Ch.2, Introduction (pp.51–52).
Here is Dawkins’ statement of the God Hypothesis:
there exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us.
In other words, Dawkins thinks ‘God’ names an explanatory hypothesis for the existence and nature of the universe. That is, for him, the core of what ‘God’ means, so that to dispense with this hypothesis for explanatory purposes is to dispense with God.
If you’ve been holding your breath, wondering whether Christian claims about God are going to receive a devastating blow from Dawkins’ arguments, this is the point where you can breathe again, deeply and slowly. This is the point where it turns out that Dawkins is not talking about what we mean by ‘God’ at all. Speaking for Christian theology (but this would be true for Judaism and Islam as well), God is not an explanatory hypothesis.
Let me say it again:
GOD IS NOT AN EXPLANATORY HYPOTHESIS.
That’s not what the word ‘God’ means, it’s not the taproot of belief in God. This is a sideshow.
Let me be more precise. We know when the idea that ‘God’ named an explanatory hypothesis really took hold: it was in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. And it’s not hard to show that this particular idea about what is meant by God is (a) a drastic thinning and reshaping of what had traditionally been meant, in the great monotheistic traditions, and (b) a misrepresentation of the God actually believed in even by those Christians who lived after this shift. (That is, while it might have become a popular apologetic argument, and have assumed centrality in some explicit modern Christian accounts of what ‘God’ means, it has never been a particularly good way of getting at the God implied by actual Christian practice.) Christians can stand shoulder to shoulder with Laplace, and say ‘I have no need of that hypothesis!’ – and in doing so they will be standing up for core, orthodox, mainstream Christian belief in God, not some mealy-mouthed invention of a handful of sophisticates in headlong retreat from the battalions of science.
Let me say it again: God is not an explanatory hypothesis. Dawkins’ version of the God Hypothesis may be a hypothesis but it certainly isn’t about God. Dawkins is firing at …
… well, what is Dawkins firing at? Dawkins has, in effect, taken some form of creationism as paradigmatic for all belief in God. Creationism may be nuts, from Dawkins point of view, but it seems to be the movement that (at last) clearly, firmly and honestly defines ‘God’ properly.
No. No, no, no, no, no.
Creationism is an irrelevant sideshow. It doesn’t get you anywhere near the heart of what the great religious traditions have meant by ‘God’. It doesn’t even get you anywhere near the heart of what creationists, once they are off their apologetic soapboxes, mean by ‘God’. Dawkins (bizarrely enough) accords it far too much power and significance. Let me say it one more time: God is not an explanatory hypothesis.
There are other problems with Dawkins’ God hypothesis as well. It appears to assume that the word ‘God’ names one more thing that there is in the total list of things there are: you count all the things in the universe, and then there is one more: God. And it appears to assume that there is no problem, on the side of the defenders of this hypothesis, in defining this extra thing literally and quite straightforwardly as a designing, creative intelligence. (These assumptions have to be embedded in Dawkins’ version of the God Hypothesis, I think, for his alternative hypothesis to make any sense: that is, his claim that a designing, creative intelligence such as is postulated by the God hypothesis can in fact only emerge as the product of a long process of evolution.) Trouble is, you don’t have to look very hard to find theologians (Jewish, Christian or Islamic) who will tell you that the falsehood of both these assumptions is a core part of what the word ‘God’ means.
So when Christians talk about ‘God’, they’re not talking about an almighty,
creator of heaven and earth? Exactly what is wrong with his definition?
Well, a number of things, as I’ve tried to explain (in this post and others). (1) I think Dawkins’ strategy assumes not just that Christians believe in a God who is creator, but that their most central reason for believing in God is that he provides explanatory hypothesis for the existence and nature of the universe, such that ‘God’ is fundamentally the name of one attempted solution to a lack of explanation of natural phenomena. (2) I take it that ‘supernatural’ in this definition is being defined as Dawkins does in his first chapter. (3) Dawkins’ definition assumes that the word ‘God’ names a reality to which the phrases ‘intelligence’ and ‘deliberately designed’ (and, if you like, we could also throw in the word ‘exists’) can be straightforwardly and literally applied – so that in important respects when we say ‘God created the world’ we are naming a process like that in which, say, a watchmaker designs and makes a watch – only on a vastly greater scale. (And Dawkins’ argument later on does, I think, rest on some such assumption.)
