Which God?

Ch.2: ‘The God Hypothesis’

I am not attacking any particular version of God or gods, I am attacking God, all gods, anything and everything supernatural, wherever and whenever they have been or will be invented. (57)

I have found it an amusing strategy, when asked whether I am an atheist, to point out that the questioner is also an atheist when considering Zeus, Apollo, Amon Ra, Mithras, Baal, Thor, Wotan, the Golden Calf and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I just go one god further. (77)

The picture Dawkins is operating with appears to be this: that all claims about the existence of some particular God are claims that there exists a distinguishable instance of a particular kind of reality (and that all other supposed instances do not exist) – and that while religious believers fritter away their remaining brain cells arguing about which instance is the right one, Dawkins cuts to the chase and tackles the kind itself – the characteristics which all supposed instances share.

I have several problems with this. I do not think that all God-claims are of the same kind. I do not think that even if one limits oneself to the various differing God-claims of the major monotheistic religions those God-claims do relate to one another as do claims about distinguishable supposed instances of a single kind. And I do not think that Dawkins has succeeded in identifying the essence even of those mainstream monotheistic God-claims.

So, first: not all God-claims are of the same kind. I don’t think it is obvious that, say, an ancient Egyptian worshipping Amon Ra was doing the same sort of thing as a medieval Sufi was doing. Given the vast differences in language and practice that surround the two different claims, the onus of proof would seem to be on those who claim that they are each instances of a common genus. More precisely, I would be very surprised if the kind of analysis I have given earlier in my discussions of Dawkins – the more-or-less non-supnernaturalist account of Christian God-claims, the not-quite-a-worldview account of Christian belief in general – travelled well. I doubt it is applicable to all sorts of things that we describe under the heading ‘religion’, or that get called ‘God’.

Second: I do not think that even if one limits oneself to the various differing God-claims of the major monotheistic religions those God-claims do relate to one another as do claims about distinguishable supposed instances of a single kind. I hardly know where to start here. I don’t want to get too deeply into this at present – so suffice it to say that there are deep and fascinating debates about how different kinds of God-claim relate to one another. There are accounts that make things look as Dawkins suggests they look. There are accounts that argue that differing God-claims are all claims about the same reality (e.g., that Allah and YHWH are ultimately one); and there are all sorts of models and arguments that are more subtle and more interesting. And, to head off a Dawkinsish criticism: the debate between them does not take the ‘deluded botanist’ form that Dawkins might expect it to: It is perfectly possible to make the vast majority of the debate, and the basis of the judgments made in it, intelligible to an atheist audience: it is about understanding the kind of claims that religious people make or imply, and about analysing their deeper implications and relations.

Third, I do not think that Dawkins has succeeded in identifying the essence even of those mainstream monotheistic God-claims. I won’t go on about this again too much here. I do not think that all, or most, claims about the existence of God arose as primitive attempts to provide the kinds of explanation that scientific explanation now provides. I do not even think that all religious doctrines of creation arose as primitive attempts to provide the kinds of explanation that scientific explanation now provides. There is a neat story that goes something like this: a pre-scientific person faced with the vagaries of the weather (for example) asks ‘Where does this wind come from? Why did that storm happen?’ Unable to arrive at an answer, but desiring not simply to live with meaningless arbitrariness, the person invents a God to whose caprice he can attribute the phenomena. Then along comes science, and provides a real explanation, in terms of air pressures and temperatures, the effect of the sun, the heat-stores of the oceans, the rotation of the globe, and so on. Primitive God-centred explanation gives way to scientific explanation. It’s a very neat, very plausible story. But that doesn’t make it true. I think, for instance, that you could provide a detailed history of the emergence of Christian ideas of a creator God, delving way back into the Jewish pre-history of those ideas and beyond, without stories like that playing any kind of starring role. I may be wrong: this is something that can be investigated in real detail, and cases made on the basis of the available evidence. But it is certainly not obvious that Dawkins’ picture is correct.

So, no, I don’t think Dawkins is talking about any and all Gods. I think he’s talking about creationism, and mistaking that for talk about something interesting.

9 Thoughts on “Which God?

  1. Isaac Gouy on March 14, 2008 at 11:34 pm said:

    > I don’t think Dawkins is talking about any and all Gods

    I haven’t been able to figure out if you simply skip “anything and everything supernatural” when you read that first quote (57)?

