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Keep It Simple; Arguing Against Shadows

Nagel is not impressed by Dawkins’ “attempts at philosophy.” One of Dawkins’ pet arguments against God as an explanation of design in the world is that it leads to an infinite regress: “A designer God cannot be used to explain organized complexity because any God capable of designing anything would have to be complex enough […]

Nagel is not impressed by Dawkins’ “attempts at philosophy.” One of Dawkins’ pet arguments against God as an explanation of design in the world is that it leads to an infinite regress: “A designer God cannot be used to explain organized complexity because any God capable of designing anything would have to be complex enough to demand the same kind of explanation in his own right.” As Nagel points out, this argument would only have force if theists conceived of God as a complicated brain rather than as an incorporeal being. ~Stephen Barr, First Things

The bigger problem with Dawkins’ formulation, in connection with the ignorance it betrays of the entirety of theological and philosophical speculation and reflection on the nature of God, is not that it makes God out to be a big brain but that it makes Him out to be complex at all.  Basic teachings of the unity and oneness of God integral to Christian doctrine, which can be found in Neoplatonism and Greek philosophy as welll, emphasise that simplicity is a natural attribute of God.  Multiplicity and complexity exist here below in a realm subject to change and corruption.  Tracing all movement back to the Unmoved Mover or tracing the origins of creation to the will of a Creator leads you to the conclusion that the origin of all other things from a Being Who could not be composite or complex.  To solve precisely this problem of infinite regress, God must be simple, which is also why He must be One (even, indeed, as God has revealed Himself to be Three Persons in perfect unity). 

What Dawkins might have said was that you cannot take a philosophical or theological account of a designer God and make that claim into an all-purpose explanatory tool for everything in a complex system that we do not yet understand scientifically.  In other words, you should not confuse an understanding that God made and ordered the cosmos with the work of science that tries to understand the workings within that cosmos.  But Dawkins target is not principally ID-as-science, but is the belief in God itself, which he attempts to demonstrate is unreasonable.  As everyone before him has failed in this vain effort, so has he.  Rather like Andrew Sullivan, Dawkins ignores the content of the Faith he derides and ridicules and then thinks he has accomplished something when he has demonstrated the weakness of the non-existent beliefs he has attributed to his opponents.   

 

Mr. Bush is also quite good at this when he attributes positions to his opponents that none of them has ever espoused.  Having handily “refuted” the opposition by rejecting ideas that no one holds, Mr. Bush can then proceed with the rest of his remarks untroubled by any unfortunate encounters with reality.  Here are some of the sorts of “arguments” Mr. Bush might use:

“There are some good and patriotic people who seem to think that we can surrender our first-born children to the dark god Moloch and he will save us from Bin Laden, but I’m here to tell you that this is a mistake.”

“We cannot win the war on terror by adopting the failed vision of Marxism-Leninism, as some critics have proposed.”

“Those who believe that we will be protected from terrorist attack by Brazilian power crystals are well meaning, but deeply misguided in their beliefs.  I call upon the leadership of the Democratic Party to repudiate these irresponsible and extreme ideas.”

“I know there are some who say that I am actually robot sent here by invading space aliens to prepare the way for their overlordship, but what we need in this country is responsible and constructive disagreement about our Iraq policy.”

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