Refuting Dawkins: Part 1

Draft 0.1 [To be updated]

I was quite disappointed to find out that Richard Dawkins’ book, The God Delusion, was devoid of any informativity. Chapter three, Arguments for God’s Existence, is the only major attempt to refute the popular God arguments. This chapter, and this is the same for the whole book, plays upon the ignorance of his readership. What I mean by this is that his language from the very beginning is very emotive and full of appeals to emotion. Dawkins builds up this use of language in such a way as to support the little information he provides for the arguments against God. His brevity and dismissive tone can easily win the hearts of many who are ‘sitting on the fence’. This tactic, as some linguists would describe as a psycholinguistic strategy, is very common amongst those who refuse to have a frank and honest dialogue. The following will show how Dawkins deliberately fails to engage in a serious intellectual discussion as he consciously omits the stronger arguments and counter arguments to his age old sweeping statements that have been emanating from the collective mouth of Atheism.

He starts chapter three by very briefly outlining the cosmological argument. He states that this argument and its conceptual derivatives,

“…rely upon the idea of a regress and invoke God to terminate it.”

This is where Dawkins fails to give the argument any justice.

One form of the cosmological argument is the kalam cosmological argument, and it has the following logical structure:

1. Everything that has a beginning of its existence has a cause of its existence.

2. The universe has a beginning of its existence.

Therefore:
3. The universe has a cause of its existence.

4. The cause of the Universe, by rational necessity, is an uncaused cause due to the absurdity of an infinite regress.

Therefore:
5. An uncaused, unique and totally transcendental entity exists

The kalam cosmological argument, dates back to medieval Muslim philosophers such as al Ghazali and it has recently been restored to popularity by the Philosopher William Lane Craig.

What distinguishes the kalam cosmological argument from other forms of cosmological argument is that it rests on the idea that the universe has a beginning in time. According to the kalam cosmological argument, however, it is precisely because the universe is thought to have a beginning in time that its existence is thought to stand in need of explanation.

The first premise of the argument is the claim that everything that begins to exist has a cause of its existence. In order to infer from this that the universe has a cause of its existence the proponent of the kalam cosmological argument must prove that the past is finite, that the universe began to exist at a certain point in time.

The crucial premise of the kalam cosmological argument, then, is the second: “The universe has a beginning of its existence”. How do we know that the universe has a beginning of its existence? Might not the universe stretch back in time into infinity, always having existed? The proponent of the kalam cosmological argument must show that this cannot be the case if his argument is to be successful.

Advocates of the kalam cosmological argument claim that it is impossible that the universe has an infinite past.

So far so good. This argument can be appreciated by anyone who is sane and rational.

Dawkins uses three very common ‘counter arguments’, he states,

“They make the entirely unwarranted assumption that God himself is immune to the regress .”

and

“…there is no reason to endow that terminator with any of the properties normally ascribed to God: omnipotence, omniscience, goodness, creativity of design…”

and

“Some regresses do reach a natural terminator…..If you ‘cut’ gold any further than the level of the single atom, whatever else you get is not gold.”

To summarise these counter arguments I will put them in plain English:

1. If there is a sole cause for the universe, then who created the sole cause?

2. If there is a sole cause what evidence is there to say what its characteristics are i.e. its essence?

3. The universe and existence can be infinite as this has been proven mathematically and many examples show that you can have a natural terminator.

Dealing with the first counter argument. Dawkins obviously falls into the trap of not understanding the argument. His self imposed philosophical restrictions – hard core empiricism – has restricted his scope for any major mental activity. If we consider, as would Dawkins himself would too, that time and space are part of the universe then if the whole universe had a cause that cause could not be subject to time and space. So rationally, it would not be possible to subject any of these concepts to this cause. Also, the very fact that this cause must be uncaused is a rational necessity. I will illustrate this with an example. If Dawkins is right and every terminator or cause has another cause ad infinitum, that would mean an infinite regress. A simple example destroys this rational fallacy, in the words of my friend Hassan Choudhury:

“This can be thought of like reserving a book from the university library that is in heavy demand (for the sake of argument let us agree this is the only copy available). If there were four people in the queue before you for the book then you would have to wait for the four to finish before using it for your assignment. Similarly if there were four thousand people in the queue before you for the book then you would have to wait for the four thousand to finish before using it. If an unlimited, infinite (i.e. endless) number of reservations stood between you and the book you would never receive it as an endless number sequence would never end…..It is not possible for an event to exist at the end of an endless chain of events thus we cannot exist at the end of infinity. The universe has not always existed.”

This means that if there is always a cause for every cause we would never have had the existence of the universe as each cause will be dependent on its own cause. If that is the case, an infinite number of causes would inevitably mean no existence. Another example is from Hassan:

“The same example is often illustrated by reference to a sniper requiring an instruction from his superior in his chain of command to open fire. Of course his superior has to wait till his own superior directs him and so on up the chain. If the chain of command were only ten minutes long the sniper would have to wait ten minutes for the command to fire. If it were one hundred years long the sniper would take one hundred years for the command to fire. If the chain were unlimited, it would be infinite, endless and the sniper would never receive the order to fire. It is not possible for an event to exist at the end of an endless chain of event thus we cannot exist at the end of infinity.”

So Dawkins first so called counter argument statement is dealt with.