  2. No: but he uses ‘anything and everything supernatural’ in apposition to ‘God, all gods’. In other words, as he makes abundantly clear, he thinks that ‘all gods’ are ‘supernatural’ (at least, any gods remotely worthy of the name – any that have been the focus of worship of an historically significant religious tradition, for instance). Like I said in a response to an earlier comment of yours, I don’t think Dawkins would take kindly to a defence of his book that said that his critique worked quite nicely – but that it did not cover such gods as, for instance, the God of the classic Christian theological tradition (and we could include classic Islamic and Jewish theology as well, if you like).

  3. Isaac Gouy on March 15, 2008 at 6:20 am said:

    > as he makes abundantly clear, he thinks that ‘all gods’ are ’supernatural’ (at least, any gods remotely worthy of the name…

    I disagree:

    1) He’s trying to make clear that supernatural God is the God he’s attacking in this book.

    “… if /the word/ God is not to become completely useless …” p33

    2) He’s trying to make clear using the same word for Einstein’s God and the kind of God he’s attacking is hopelessly confusing.

    3) He’s trying to make clear using the same word for the God of the classic Christian theological tradition and the kind of God he’s attacking is hopelessly confusing.

    If Dawkins ambitions are as sweeping as you suppose then what are we to make of these comments?

    “… the deist God of the eighteenth-century Elightenment is an altogether grander being: worthy of his cosmic creation …” (maybe p59 or p60 in your copy)

  4. You are, of course, quite right that Dawkins thinks that there are some marginal cases where the word ‘God’ is used only deeply misleadingly, cases which are not properly called ‘religious’, because they have nothing to do with religion. That is, therefore, not the same thing as making a distinction between some forms of religious belief in God and others – and nowhere does he suggest that the God of the classical Christian tradition is not in his sights just as much as the God of the average American evangelical in 2008.

    Yes, he has kinder words for the God of the Deists than for some other varieties of god – but don’t think for a moment that he intends to exempt Deism from his attack: ‘They do, after all, beieve in a supreme intelligence who created the universe.’

    Nothing you have quoted undermines my reading of the book: that Dawkins thinks that ‘supernaturalist’ is only a qualification of the word ‘God’ to the extent that it rules out improper uses of the word to refer to things that aren’t really gods at all, and don’t have anything to do with religion. That is why he can say, ‘I am not attacking any particular version of God or gods.’

  5. Isaac Gouy on March 18, 2008 at 9:42 pm said:

    We’ve touched on the same themes in other comments, for example:
    – “The supernaturalist God” (http://mikehigton.org.uk/?p=77)
    – ‘The Weakness of the Religious Mind’ (http://mikehigton.org.uk/?p=84)

    Firstly, your “March 14th, 2008 at 11:23 pm The supernaturalist God” comment clearly sets out your view of Dawkins motivation:

    – “I don’t think it would do justice to the sweep of Dawkins’ ambition: it matters to him that he is not simply tackling a variety of belief in God, but belief in God per se.”

    For sake of argument, let’s say Dawkins’ ambition is that sweeping. The way you seem to be reading suggests more than that – it suggests that Dawkins’ ambition is to scythe down “belief in God per se” with a single stroke.
    To me the obvious strategy would be to cut a swath of “supernatural beliefs” turn and from a different direction (using a different argument) cut another swathe of belief.

    Secondly, and to mix my metaphors, you seem to be saying Dawkins naturalism : supernaturalism is black & white and misses (or distorts) the grays.
    As far as I understand, you link this to Dawkins’ sweeping ambition – instead, because I imagine Dawkins cutting swathe after swathe, I read Dawkins’ distinction as black & not black.

  6. Yes, I continue to hold that Dawkins’ ambition is that sweeping – and, I’m sorry, but I don’t see you’ve cast any doubt on that yet.

    And it seems to be the obvious reading of Dawkins’ text. For instance, he presents all that material on Einstein in order then to set it on one side, and say that such purely metaphorical senses of the word ‘God’ are not what he is talking about. Rather, he is talking about supernatural gods.

    The most natural way of reading this is to understand that, once he’s cleared out the purely metaphorical and poetic senses of the word ‘God’, Dawkins’ target is everything that is left. And that initial impression is confirmed repeatedly in what he goes on to say: he several times stresses that he is not confining himself to some particular variety of claim about God, but that his target is the whole lot: it includes the gods of Christianity (ancient, medieval, modern), Islam, Judaism; it includes deism; it includes polytheisms Greek, Roman, Norse; it includes Hinduism…

    And I come back once again to the comment: ‘I am attacking God, all gods, anything and everything supernatural…’. If the ‘supernatural’ were meant to qualify the reference to ‘God, all gods’, the grammar would have to be different: it would have to read ‘I am attacking all supernatural gods’ or ‘I am attacking God, all gods, or at least all those that are supernatural’ or something. As it stands, the sentence unambiguously presents ‘anything and everything supernatural’ as either a restatement or an expansion of the earlier clauses. We know only one exception that Dawkins makes – and that is the purely metaphorical uses of the word ‘God’ that he believes to be utterly misleading misuses of the term – because they are uses that are actually synonyms for talking in naturalist terms.