All three of those aspects of Dawkins’ definition are at best debatable. My claim in this post is that (1) is pretty straightforwardly wrong. For (2), I argued in earlier posts that some pretty mainstream strands of Christian debate about God would deny it. The same goes for (3), only more so.
> assumes not just that Christians believe in … All three of those aspects of Dawkins’ definition are at best debatable.
And for them not to be endlessly debatable we need exploration of what ordinary christian believers do believe – data.
A survey of ordinary Christian believers may well show that a majority believe something that looks like claims (2) and (3). But there, all I claim is that there are ‘some pretty mainstream strands of Christian debate about God’ that deny it (an empirical claim, certainly, but one not hard to substantiate: if you’re really interested, I can dig out a bibliography of recent discussions of the doctrine of God). Of course, I also (elsewhere) claim that in some respects those strands do better justice to the nature even of ‘ordinary’ Christian faith and practice than do the explicit accounts produced by the ‘ordinary Christians’ themselves – and, I agree, that’s a claim that could do with much fuller justification than a blog entry can supply. Where claim (1) is concerned, I can point you most easily to historical material which charts the development of Christian belief in God (and Jewish/Israelite belief before that), and you can see for yourself whether Dawkins’ claim holds any water. If you want one good study that tackles part of this story in some detail, you could look at Michael Buckley, At the Origins of Modern Atheism (Yale, 1990).
> if you’re really interested
I’d be interested in a “survey of ordinary Christian believers” beliefs about the doctrine of God.
> I can point you most easily to historical material …
Here I’m not asking about the development of ideas in Christianity. I’m asking that claims about ‘what Christians believe now’ be grounded in questions asked of a substantial number of Christians this millennium.
I’m making educated guesses – but since I’m guessing that most contemporary Christians disagree with me, I’d be very happy to be proved wrong. The argument in this post, and in the rest of my discussion of Dawkins, does not involve any denial that many Christians alive now think about God in terms that match fairly well what Dawkins says – probably a pretty big majority. Hence all those dull posts about the connection between ‘sophisticated’ and ‘ordinary’ Christian accounts of what ‘God’ means!
The closest to an exception is claim (1) above: I do indeed claim that the central reason for belief in God is not, for most Christians, anything much to do with quasi-scientific explanation. That’s actually a pretty hard question to get at in any kind of survey, because I am not denying that some such quasi-scientific explanation is a very common apologetic strategy, and so the sort of thing that lots of Christians are likely to say when you ask why they believe in God. But to justify my claim, we would need to look at two things: the processes by which individual Christians come to, and sustain, their belief in God, and the processes by which Christian belief in God came over time to take the form that it does. I tend to concentrate on the latter, because it is closer to my field of expertise: if it can be shown that Christian faith, especially faith in God as creator, did not historically arise by way of quasi-scientific explanation, that is already enough to undermine Dawkins’ presentation. And when one can also see how the popularity of quasi-scientific explanation as an apologetic strategy arose in particular early modern circumstances, you have the bones of a good argument.
As for the processes involved in individuals coming to and sustaining faith, which is where your question seems to focus, I only know that none of the studies I am aware of (I’m thinking of the work of sociologists of religion like Grace Davie in the UK – e.g., Religion in Britain since 1945 – or Christian Smith in the US – e.g., Soul Searching) even remotely suggests that quasi-scientific explanatory power has anything to do with it. Take a look at a book like Timothy Jenkins, Religion in English Everyday Life for a good social anthropological study in the UK context.
… so the sort of thing that lots of n Christians are likely to say when you ask why they believe in God.
Are you suggesting that they are unable to express why they believe in God, and come up with this as a rationalization?