The second counter argument is understandable. I have to admit that I have to commit intellectual blasphemy and agree with Dawkins here. No one can attribute an essence or characteristic to an unknown cause. To do this would be irrational. Take the following example; if someone right now was knocking at the door, assuming that you were not expecting anyone, could you describe the character of the person behind the door? Would you know their gender? Or their name? Of course not. This is the same with the attributes of the cause of the universe. But what I must add here is that there is an intellectual Islamic approach to the counter argument. Muslims would all agree that information is required to explain the characteristics and essence of the cause or creator. Muslims would argue that there is a book, the Qur’an that can be rationally proven to have come from this entity. Therefore the information and knowledge from this book would describe the nature and essence of this creator. This is a slightly more complex argument, so for more information on this please see www.theinimitablequran.com . But Dawkins ‘refutation’ doesn’t refute that a Creator exists, having an explicit assumption on the Creators essence doesn’t nullify its existence. Many of you do not know me but assuming I am a bad person or good doesn’t take away the fact that I exist.

The third counter argument, can be easily dealt with. Hassan Choudhruy states:

“The idea of infinity has always been problematic since there is a distinction between a possible infinite and actual infinite. A figure can increase towards infinity but will never get there (since numbers are limited). We can therefore say this process is indefinite rather than infinite. Students of calculus will recognise this for the example of the function f(x) = 1/x. If one increases x indefinitely, one increases it without limit, and as x becomes very large, the function f(x) becomes very small. The graph of the function (a hyperbola) provides a straight line that is tangential to the curve at infinity, nevertheless, this will never be actualised; it will never be the case….Even David Hilbert, perhaps the greatest mathematician of the 20th Century, has similarly argued against actual infinity:

‘…the infinite is nowhere to be found in reality. It neither exists in nature nor provides a legitimate basis for rational thought. The role that remains for the infinite to play is solely that of an idea’.(Hilbert, 1964, p139)”

So there are obvious issues with the concept of an actual infinity. Even if we were to assume a mathematical model for an actual infinite, it has never been found in reality. The concept of an actual infinite has no ontological export into the real world, that is, it can’t be found anywhere.

However despite these concerns let us examine the claim in the best traditions of debate and discourse. The following examples should suffice:

If the universe did not have a beginning, then the past would be infinite, i.e. there would be an infinite number of past times. There cannot, however, be an infinite number of anything, and so the past cannot be infinite, and so the universe must have had a beginning.

Why think that there cannot be an infinite number of anything? There are two types of infinites, potential infinites and actual infinites. Potential infinites are purely conceptual, and clearly both can and do exist. Mathematicians employ the concept of infinity to solve equations. We can imagine things being infinite. Actual infinites, though, arguably, cannot exist. For an actual infinite to exist it is not sufficient that we can imagine an infinite number of things; for an actual infinite to exist there must be an infinite number of things. This, however, leads to certain logical problems.

The most famous problem that arises from the existence of an actual infinite is the Hilbert’s Hotel paradox. Hilbert’s Hotel is a (hypothetical) hotel with an infinite number of rooms, each of which is occupied by a guest. As there are an infinite number of rooms and an infinite number of guests, every room is occupied; the hotel cannot accommodate another guest. However, if a new guest arrives, then it is possible to free up a room for them by moving the guest in room number 1 to room number 2, and the guest in room number 2 to room number 3, and so on. As for every room n there is a room n + 1, every guest can be moved into a different room, thus leaving room number 1 vacant. The new guest, then, can be accommodated after all. This is clearly paradoxical; it is not possible that a hotel both can and cannot accommodate a new guest. Hilbert’s Hotel, therefore, is not possible.

A similar paradox arises if the past is infinite. If there exists an infinite past, we would never have the present day. If there was an infinite set of past events and each event requires the previous event to occur, would we ever have the present? Of course not. This is because if today is dependent upon the fact that yesterday happened, and there is an infinite set of these dependencies (i.e. forever) - today will have not occurred. This is similar to the library book example mentioned earlier.

That such a paradox results from the assumption that the past is infinite, it is claimed, demonstrates that it is not possible that that assumption is correct. The past, it seems, cannot be infinite, because it is not possible that there be an infinite number of past moments. If the past cannot be infinite, then the universe must have a beginning.

Additionally if one begins with a number, and repeatedly adds one to it, one will never arrive at infinity. If one has a heap of sand, and repeatedly adds more sand to it, the heap will never become infinitely large. Taking something finite and repeatedly adding finite quantities to it will never make it infinite. Actual infinites cannot be created by successive addition.

The past has been created by successive addition. The past continuously grows as one moment after another passes from the future into the present and then into the past. Every moment that is now past was once in the future, but was added to the past by the passage of time.

If actual infinites cannot be created by successive addition, and the past was created by successive addition, then the past cannot be an actual infinite. The past must be finite, and the universe must therefore have had a beginning.

Finally if I were to set out on a journey to an infinitely distant point in space, it would not just take me a long time to get there; rather, I would never get there. No matter how long I had been walking for, a part of the journey would still remain. I would never arrive at my destination. Infinite space cannot be traversed.

Similarly, if I were to start counting to infinity, it would not just take me a long time to get there; rather, I would never get there. No matter how long I had been counting for, I would still only have counted to a finite number. It is impossible to traverse the infinite set of numbers between zero and infinity. This also applies to the past. If the past were infinite, then it would not just take a long time to the present to arrive; rather, the present would never arrive. No matter how much time had passed, we would still be working through the infinite past. It is impossible to traverse an infinite period of time.

Clearly, though, the present has arrived, the past has been traversed. The past, therefore, cannot be infinite, but must rather be finite. The universe has a beginning.

In conclusion it can be understood that Dawkins fails to give the major arguments any justice, and he consciously ignores the counter refutations to his age old swiping statements. Maybe he felt they were intellectually convincing, so he decided to protect his ‘dogma’ and brush the truth under his swelling carpet.

To be continued…..