Quotes on Dawkins' 'Ultimate Boeing 747' Argument

One shortcoming of my critique of Dawkins' 'Ultimate Boeing 747 Argument' in a previous post is its lack of quotes from those philosophers/theologians/scientists critical of Dawkins argument. My own argument was a synthesis of their arguments. Below, I have included quotations from some of the essays and books I mention in the previous post, as well as some others that I don't mention, to supplement my own discussion. I should note that none of the quotes below exhaust the authors' discussion of Dawkins' argument (or similar arguments). They are intended only as examples.

• "As for Dawkins' argument, it is that any creator of the cosmos would have to be very complex indeed, and since complexity is produced by evolution the existence of such a being is vanishingly unlikely. The argument, needless to say, parodies itself. To begin with, there is the rather confused notion that a mechanically complex reality can be created only by something even more mechanically complex; this does not even follow from the logic of mechanical causation, since a structurally simple object can be the efficient cause of an object structurally more complex than itself. But since mechanism cannot create anything in the proper sense, because creation is the donation of existence to what has not existence in itself, mechanical complexity is of no relevance here at all. In fact, all advanced theistic traditions insist that God is metaphysically simple...he is not composed of parts or processes, is not finite, and so on, and it is for this very reason that he is capable of being the source of the complex structure of finite things. In any event, Dawkins need not, given his premises, have rested content with the assertion that the god he is talking about is merely an improbable being. Such a god would in fact be quite impossible, inasmuch as he would be both a product of nature and the creator of nature, which means he would have had to create himself. This is a notoriously difficult feat to pull off." - Greek Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart, in The Experience of God: Being Consciousness, Bliss (Yale University Press, 2013); p. 335. Hart discusses the subject of divine simplicity elsewhere in the book, as well, though not in direct response to Dawkins' argument (pp. 134-42).

• "In traditional religious thought there are three important senses in which God is said to be simple. The first is that God is not complex in the sense of being composed of separate and separable parts. The ideas in God's mind are not separately existing ideas that are added together to form the mind of God. They only exist as part of the mind of God, which is one consciousness. It is not possible to take some separate ideas and build them up into a mind that contains them. The mind comes first and its ideas are parts that are inseparable from the mind. The ideas cannot be taken out and made parts of another mind: it is the unit that comes first, and the 'parts' only exist as part of that unity. In this sense, God is simple in a way that no other physical thing is simple, because physical things are made of smaller, separable parts." Philosopher-theologian Keith Ward, former Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford, in Why There Almost Certainly is a God: Doubting Dawkins (Lion Books, 2008), p. 48. This is a small section of a much fuller discussion in Chapter 2.  Note the significance of Ward's comments to Hume's argument, briefly summarised in my previous post, which assumes that God's mind must be complex because God's mind has within it a complex collection of complex ideas.

•  "The argument for the improbability of God, as advanced by Dawkins and others, seems to boil down to the following reasoning: (1) By common consent, the world is a highly improbable and complex system; (2) if God created the world he must be more complex than the world he created; therefore (3) God is less probable than the world; indeed, he is fantastically improbable; so (4) God probably doesn't exist. Although produced with a flourish, the argument hold no more water than a sieve. Firstly, we have to accept the dubious assumption that the science of thermodynamics (or statistical mechanics) - which was developed to describe the behaviour of matter and energy - applies to theology and God. You might just as well apply it to love, music or politics, but I promise you it won't work. Secondly, there is excessive sleight of hand in the use of the word 'improbable'. In thermodynamics there are a number of ways that a system can be arranged or ordered. The repaired soup bowl [mentioned in a previous example] is highly improbable (thermodynamically speaking) because it is uniquely formed - there is only one way to arrange the pieces to rebuild that particular shape. By contrast, the broken bowl can consist of many different arrangements of shards..." - Physicist Edgar Andrews, Emeritus Professor of Materials, University of London, in Who Made God? Searching for a Theory of Everything (Evangelic Press, 2009), p. 23-24. Part of a more extended discussion, pp. 19-26.

