The Chicago Moron on Dawkins and Militant Atheism

I previously mentioned at the beginning of the semester a trend in student journalism toward folly and doltishness. Within a one-week period, Yale, Ohio, and my school managed to publish outlandish claims. I commented on the Yale article. Now, it is time to address an opinion editorial from the Chicago Maroon, the University of Chicago student newspaper. Just like before, I will address each claim developed in the editorial.

The tradition of atheism is certainly long-standing and stretches back at least as far as Western classical antiquity, but the modern trend of liberal, militantly atheist academics and of “scholars” who declare war on religion—or, more simply, a person’s belief in God—is vicious, disrespectful, and an abuse of the scholarly platform.

Somehow, as an academically inclined individual, I am supposed to believe that I am being viciously disrespectful anytime I remark about the inanity of belief in god? If I am, so be it. I would rather be disrespectful to entities and ideas which I see are socially and ethically unhealthy than become an appeaser to the evils wrought by chronic religiosity.

Dawkins insists that our beliefs should be based on evidence, specifically that which can be tested and definitively proven by the scientific method...What Dawkins fails to realize, though, is that no science, however advanced or “enlightened,” can ever prove the existence of God.

Here is a subtle admission made by Lee. To Lee, knowledge is determined by more than empirical methods. That is nice to know forthright. However, if he had realized he made this admission, he would then realize his entire grief with Dawkins is the discrepancy between their epistemologies. As a self-reported "analytic philosopher", I am a bit surprised he did not realize this.

Dawkins, like other like-minded individuals, demand a high level of empiricism in determining knowledge; that is, Dawkins desires a high-level of precise knowledge. I need to make a distinction between precise knowledge and imprecise knowledge. Imprecise knowledge can be considered any constituent which requires accepted definitions or beliefs as opposed to elements which stem from the scrutiny of empiricism. Language is an imprecise knowledge based on this definition. Words have meanings and associations that have been determined through the course of human history. Essentially, our ancestors bequeathed to us their vocabulary and grammar the same manner in which we will give our vocabulary and grammar to the next generation. These meanings are accepted universally. A cat is a cat because we say it fits our definition of being a cat. Thus, any sense of nomenclature is an imprecise knowledge, meaning we simply use such items as tools to communicate and connect patterns of thought together.

Science is a precise knowledge which, like logic, suffers from the aspect of being corroded by imprecise language. As much as we as scientists try and maintain a certain diction and jargon to separate the imprecision of colloquialisms from ruining our ability to communicate science, it is inevitable that imprecision prevails. hence, the existence of Creationism and the persistent mantra of evolution is just a theory.

But I digress some. It is true that Dawkins requires precise knowledge in making epistemological claims, such as knowing the existence of God. To Dawkins, it is better to know
whether something exists rather than simply believe it exists without any ability to determine whether it exists or not. This segues into Lee's next sentence:

Trying to use the limited perspective of humanity and the simple scientific methods we have at our disposal to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that God exists is a waste of time. The nature of God is found far beyond the reach of even the most advanced scientific instrument.

There is one ultimate premise introduced by Lee here: humanity is limited (the claim concerning the scientific method is an easy corollary). Now, this instigates a question: Is humanity truly limited? Indeed, we are limited by our size and physical capacity; we can not do everything ourselves. However, we can develop tools and methods to achieve an expected end. That is the basic premise of engineering. So, as engineers, are we truly limited? I would argue no. Humanity is not ultimately limited. We are temporally limited, but being temporally limited does not easily translate to being completely or truly limited. Let us look at some case examples.

I am walking through the woods and happen to come upon a banana tree. I see a deliciously ripe banana at the top of the tree, but the tree is twenty feet tall while I am only six feet. What am I to do? I could obtain a ladder to help aide in my advent. Or, I could utilize a mechanical cherry picker to lift me to the top branches. In this example, ladders have been around in various shapes and constructs for centuries. The mechanical lift is relatively new in terms of the history of humanity. Where a ladder suffers from certain construction constraints (mainly stress as the ladder becomes "taller" and has more "lean" on a wall), a mechanical lift can be constructed overcome the shortcomings of the ladder. So where medieval man could only climb so high on a ladder (or build a certain level of stairs), modern man can construct a better mechanical lift. It follows that medieval man was temporally limited to the extent of technologies available to him versus modern man who has modern technologies. In the future, I could possess a fuel-efficient jet-pack to springboard myself to the top branches. Thus, my future self is temporally saturated versus the modern me who is, in comparison to the future me, temporally limited.

This occurs throughout the history of the sciences as well as other disciplines. The Native American civilizations knew nothing about the European civilizations until the Spanish conquistadors arrived. Thus, those Native American civilizations were temporally limited in their knowledge concerning Europe. It was not until the arrival of colonists and exhibitions did the Native Americans become aware of the existence of foreigners and distant lands.

So, where am I getting at with this digression? Simple. Were the Native Americans ultimately limited? No, they learned about the foreigners. Was I ultimately limited in those three different time periods to get the banana? No, I was only limited to the variety of technologies available. But overtime, these limitations decreased. Essentially, things expanded beyond the limits.

This is the pursuit of science: to go beyond the limits of human knowledge to forge new knowledge. And the major driving force of science to develop this new knowledge is, indeed, the scientific method. Empiricism is the copilot of science. To science, our only limitations are the available current knowledge and our ingenuity.

Thus, it amazes me for someone to say bluntly and factually that God is beyond human comprehension. Is it perhaps instead that God is simply currently unable to be comprehended due to a temporal limitation? Or, as Dawkins tends to assert which makes people unhappy, science has indeed breached this temporal limitation and have seen the lack of god everywhere?

