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I asked for a specific argument that the parent felt Dawkins made that was sufficiently rebutted by theologians. They replied with a generic list of Christian apologetics.

You're welcome to contribute to the debate if you have a specific example in mind to defend their argument.




Well, let me give you a specific example (just one of many): his dismissal of Thomas Aquinas' proofs for God's existence (at the start of chapter 3), isn't even good for an undergraduate; if he submitted that as an essay in a philosophy 101 course, I doubt he'd get good marks. He doesn't bother to understand what Aquinas meant by the terms he uses in his arguments; he shows zero awareness of the historical context, that Aquinas is relying on a specific set of philosophical theories (scholastic Aristotelianism), and it is impossible to properly understand his arguments without first understanding that theoretical background. It appears Dawkins has never read any of the secondary literature (not even a first year textbook!), he is just dismissing these arguments based on a plain English reading of their words. He identifies Aquinas' fifth proof with Paley's argument from design, completely ignoring the (rather standard) position that they are rather different arguments based on quite different assumptions (an Aristotelian theory of causation versus a mechanistic/Cartesian/Humean one)

Personally, I'm sceptical than any of Aquinas' arguments actually work. Maybe, if you accept his philosophical assumptions (about the nature of causation, etc), they succeed – but that leaves us with the equally difficult task of proving those assumptions. So, I think Dawkins may well be right in his conclusion, that Aquinas' arguments fail – but the reasoning he uses to reach that conclusion shows he has zero idea what he is talking about.

To make an analogy – imagine an anti-creationist book written by someone with a very poor knowledge of the science of evolution, and their understanding of it is riddled with errors and misunderstandings, and Dawkins was asked to review it – while he'd of course agree with the book's conclusion, he'd find its contents an embarrassment – much of The God Delusion is the same thing.

Compare Dawkins to someone like the Australian philosopher of religion Graham Oppy. Oppy is, like Dawkins, an atheist. Unlike Dawkins, when he criticises theists' arguments, he actually knows what he is talking about, and doesn't make the kind of juvenile mistakes that Dawkins makes. Unlike Dawkins, he's read all the secondary literature on the topic, and has made significant contributions to that literature. Due to this, many theist philosophers of religion actually have a lot of respect for Oppy, even though they (of course) disagree with his conclusions–among philosophers of religion (whether theist or atheist), Dawkins is mostly viewed as an example of what happens when an expert in one field decides to write a book in a completely unrelated one, and their valuable contributions to the former field are no guarantee their attempt to contribute to the later will be of any value at all.


Thank you for the detailed answer. I understood perfectly what you meant and I think you are correct in your criticism. This is a sign of poor scholarship from Dawkins, I'm better off knowing about it.

A small quibble, unrelated to your explanation, is that if this particular theological argument is not respected even among theologians, it does not constitute an example of arguments that "were effectively fended off hundreds or in some cases thousands of years ago by theology and apologetics".


> A small quibble, unrelated to your explanation, is that if this particular theological argument is not respected even among theologians, it does not constitute an example of arguments that "were effectively fended off hundreds or in some cases thousands of years ago by theology and apologetics".

Well, to give a different example - in the midst of discussing Aquinas' proofs, he advances the claim that omniscience and omnipotence are logically incompatible. There is a long history in Jewish, Christian and Islamic philosophy of debating closely related questions. The 10th century Rabbi Saadia Gaon, the 12th century Islamic philosopher Ibn Rushd (Averroes), and Aquinas himself all discussed paradoxes of omnipotence (the classic "can God create a stone heavier than he can lift?") – the resolution of which generally turns on precisely how "omnipotence" is defined. There is similarly a long history in all three religions of intellectual debate over the relationship between divine omniscience, the nature of time and God's relationship to it, and human free will (if God perfectly knows the future, does that mean the future is predetermined? if the future is predetermined, how can humans have free will?) – topics discussed by ancient Christian philosophers and theologians such as Boethius (6th century) and Augustine (5th century), the Jewish philosopher Maimonides (aka Rambam, 12th/13th century), the 7th–10th century disputes in Islamic theology over predestination (qadr) versus free will.

Obviously this lengthy history of debate, stretching back many centuries, even 1500 years, has a lot of relevance to Dawkins' claim of a contradiction – and, as usual, Dawkins appears utterly ignorant of all of it. His argument seems to be basically that he knows what "omnipotent" and "omniscient" mean (he may have consulted a dictionary), and obviously by his definitions they contradict each other – zero interest in whether his definitions of them agree with those of philosophers and theologians who've examined these issues before – and then he cites a poem which expresses the same view. So I think that is a good example of what you are looking for in your quibble – although the plural in "thousands of years ago" is possibly somewhat of an exaggeration. I'm not sure if anyone ever answered Dawkins precise objection (although I wouldn't rule it out), but closely related objections have been discussed many times before.


I see. I think this is another great and very appropriate example, this time directly addressing the initial claim. I stand thoroughly corrected. Thanks for taking the time to explain it in a way that I and anybody else unfamiliar with this field could understand it.




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