• "Richard Dawkins thinks that considerations of complexity actually clinch his case against God: 'Introducing God would mean an end of science. God is no explanation since, by definition, God is more complex (and therefore less probable) than the thing you are explaining.' Spelling it out he claims: 'To explain the origin of the DNA/protein machine by invoking a supernatural Designer is to explain precisely nothing, for it leaves unexplained the origin of the designer. You have to say something like "God was always there" and if you allow that kind of lazy way out, you might as well say "DNA was always there", or "Life was always there", and be done with it.' This is highly illogical thinking. Firstly, we know that DNA was not always there, nor was life - nor, indeed, come to think of it, was the universe. This is the one main reason why scientists seek explanations for their existence. But the real issue here is that Dawkins appears to believe that the only explanation that is worthy of the name 'is an explanation that proceeds from the simple to the complex...' Dawkins is simply wrong in his limited view of what counts as an explanation. Firstly, the things he takes to be simple are not; and secondly, the reason such complex physical theories are accepted by scientists is not because of their simplicity; it is because of their explanatory power. Explanatory power is just as important, if not more important, for the validity of a scientific theory as simplicity. Sometimes simpler theories have been discarded because they do not have sufficient explanatory power. It was, after all, Einstein who said: "Explanations should be as simple as possible, but not simpler." Explanatory power often trumps simplicity, a fact that Dawkins seems not to appreciate...We should also note that Dawkins seems to be impressed with the multiverse hypothesis and yet realizes there is a problem: 'it is tempting to think (and many have succumbed) that to postulate a plethora of universes is a profligate luxury which should not be allowed. If we are going to permit the extravagance of a multiverse, we might as well be hung for a sheep as hung for a lamb and follow God.' His solution to this is that the God hypothesis is genuinely extravagant but the multiverse is only apparently extravagant. His reasoning on the basis of statistical improbability is not convincing. If there are vastly many universes, then one would have thought that most of them are highly complex; and if they are ultimately the product of such a multiverse then Dawkins' acclaimed argument that things always proceed from simple to complex is in tatters...the 'complexity of God' argument turns out to be much less substantial than a house of cards." - Mathematician and philosopher John Lennox, Oxford Uni. Professor of Mathematics, in God's Undertaker - Has Science Buried God? (Lion Books, 2009), pp. 178-82. Part of a more extensive response, pp. 178-85.

• "What a man rejects as distasteful must always be measured against what he prepared eagerly to swallow. What Richard Dawkins is prepared to swallow is the Landscape [multiverse] and Anthropic Principle. The Landscape does not, of course, answer the question what caused the Landscape to exist. How could it? And if nothing caused the Landscape, it does not answer the question of why it should be there. But having swallowed the Landscape with such inimitable gusto, Dawkins is surely obliged to explain just why he scruples at the Deity. After all, the theologian need only appeal to a single God lording it over all and a single universe - our own. Dawkins must appeal to infinitely many universes crammed into creation, with laws of nature wriggling indiscreetly and fundamental physical parameters changing as one travels from one corner of the cosmos to the next, the whole entire gargantuan structure scientifically unobservable and devoid of any connection to experience. This is a point that Dawkins endeavors to meet, but with markedly insufficient success. "The key difference between the radically extravagant God hypothesis," he writes, "and the apparently extravagant multiverse hypothesis, is one of statistical improbability." It is? I had no idea, the more so since Dawkins's very next sentence would seem to undercut the sentence he has just written. "The multiverse, for all that it is extravagant, is simple," because each of its constituent universes "is simple in its fundamental laws." If this is true for each of those constituent universes, then it is true for our universe as well. And if our universe is simple in its fundamental laws, what on earth is the relevance of Dawkins's argument?" - Agnostic David Berlinski, mathematician and author, in The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions (Basic Books, 2009), p. 152-53. Part of a more detailed discussion in Chapter 7.

