Dave Rosborough

A couple of my students recently came to ask me some questions regarding creation and the existence of God. It was clear from their discussions that they’d been reading up on their Richard Dawkins. Frankly, I hadn’t read any of Dawkins’ more recent work, although I’ve got copies of Climbing Mount Improbable and The Blind Watchmaker on my bookshelf and have read The Selfish Gene years back. I was aware that he had published The God Delusion, and had glanced over it a couple of times, getting a cursory idea about what he was trying to say.

So, I recently went to take a look at what he’s been up to lately.

In my browsing, I stumbled across this podcast, in which Dawkins “takes on” Alistair McGrath, an Oxford theologian who has published a couple of books taking cracks at Dawkins’ work.

McGrath, unfortunately, fails to impress. He’s clearly got a fairly thorough understanding of his position, but his ability to communicate to the lay-person leaves something to be desired. Big flowery sentences, but it’s easy to miss his point (and it, sometimes, makes it too easy for him to speak without having a point). To some extent, I’m used to hearing Christian apologists and (more frequently) intelligent design advocates who fail to impress me, so I wasn’t all that surprised.

What surprised me most of all, though, was how unimpressive Dawkins was. He has a very clear way of speaking, a perfectly understandable and cultured accent, and clearly is highly intelligent. But, in espousing his atheist/strongly agnostic position, he seems a bit out of his depth. In particular, he seems a bit muddled in his epistemology (theory of knowledge).

Perhaps unsurprisingly for someone with a science background, his language is full of objectivism (the idea that an objective truth exists). He claims, over and over throughout the interview, to only be interested in “the truth”. Clearly, for Dawkins, an objective truth must exist. To go further, he seems to be very strongly positivist (an objective truth exists, and we can figure out what it is). For Dawkins, the scientific method is the way to discover objective truth, and during the podcast he holds up the laws of physics as good examples of truth, whereas religion is ridiculed and dismissed.

At one point during the discussion, while explaining that he doesn’t care how many good things religion has contributed to the world, he simply exclaims,

“Is it true?”

Good question.

Interestingly, the moderator in the discussion asked a revealing question from an entirely different epistemology. She asked something along the lines of this:

“Would you agree that Islam might be true for someone else, in the same way that Christianity is true for you?”

This type of epistemology is called subjectivism, which claims that no objective truth exists (or that no knowledge exists external to the individual who is doing the knowing).

Subjectivism is a pretty tough viewpoint to adhere to, because there are certain types of knowledge that sure seem to be external to the individual, such as the laws of physics. Your idea of the laws of physics might differ from mine, but in that case, we’d probably assume that one of us had it slightly wrong.

Dawkins leaves little room for subjectivism, it seems, even in terms of moral and ethical truths. In the discussion, he refers to a widespread consensus about what is right and wrong, appealing to our morals about child labour and slavery. This is surprising, since it’s generally Christians or members of other religions who claim that there is an objective moral or ethical truth. Dawkins, however, is forced to say that “something other than religion” is giving us this moral consensus, but he isn’t in any way equipped to know what that is.

So, how does an objectivist, positivist scientist start figuring out what moral and ethical truths are out there? Unfortunately, the scientific method doesn’t give us the tools to find that truth. Where Dawkins seems to fall apart is in his determination to stick with a firmly-entrenched scientism and naturalism that undermines any other means of knowing.