Moreover, Dawkins incorrectly applies the sciences of biology, chemistry, and physics.

For instance, instead of using evolution and natural selection as examples of a harsh, Godless reality, he should realize that the complexity, intricacy, and beauty of a living organism further reinforce the reality of the supernatural. It also leads someone with an open heart and mind to the unmistakable conclusion that the cell or molecule under observation had to have been designed before it ever evolved to its current state.

We have three gauche concepts expressed by Lee above: complexity, intricacy, and beauty. How is a cell beautiful? How is a conjugated alkane chain complex? How is the Krebb's Cycle intricate? I would have to know the answers to these specific questions before fully analyzing his argument.

However, as a cursory observation, I would like to see what he means by being designed as opposed to having been evolved. Did God simply insert the Krebb's Cycle into a cell? Did God fashion the cell together mechanically, piece by piece, with his own (magical?) hands? Did humans simply appear out of the sky (or from the dirt, as Genesis implies) instantaneously? What is the mechanism by which God "designed" these things which people claim are "intelligently designed"? Those would be standard questions posed by one who demands empiricism to substantiate truth claims over those who desire other methods.

This is what Dawkins and other ID critics ask in their books and criticisms. If those who see design in nature do not desire to speak in terms of science but instead bury themselves in rhetorical devices and imprecise reflections, than so be it. There are people who demand strictness in knowledge and those who do not. One easily sees where the other lies upon the words they choose to answer the questions in the preceding paragraph.

If he wants some rational arguments for faith, I would encourage Dawkins to read some St. Thomas Aquinas before vomiting up his next accusation against religion.

Interesting. For someone who claimed to have read The God Delusion, Lee must have forgotten that Dawkins devoted an entire chapter to deflating the claims of Thomism.

To give an example of one of Dawkins’s logically flawed arguments, one need look no further than the fourth chapter of The God Delusion. One of his main claims is that because the universe is so enormous and contains so much information and substance, God must also be enormously complex. This complexity predisposes God to extreme improbability. I, along with a host of analytic philosophers, do not understand why this has to be so. Must God be infinitely complex to have designed something more complex than himself? Why does his simplicity prevent him from doing certain things? Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel, Handel composed the Messiah, and Gustave Eiffel designed and built the magnificent Eiffel Tower. In each of these cases—and there are countless more—one person produced something so much more intricate than himself that the world still marvels at his ability and vision.

No surprise really that I see a hint of Plantinga in Lee's rhetoric. However, Lee, like Plantinga, nearly straw man Dawkins' intent. Dawkins wrote in The God Delusion concerning the Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit:

1. One of the greatest challenges to the human intellect, over the centuries, has been to explain how the complex, improbable appearance of design in the universe arises.
   
   
2. The natural temptation is to attribute the appearance of design to actual design itself. In the case of a man-made artefact such as a watch, the designer really was an intelligent engineer. It is tempting to apply the same logic to an eye or a wing, a spider or a person.
   
   
3. The temptation is a false one, because the designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer. The whole problem we started out with was the problem of explaining statistical improbability. It is obviously no solution to postulate something even more improbable. We need a "crane" not a "skyhook," for only a crane can do the business of working up gradually and plausibly from simplicity to otherwise improbable complexity.
   
   
4. The most ingenious and powerful crane so far discovered is Darwinian evolution by natural selection. Darwin and his successors have shown how living creatures, with their spectacular statistical improbability and appearance of design, have evolved by slow, gradual degrees from simple beginnings. We can now safely say that the illusion of design in living creatures is just that – an illusion.
   
   
5. We don't yet have an equivalent crane for physics. Some kind of multiverse theory could in principle do for physics the same explanatory work as Darwinism does for biology. This kind of explanation is superficially less satisfying than the biological version of Darwinism, because it makes heavier demands on luck. But the anthropic principle entitles us to postulate far more luck than our limited human intuition is comfortable with.
   
   
6. We should not give up hope of a better crane arising in physics, something as powerful as Darwinism is for biology. But even in the absence of a strongly satisfying crane to match the biological one, the relatively weak cranes we have at present are, when abetted by the anthropic principle, self-evidently better than the self-defeating skyhook hypothesis of an intelligent designer.

In short, Dawkins indicates that evolution via natural selection explains observable complexities in biology successfully compared to design theories. Then, Dawkins indicates the triviality of nearly improbable statistics for "finely tuned variable" due to the anthropic principle, thereby illuminating such confusions espoused by design proponents. It follows, then, that Dawkins' argument comprises of only the classic "Who designed the Designer" question. That is, Dawkins reduced the entire design argument into question begging: a designer designed the universe because the designer was un-designed. Or, in more succulent terms, Dawkins discredits the notion that the universe is designed as well as questions the aspect that a God is undesigned.

So, I fail to see where Lee gets his "infinitely complex" verbage from. Dawkins presented an argument questioning if God is necessarily uncaused. Though Lee would say yes, strict scrutiny yields otherwise.

I encourage the theists of this campus to stand up against this type of insidious “academic” persuasion and firmly assert the existence of God.

If I do indeed get accepted and attend University of Chicago for graduate studies, I will gladly be the nuisance of a student who will persistently call anyone out who asserts that the existence of God is true and not a mere opinion. As a "peer" in terms of age, it saddens me that Lee presents the foolish side of those who study science. He is no "peer" by my standards, though, because I have enough sense to back up my own words and not expect a student newspaper to publish my trash.

(Hat tip: Pharyngula)