… if it can be shown that Christian faith, especially faith in God as creator, did not historically arise by way of quasi-scientific explanation, that is already enough to undermine Dawkins’ presentation.
Because…?
(I’ve read and re-read but am still missing your point.)
Are you suggesting that they are unable to express why they believe in God, and come up with this as a rationalization?
As I understand it, most people believe in God for a whole complex of reasons, only some of which they are able to articulate. All the evidence I have seen suggests it seldom has anything much to with their following of particular apologetic arguments. Nevertheless, one of the things that many religious people do learn to do – one religious practice, if you like – is presenting arguments designed to justify or explain their beliefs to particular audiences. Such arguments may be sincerely advanced; the believer may be deeply attached to them; they may have a significant role in shaping what the believer means by ‘God’- but, so I claim, they are seldom the whole story. In this respect, asking someone ‘Why do you believe in God?’ is much more like asking someone ‘Why are you politically liberal?’ than it is like asking ‘Why do you think that train goes to Edinburgh?’
… if it can be shown that Christian faith, especially faith in God as creator, did not historically arise by way of quasi-scientific explanation, that is already enough to undermine Dawkins’ presentation.
Because…?
If I am right, then Dawkins understands God as essentially an attempted explanation of the kinds of things that science now explains better. I’m calling this ‘quasi-scientific explanation’. That’s the claim I made above, and I take it we are at the moment discussing not whether that is a good interpretation of Dawkins, but what kinds of data might be relevant to testing that claim.
Now, we could take that claim in two directions. Someone could claim that in the majority of cases of individual believers in God, that believer has arrived at faith by some process of quasi-scientific explanation, or finds that the continued holding of such belief is justified by its quasi-scientific explanatory power. We would test this version of the claim by trying to get at the reasons for belief of a representative sample of contemporary believers – noting the difficulties I described above.
However, it is possible that we will find that belief in God is now so entrenched that it carries on by its own momentum – with people believing because their parents believed, or because the people around them believe – so that the explanatory power or lack of it of the God hypothesis doesn’t really enter into the picture.
If that, or something like it, is true, it would still be possible to rescue Dawkins’ understanding of the nature of belief in God if it were true that the belief in which believers now rest originally arose through processes of quasi-scientific explanation. That, this defender of Dawkins might argue, is how this juggernaut now got rolling.
It is against the latter version of the claim that my historical claims are directed. Put rather simplistically: I think that belief in God, in the full-blown sense involved in the great monotheistic religions, got going without quasi-scientific explanation playing much of a role. And that includes aspects of the belief that look to a modern eye most like quasi-scientific explanation, such as the belief that God is creator. Only relatively recently, and as an accidental accretion to already existing belief in God, did quasi-scientific explanation come to play a significant role. It would therefore in principle be possible to give up on any claim to the quasi-scientific explanatory power of God whilst retaining belief in God in a form faithful to the great monotheistic religious traditions. Therefore it makes sense to doubt that ‘God’ is essentially the name of a quasi-scientific explanation.
As I say, I think the non-historical version of this debate is a non-starter. Nothing I’ve read about the process by which belief in God is acquired and sustained have much to say about quasi-scientific explanation. So I more interested in the historical version of the argument.
Now, I know that (a) I have not here justified my presentation of this history, and that (b) I have not yet really justified my claim that in Dawkins’ presentation God is essentially an attempted explanation of the kinds of things that science now explains better. But if (b) is true, I do think (a) provides salient grounds for a critique of Dawkins’ position.
Thanks for the explanation, and a footnote:
> but, so I claim, they are seldom the whole story
When I read bold “GOD IS NOT AN EXPLANATORY HYPOTHESIS” I understand it is /not any part of the story/ – not that it is not the whole story.
Fair point. My bolded statement was a rather over-hasty way of saying, as above, that I think it would ‘in principle be possible to give up on any claim to the quasi-scientific explanatory power of God whilst retaining belief in God in a form faithful to the great monotheistic religious traditions.’