Just reading through some stuff on the amazing Symposia website, I came across an article (‘Some Thoughts on Dawkins’ Infinite Regress’) which claims that Richard Dawkins fails to establish the impossibility (or improbability) of God’s existence in his book, The God Delusion. Has anyone else read it? Might fail in its task, but worth a read.
Just another thought.
R
Well of course he failed, and only the reasonable atheists know it. Just because someone is good at couching an argument in reasonable terms, doesn’t mean it’s reasonable.
You’re probably right. Did the following thought occur to you (I don’t want to put words into your mouth - you don’t need anyone to do that anyway)?
The article suggests that, for the theist, the design inference runs only so far: that is, from created things to a single creator, and stops there, as if it is illegitimate to seek an explanation of God in terms of yet another, even greater and more complex, designer. He wants God, in other words, to be a regress stopper, and I don’t know a way of showing that God is (which isn’t to suggest that there isn’t such a way).
Do you think Dawkins is right, then?
Isn’t the point of postmodern pragmatists like Richard Rorty that both sides fail? According to this way of thinking, truth is without a rational foundation. So Dawkins says God talk is absurd. But religionists like me and, if I understand him, The Paineful Truth, think that the intuition of a foundation is inescapable. “Reason” that denies a foundation is unreasonable.
Well, that’s a basis for claiming that God is a regress stopper: that propositions asserting his existence are basic, or in some sense, foundational. Once we have posited God, there is no need to go searching for, or believing that there has to be, an even greater being who deigned the first. Of course, if God is a being than which no greater can be conceived, then Dawkins must be wrong in thinking there has to be an infinite series of them, each one greater than the one he designs or creates (or both).
Sorry . . . I’m being slow today . . . are you saying that the Symposia article has got it right, then?
Hi guys, I wanted to weigh in on this.
I did read some of Dawkins, but not all. I am going to avoid trying to be overly fancy with the $5 words in my comments to help others understand my thoughts better. I also plan to keep it simple as well.
If everyone agrees, Dawkins primary effort is to get people to reason away God. Following is a short and simplistic example.
""If God is good, then why does He allow evil in the World?
If someone allows Evil, they are either Evil themselves or unwilling to prevent/stop it therefore being evil by fault.
The contention is that God is the manifestation of all that is Good, and if this is so then evil should be smitten in the Earth each time it appeared and yet it is not.“”
At our very core, humans are error prone and challenged regarding logic and emotion to say the least. If we cannot bring a criminal to justice 100% of time (even with undeniable evidence in hand) then how can we dismiss God in any reasonable fashion?
I would like to explain that each and every article I have read that try’s to prove that God does not exist by human logic, always has a fatal flaw. They always firstly limit God, His reasoning’s, His power, His motivations, and creation. The game is a conceptual trap. They first get you to reason with yourself, and when you read it, if you are carefully watching, you will leave behind your reasoning and assume theirs for the sake of the piece. This is the same tools Hollywood uses in Movies, they get you to root for the good/bad guy by getting you to assume the same ideological persona or at least getting you to connect to their persona in a heartfelt way.
Everyone has seen a movie where they wound up rooting for the bad guy, and that’s what Dawkins is trying to do. Get you to root for him in his story against God. The story is like this, A generally ‘Decent’ organization/government makes a mistake and does something to harm a decent person. Said decent person becomes incensed and begins a crusade to take down generally decent said org/gov. Immediately, onlookers empathize with said decent persons plight and instantly everyone is willing to forgive said decent persons foray into a destructive maniacal persona committing atrocities that extend beyond the original insult. At the end, the people cheer in victory as the said decent person chops, maims, and kills all the people that have families, up to the top of the organization laying all low before him. This scenario seem familiar to you folks?
Claiming there is, or there is not a God is the biggest waste of time in the universe since no one can offer more than conjecture and supposition. There is no method of inquiry that isn’t fallible. To say that there is no god would require knowing everything, and we don’t. To say that there is a god requires the same. The issue is null.
Thanks, tentative. You’re right, of course. We cannot know (at least in this life) whether there is a god. However, that we cannot is what makes this sort of debate - between intelligent friends - philosophically interesting. What we can and do know about is of no interest in this sense. What enlivens our lives is discussion. Attempting to solve a philosophical matter is like tackling a math problem. You might not get much further in the whole scheme of things; but it’s trying to get there that’s rewarding.