• "Now suppose we return to Dawkins' argument for the claim that theism is monumentally improbable. As you recall, the reason Dawkins gives is that God would have to be enormously complex, and hence enormously improbable ("God, or any intelligent, decision-making calculating agent, is complex, which is another way of saying improbable"). What can be said for this argument? Not much. First, is God complex? According to much classical theology (Thomas Aquinas, for example) God is simple, and simple in a very strong sense, so that in him there is no distinction of thing and property, actuality and potentiality, essence and existence, and the like. Some of the discussions of divine simplicity get pretty complicated, not to say arcane. (It isn't only Catholic theology that declares God simple; according to the Belgic Confession, a splendid expression of Reformed Christianity, God is "a single and simple spiritual being.") So first, according to classical theology, God is simple, not complex. More remarkable, perhaps, is that according to Dawkins' own definition of complexity, God is not complex. According to his definition (set out in The Blind Watchmaker), something is complex if it has parts that are "arranged in a way that is unlikely to have arisen by chance alone." But of course God is a spirit, not a material object at all, and hence has no parts. A fortiori (as philosophers like to say) God doesn't have parts arranged in ways unlikely to have arisen by chance. Therefore, given the definition of complexity Dawkins himself proposes, God is not complex. So first, it is far from obvious that God is complex. But second, suppose we concede, at least for purposes of argument, that God is complex. Perhaps we think the more a being knows, the more complex it is; God, being omniscient, would then be highly complex. Perhaps so; still, why does Dawkins think it follows that God would be improbable? Given materialism and the idea that the ultimate objects in our universe are the elementary particles of physics, perhaps a being that knew a great deal would be improbable—how could those particles get arranged in such a way as to constitute a being with all that knowledge? Of course we aren't given materialism. Dawkins is arguing that theism is improbable; it would be dialectically deficient in excelsis to argue this by appealing to materialism as a premise. Of course it is unlikely that there is such a person as God if materialism is true; in fact materialism logically entails that there is no such person as God; but it would be obviously question-begging to argue that theism is improbable because materialism is true. So why think God must be improbable? According to classical theism, God is a necessary being; it is not so much as possible that there should be no such person as God; he exists in all possible worlds. But if God is a necessary being, if he exists in all possible worlds, then the probability that he exists, of course, is 1, and the probability that he does not exist is 0. Far from its being improbable that he exists, his existence is maximally probable. So if Dawkins proposes that God's existence is improbable, he owes us an argument for the conclusion that there is no necessary being with the attributes of God—an argument that doesn't just start from the premise that materialism is true. Neither he nor anyone else has provided even a decent argument along these lines; Dawkins doesn't even seem to be aware that he needs an argument of that sort." - Christian Alvin Plantinga, Jellema Chair of Philosophy, Calvin College, in 'The Dawkins Confusion' book review, Books & Culture, 2007.

• "If the [design] argument is supposed to show that a supremely adept and intelligent natural being, with a super-body and a super-brain, is responsible for the design and the creation of life on earth, then of course this “explanation” is no advance on the phenomenon to be explained. . . . [However,] [t]he explanation of his existence as a chance concatenation of atoms is not a possibility for which we must find an alternative, because that is not what anybody means by God." - Atheist Thomas Nagel, University Professor of Philosophy and Law, New York University, in 'The Fear of Religion' book review, The New Republic (October 26, 2006).

• "Richard Dawkins has a dilemma when it comes to design arguments. On the one hand, he maintains that it was Darwin who killed off design and so implies that his rejection of design depends upon the findings of modern science. On the other hand, he follows Hume when he claims that appealing to a designer does not explain anything and so implies that rejection of design need not be based on the findings of modern science. These contrasting approaches lead to the following dilemma: if he claims that Darwinism is necessary for rejecting design, he has no satisfactory response to design arguments based on the order in the laws of physics or the fine-tuning of the physical constants; alternatively, if Humean arguments are doing most of the work, this would undermine one of his main contentions, that atheism is justified by science and especially by evolution." - Physicist and philosopher David H. Glass, School of Computing and Mathematics, University of Ulster, in 'Darwin, Design and Dawkins' Dilemma', Sophia (2012) 51: 31.

