Author: Ophelia Benson

As a companion piece to the one on Gary Gutting’s suggestions about god’s simplicity, here is Dawkins on why the whole idea is a non-starter (TGD p 121):

Creationist “logic” is always the same. Some natural phenomenon is too statistically improbable, too complex, too beautiful, too awe-inspiring to have come into existence by chance. Design is the only alternative to chance that the authors can imagine. Therefore a designer must have done it. And science’s answer to this faulty logic is also always the same. Design is not the only alternative to chance. Natural selection is a better alternative. Indeed, design is not a real alternative at all because it raises an even bigger problem than it solves: who designed the designer?

You see he’s not just talking about why the failure of the argument from design makes god seem improbable, he’s also talking about why the argument from design fails. This is central. The argument from design fails because the appearance of design is just that; it’s an illusion; and that makes sense because the designer is nowhere to be found, and not at all likely, and that in turn makes sense, because there is no design, so we might as well stop looking for a designer. There is no need to pace to and fro talking about how god can be simple and identical to all its qualities; we can just bag the whole thing. There is no design; there is no designer; let’s go have a glass of wine.

Russell has done a thorough dance on the exiguous “arguments” of Suzanne Fields’s “atheists are poopyheads” in that pride of journalism, The Washington Times, but I thought I would still take just a moment to point out how incredibly lazy it is. There’s no evidence that she’s ever even read anything on the subject before writing about it; all she’s done is string together a selection of very stale atheist-hating chestnuts.

Atheism is fashionable. The Bible sells way more copies. Nobody puts atheist books in hotel rooms. Atheists think they’re nonconformists but atheism is way old. Satan. Smug, shallow and arrogant. Cheap. Hitchens and Hitchens. Zealous. Lenin. The 60s. Muslims. Leftists. The worship of power.

That’s it. Seriously. Sarah Palin could have done it in a couple of tweets, and probably has. They don’t have much intellectual integrity, the “ewww atheists” crowd.

All right, I’ve adjusted my attitude since yesterday and the day before. We had a nice chat on the phone, and it will be okay. The seminar will be mostly discussion and q and a, so I won’t have to give a big long talk while yawning and scratching, so I can handle it. And hey, it will be fun. A conversation with a lot of people interested in women’s rights and the role of religion in interfering with same, in Stockholm. Fun!

And the cover of the Swedish translation of Does God Hate Women? is by Elisabeth Ohlson Wallin, whose Homosexuality in religion exhibit was canceled by one museum in June.

Sweden’s Museum of World Cultures canceled the Homosexuality in religion exhibit after consulting with representatives of the three religions involved in the exhibit, Judaism, Christianity and Islam claiming that it might offend some believers. The exhibit was by artist Elisabeth Ohlsson-Wallin. The pieces in the exhibition depict texts from holy books condemning homosexuality beside pictures of people of the same gender in sexual positions.

In other words a Swedish museum of world cultures gave three religions the right of veto over an artist’s exhibition, because somebody claimed it “might” “offend” “some” “believers.”

Perhaps representatives of the three religions will turn up at the seminar Thursday afternoon and bust all of us, because what we’re talking about “might” “offend” “some” “believers.”

Best fun evah.

Gary Gutting is a philosopher of religion at Notre Dame, a Catholic university in the US; he writes for the New York Times philosophy blog The Stone. He has a long post saying what’s wrong with Dawkins’s arguments for the strong improbability of god. It’s worth reading because it’s more than just shouting or hand-waving or tone trolling or border disputing or last Thursdayism or science has nothing to say about the supernatural-ism. That’s not to say it’s convincing, but at least there’s something there.

He addresses Dawkins’s argument (not unique to him, of course) that a god that created the universe would have to be even more complex than the universe, and thus would require explanation even more than the universe does, so it doesn’t explain the universe after all, so it’s not a good argument for the existence of god. (That’s not how Gutting puts it, it’s how I do.)