Dawkins thinks he’s more or less put paid to the notion of God, by arguing that to claim there is one involves admitting an infinite regress of gods, each one that bit more complex and statistically improbable than the next. He thinks, that is, that the question of whether there is a god definitely has, once and for all, a negative answer - based on the evidence which supports Darwinian evolution. This conviction of his arises from his insistence about the infinite regress of ‘gods’ which is, he imagines, impossible.
Good thinking, and thanks.
R
Not exactly. The article counters Dawkins with Intelligent Design which I’m not on board with. I just don’t think a foundation is consistently avoidable. It’s going to enter in either explicitly or implicitly into every philosophical system. Critics of theism are bothered because the God concept seems to be concrete and arbitrary and doesn’t really solve the problem. And every foundation is questionable. A foundation requires philosophical faith. And philosophy recognizes that the content of the foundation is speculative.
Churro the Viscous,
Thanks for that. My thought was that the article doesn’t push the Argument from Design so much as try to block Dawkins’ objection to it.
On the matter of foundational beliefs: of course, these cannot be expected to be supported by reasons or more basic beliefs; for if they could then they wouldn’t be foundational.
Regards to all good thinkers on this forum,
R
True, but not bloody likely. I’m still waiting for proof of pink unicorns. I think I may have seen a purple wombat, but it was late and I had been drinking heavily…
God is the regress stopper because He’s different. Don’t think of the cosmological argument as “Everything always needs a cause, no matter what, all the time (except for God for no reason).” Think of it as “Everything we have ever observed, everything we can imagine that possesses the qualities we have observed, up to and including the universe itself, seems to need a cause. Therefore, there must be Something completely unlike all this stuff that caused it all”.
I realize that’s not very rigorous, but it should get the point across.
I would gladly clean your driveway for free.
When discussing philosophical issues, especially things like god/God, it becomes very important to rectify the terms in question. Dawkins is arguing against a particular vision of God, one held by a certain strain of Fundamentalist Christian where the world is 6000 years old, a literal 7 day creation of the world and all creatures on it, that languages originate from the tower of Babel, and so on. Arguing against this God, I think he does a pretty fine job.
Now, since the term “God” has a wide variety of meanings, what he then does is a little linguistic trick where he tries to say that all visions of god, let alone God, really boil down to this very specific iteration he’s argued against so the entire project fails. That is clearly not a valid argument and it is quite disingenuous on his part since I can only assume he knows he is doing it. Why is he doing it? Because he is a propagandist. He is trying to fight fire with fire, something that is occasionally politically necessary but is never pretty.
But at that point, we aren’t talking philosophy or theology but sociology – if that.
Xunzian, did I ever tell you you were my token atheist friend?
I think the author of the Dawkins article on Symposia kind-a hints (at the end) that it is proper to posit a designer, or cause, that has to be self-caused. In this way, that designer/cause stops the regress.
We can say there is a being that is self-caused if we want; it’s just that nothing (absolutely nothing) we experience is such a being. Of course, the article doesn’t go into any justification of this for that is not (as I understand it) its purpose. But giving a sense to the expression ‘self-caused’ is one that we (well, I) find difficult.
As I see it, if b caused a, and c caused b, why shouldn’t we look for a cause of c? The author of the article side-steps this.
Wouldn’t it be possible to say that everything we have ever observed appears to have cause, appears to have beginning and end, but since we do not know conclusively, to posit a creator is at best, just a guess? Not very rigorous, but…
I believe both you and Ucci have positive points. Now, what happens if something breaks the linearized cycle? Such as miracles, or anomalies. No clear beginning and/or no end. Perhaps we just cannot look closely enough to find the beginning or the end of the observation. Maybe we were never supposed to. I don’t know just some ramblings before I go to inebriate some sleeping minds at work.
Yeah, I wouldn’t have any disagreement with that position. That’s why I think deism, for example, is a pretty untenable position. A practitioner of a revealed religion, on the other hand, doesn’t ever have to posit God. The God concept is already decidedly ‘in play’.
Which leaves the religious and the agnostics pretty much talking about the weather… 
Howzit in Maine? Hotter than hell here in Ideeho.