• "What does Dawkins mean by talking about the probability of God? Clearly, God either exists or he does not. Shouldn’t the probability of his existence be 1 if he exists and 0 if he does not? No, Dawkins adopts a mainstream Bayesian understanding of probability theory according to which probabilities represent rational degrees of belief, and so it is entirely reasonable to have a probability for God’s existence that lies between 0 and 1. But what probability should we assign to God’s existence? Here we need to be careful because the question as it stands is ambiguous. Bayesians will distinguish between the prior probability of a belief before a piece of evidence has been considered and the posterior probability, which is the updated probability after the evidence has been taken into account. Even these terms are ambiguous, however, because the prior probability will depend on what background knowledge has been taken into account, and the posterior probability will depend on exactly what evidence is included before updating. Now we must ask what Dawkins means when he says that God’s existence is extremely improbable. Is this meant to be a prior of some kind or a posterior probability? It seems clear from Dawkins’ Humean arguments...that even if they were sound they would at best establish that the prior probability of God’s existence, before any specific evidence is taken into account, is extremely low. The reason for this is that they appeal to what God must be like if he exists, i.e., that he must have organised complexity, and that organised complexity is improbable if unexplained, etc. They do not appeal to any evidence that theists might appeal to as supporting belief in God. Now, here is Dawkins’ problem: it is very common for a belief to have a very low prior probability and yet a very high posterior probability. The following example illustrates the point. Suppose my friend Tom enters the lottery every week. Suppose also that the winning numbers have just been announced in a particular week. What is the probability that Tom has hit the jackpot? Well, either he has or he hasn’t, but not knowing what numbers he selected it is very reasonable for me to assign an extremely low probability, 1 in 10,000,000 perhaps. However, the next day Tom arrives at my house, driving a new BMW, and he tells me that he hit the jackpot in the lottery the previous night. Initially, I am suspicious because Tom is a bit of a practical joker, but then he shows me a newspaper that has a picture of him receiving his winnings, and later we see him on the local news on television, which again confirms his story. What is the probability now? Although, the prior probability was low, the posterior probability after taking all the evidence into account is extremely high; in fact, I can be virtually certain that he hit the jackpot. Could something similar be the case in terms of the probability of God’s existence?" - Physicist and philosopher David H. Class, School of Computing and Mathematics, University of Ulster, in 'Darwin, Design and Dawkins' Dilemma', Sophia (2012) 51: 52-53. 

 I could add to these excerpts from Stephen C. Meyer's Signature in the Cell, where he thoroughly refutes Dawkins' argument or Patrick Richmond's essay, or Alister McGrath's discussion in Dawkins' God: Genes, Memes and the Meaning of Life, or Del Ratzch's discussion in Nature, Design and Science, but I won't. These excerpts sufficiently highlight the many difficulties, inconsistencies and logical errors of Dawkins' argument.

I do not regard Dawkins' argument as particularly significant when set against more powerful discussions by serious thinkers from Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus (in the ancient world) to Thomas Aquinas and Ibn Sina (in the Mediaeval period) to Gottfried Leibniz and Christian Wolff (in the early-modern period) to William Lane Craig and Alexander Pruss (in  the 21st century). It may seem that I think this a serious argument, because I spent the time to refute it, but I don't, actually. Nevertheless, because of the significance that Dawkins (and, because of Dawkins, many other advocates of 'pop atheism'), places on this argument as the central argument of his book, I feel that a discussion is warranted. Now that it's done, I can move onto other issues.