    So, Dawkins clearly thinks in general that pure naturalism is all we need, and specifically that any way of understanding the word ‘God’ which is not simply an entirely poetic and metaphorical way of talking in naturalistic terms – i.e., any ‘supernatural’ God – is to be rejected.

    If that was all he said, we would think that ‘supernatural’ was simply defined in opposition to naturalism, and covered anything and everything that is not covered by pure naturalism (whether it’s the theism of an Intelligent Design proponent, or my belief, or Spinoza’s, or whatever).

    However, Dawkins also provides positive definitions (either explicitly, as in his statement of the God Hypothesis, or implicitly, as in his statement of his case against the God Hypothesis) of what ‘supernatural God’ means which look to me are much narrower, but which he presents (as I have just said) as covering the whole gamut of supernatural belief in God.

    And, yes, Dawkins seems to think that he has a scythe that attacks the whole of this broad sweep. It is not his only scythe, but I can see no textual evidence that he thinks it is a scythe designed only for one subsection of religious belief. Quite the opposite. See, for just one example, his summary at the end of chapter 4. ‘If the argument of this chapter is accepted, the factual premise of religion – the God Hypothesis – is untenable. God almost certainly does not exist.’ Not, note, ‘the factual premise of some religion’. The whole way chapter four is framed suggests that, even if he is going to get other bites at the cherry, this argument goes to the root of all religion, all belief in God. He does not seem to follow your suggested swathe-by-swathe strategy.

    Now, I do freely admit that I have yet to look in detail at chapters 5 and following. As I promised at the start, this blog is a record of a slow read through, not a reflection from the endpoint. So I’m interested to know if he does later suggest that his target is something other than all belief in God, or if he does later suggest that his argument in chapter 4 only works against a subset of belief in God, or if he suggests that his framing of the God Hypothesis only covers some cases of belief in God. That’s certainly not what he’s said so far.

  7. Isaac Gouy on March 19, 2008 at 5:42 pm said:

    > The most natural way of reading this is to understand that, once he’s cleared out the purely metaphorical and poetic senses of the word ‘God’, Dawkins’ target is everything that is left.

    “The metaphorical /or pantheistic God/ of the physicists is light years away from the … prayer-answering God of the Bible … and of ordinary language.” (Deserved Respect, last para)

    There are two things here not one: simple use of metaphor in statements about physics; identification of ‘God’ with all of nature.

    (Although I’m sympathetic to the suggestion that “identification of ‘God’ with all of nature” is an impoverished description of what, for example, Einstein said:

    – “I’m not an atheist, and I don’t think I can call myself a pantheist.”

    – “In common parlance this may be described as ‘pantheistic’ (Spinoza).”

    :the impoverished description is as close as we’ll get at this general level.)

  8. Isaac Gouy on March 19, 2008 at 7:21 pm said:

    > … such purely metaphorical senses of the word ‘God’ are not what he is talking about.

    Such metaphorical /or pantheistic/ senses of the word ‘God’ are not what he is talking about.

    > If that was all he said, we would think that ’supernatural’ was simply defined in opposition to naturalism …

    – “But philosophers use ‘naturalist’ in a very different sense, as the opposite of supernaturalist.”
    (chapter 1, Deserved Respect, directly before the Baggini quote)

    > … I can see no textual evidence that he thinks it is a scythe designed only for one subsection of religious belief …

    – “And I shall not be concerned at all with other religions such as Buddhism or Confucianism.”
    (chapter 2, Monotheism, para 1)

    > Not, note, ‘the factual premise of some religion’ …

    This makes me feel sympathetic towards Dawkins – you seem to require that he prefix every use of ‘religion’ or ‘God’ with ‘supernatural’.

    – “… for the vast majority of people, ‘religion’ implies ‘supernatural’.”
    (chapter 1, Deserved Respect)

    > … if he does later suggest that his target is something other than all belief in God … That’s certainly not what he’s said so far.

    – “In the rest of this book I am talking only about supernatural gods, …”
    (chapter 1, Undeserved Respect, para 1)

    What does Dawkins have to say before we take him at his word?

  9. My response to this has turned into a new post – http://mikehigton.org.uk/?p=165

    I think it answers all the points you make here – and you’ll see that I think you’re the one not taking Dawkins at his word.

Post Navigation