Here Dawkins ignores the possibility that God is a very different sort of being than brains and computers. His argument for God’s complexity either assumes that God is material or, at least, that God is complex in the same general way that material things are (having many parts related in complicated ways to one another). The traditional religious view, however, is that God is neither material nor composed of immaterial parts (whatever that might mean). Rather, he is said to be simple, a unity of attributes that we may have to think of as separate but that in God are united in a single reality of pure perfection.

Okay…but what good is that? What good is a view, what good is “he is said to be”? It’s just saying. Anyone can say, but that doesn’t mean anyone else should believe what is said.

Obviously, there are great difficulties in understanding how God could be simple in this way. But philosophers from Thomas Aquinas through contemporary thinkers have offered detailed discussions of the question that provide intelligent suggestions about how to think coherently about a simple substance that has the power and knowledge attributed to God.

Okay, but I don’t really see why anyone should bother, given that there’s no real reason to pay attention to the claim in the first place. Saying “God is simple” is an ad hoc way to get around the “god would have to be more complex” objection, but it’s not a claim with any apparent relationship to observable reality. That means that intelligent suggestions about how to think coherently about this legless claim don’t strike an outsider as all that valuable.

Making Dawkins’ case in any convincing way would require detailed engagement not only with Swinburne but also with other treatments by recent philosophers such as Christopher Hughes’ “A Complex Theory of a Simple God.” (For a survey of recent work on the topic, see William Vallicella’s article, “Divine Simplicity,” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

Okay, I had a look.

According to the classical theism of Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas and their adherents, God is radically unlike creatures in that he is devoid of any complexity or composition, whether physical or metaphysical. Besides lacking spatial and temporal parts, God is free of matter/form composition, potency/act composition, and existence/essence composition. There is also no real distinction between God as subject of his attributes and his attributes.

Okay, but again, this is just dogma. It’s just saying. I’m sure it’s internally coherent, but there’s no reason to believe it in the first place. Without any reason to believe it in the first place, it’s hard to care whether it’s internally coherent or not. Don’t you find?

 God is what he has. As identical to each of his attributes, God is identical to his nature. And since his nature or essence is identical to his existence, God is identical to his existence. This is the doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS). It is represented not only in classical Christian theology, but also in Jewish, Greek, and Islamic thought. It is to be understood as an affirmation of God’s absolute transcendence of creatures.

Okay – that all makes sense if you believe in this god in the first place. But if you don’t, it just sounds like people saying fancy things about something they know absolutely nothing about. It sounds grand, that kind of thing, but it’s just saying. Just saying is not convincing to outsiders.

You need a better first step. I already know that theology sounds explanatory and serious to insiders, but you need a better first step to convince outsiders. Science and other empirical forms of inquiry have that better first step; theism doesn’t.

Oh come on. The brush Toby Young paints with is so broad that he’s lost his grip.

No other prominent feminist has spoken out about Ashtiani’s case, unless you include Yoko Ono who has signed the petition calling for her to be freed. We’ve heard nothing from Germaine Greer, nothing from Gloria Steinem, nothing from Jane Fonda, nothing from Naomi Wolf, nothing from Clare Short, nothing from Harriet Harmen.

Well that’s interesting, and in some cases reprehensible if true, but it’s hardly conclusive. That’s not a complete list of prominent feminists, to put it mildly; arguably it’s not even a list of feminists. Jane Fonda? Yoko Ono? They’re celebrities rather than feminists.

 Almost no one on the left, with the honourable exception of Christopher Hitchens, dares to breath a word against any Islamic country for fear of being branded “Islamophobic”. Thus, a brutal dictatorship is able to torture and murder thousands of innocent women, safe in the knowledge that the self-styled keepers of the West’s conscience will remain silent.

Oh come on. Yes parts of the left are way too “sensitive” about what they take to be “Islamophobia” and way too confused about the difference between racism and criticism of religion, but it’s certainly not the case that Christopher Hitchens is the sole exception to that.

Could a feminist outcry today about the plight of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani do anything to prevent her death? We will never know, but it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that their continuing silence reveals the moral bankruptcy of their movement.

What do you mean we will never know?! There is such an outcry; it’s going on right now. There could be even more people involved, of course, but that doesn’t mean there are none.