But wait, we have a problem. The problem is that the empirical method of science is not philosophy. Not philosophy? What does philosophy have to do with this? Well, philosophy was the discipline that used to claim the capacity to answer all of life’s questions, and I think its quite safe to conclude that it still firmly sits upon that throne. What I think was not realized was that science was only a sub-discipline of philosophy, only a small specialization of the great study of Reality. Why is that? Because science cannot answer a number of questions about reality. Which ones? Start at 1:10 if you want to cut to it:

The dubious claim is Atkins’, that “science is omnipotent.” Craig shows by counterexample that this statement is obviously false, and I want to dwell on the last one in particular. Whether or not you buy Craig’s example about the Theory of Special Relativity (or even his other examples) is not the issue, the point he raises is profound: The empirical method is entirely circular: it cannot justify itself. Empiricism lays great emphasis on the superiority of its method, because it yields results which we can touch and see. But what does that mean? Essentially, it’s a claim to the superiority of empiricism because its methods yield empirically-verifiable results. One is appealing to empiricism to prove empiricism to be true, and hence becomes entirely circular.

What are we not saying here? No one’s saying that science doesn’t “work.” Of course it does. What we have discovered is that empiricism cannot itself be its own justification, and therefore is not a substantial, self-subsisting worldview, not to mention the number of other things Dr. Craig points out which science lacks the ability to explain. Why? Because those things are not scientific questions. To quote CS Lewis in Mere Christianity,

“Science works by experiments. It watches how things behave. Every scientific statement in the long run, however complicated it looks, really means something like, ‘I pointed the telescope to such and such a part of the sky at 2.20 a.m. on January 15th and saw so-and-so,’ or, ‘I put some of this stuff in a pot and heated it to such-and-such a temperature and it did so-and-so.’ Do not think that I am saying anything against science; I am only saying what its job is.”

And science’s job, we might add, is not to create a self-subsisting worldview or to “achieve omnipotence;” for it cannot, even in potentiality, do either. Those tasks are the duties of Philosophy and the philosopher, to which Science and the scientist must ever be subservient. The last few centuries have shown science to be a usurper; but the time has come for its humbling.

Thinking that we obviously needed to go and see Geisler, we asked the internet where to find him, and lo! he would be speaking not 45 minutes away from us in a few weeks.

Further research revealed something I had not realized about Dr. Geisler, that he had left the ETS because they would not kick out Clark Pinnock, an advocate of open theism. You can read all about it in Geisler’s own letter. Now, granted, this isn’t really that much of a scandal given that it was about eight years ago that this happened, but it was news to us, and we felt that this was a bit harsh. We felt that Norman Geisler needed to be more…open, to Open Theism. After some scrambling around, scribbled plans, shirt making, and rushed driving, we managed to both attend the conference that Geisler spoke at as well as get our picture with him. But, additionally, we managed to get THIS picture with him (Click to enlarge!):

And, thanks to zippers and buttons, none knew the message of our shirts, either before it was too late, or after.

Two points. First, I want to dedicate this trouble and time that we went through to Craig Boyd, who first took the time to painstakingly explain open theism to me when I was but a junior undergrad, and who humored us enough to sing Bob Dylan songs on the last day of class.

Second, to Dr. Geisler himself, for whom I have nothing but warm affection for. Your arguments got me through many difficult times in my youth and I hope you will take this as an opportunity to laugh about that narrow range of scholar jokes which (unfortunately!) not everyone can enjoy.

As has been noted in other places, if you want your own “be open to open theism” shirts, you will, unfortunately, have to make them yourself.

Dorothy Sayers, author, translator, Inkling, and all-around fascinating woman, wrote this essay, in which she elaborated on a proposal for a return to a model of education based on the Medieval Trivium.

Both are well worth consuming and talking about.

For these sorts of “boring” things I usually expect only a certain tiny clique of my fellows to entertain any level of excitement, but as Thursday comes striding towards the present, my roster has filled up with all sorts of other friends, who, though not majors or scholars, nevertheless maintain an honest and healthy interest in edification. The word “Thursday” keeps getting tossed around from person to person, with definitive nods or sparkling eyes. Vehicle seating capacity may actually become an issue. This is, I suppose, of one of those good problems to have.

See you Friday!

Preface

Today I’d like to deal specifically with “Chapter 3: Arguments for God’s Existence,” and primarily Dawkins’ addressing of the major traditional arguments for God put forth by the scholastics. Again, I’ll be citing from my Silver-and-orange paperback, the First Mariner Books edition, 2008, if you want to follow along. But first, I’d like to make one thing very clear:

I do not, for the record, take issue against Mr. Dawkins for atheism. Far from it. As I believe I have said at numerous points in the past, there are many atheists for whom I maintain a great deal of respect and admiration, notably Sarte, Russel, and (for some reason) Nietzsche. It is far, far from me to make a personal attack on someone for what they believe about Theology. That would amount to utter nonsense in my book.

“Fine,” some people say, “so you have no problem with atheists who are atheists but respect your religion and leave it alone; you have a problem with Dawkins because he wants to condemn/destroy/undermine/speak out against your religion. That’s why you don’t like him. You want a quiet atheist, a placid leave-me-alone atheist.” This is a response I’ve gotten a lot, but that’s not it either. Again, this goes back to my fundamental concern over proper discourse and rationalism. Talk. Everyone talk, read, write, debate, research, investigate, whatever you want to do. By all means let us dialogue about atheism and various religions and the merits of all things. My issue is with fallacy, rhetoric, and pseudo-intellectualism. Fred Phelps, for example, is someone in whom I have a hard time believing, because he is so completely insane. He’s a Christian (or so he says). I discount him, as well as Dawkins. The people who put out the Chick Tracts? Also babbling idiots. The common denominator here isn’t religious affiliation, it’s craziness.

Arguments for the Existence of God

Dawkins begins with Thomas Aquinas’ Five Ways (or Five Proofs), and this would be standard enough, except for the fact that Dawkins (proudly) remains ignorant of theological details, which makes his assessment of Aquinas a little embarrassing. Dawkins takes the first three of Aquinas’ proofs (Unmoved Mover, Uncaused Cause, and the Cosmological Argument) in one stride, and notes that “all three of these arguments rely upon the idea of a regress and invoke God to terminate it. They make the entirely unwarranted assumption that God himself is immune to the regress” (p.101). This is what’s funny. Yeah, a theologian might say, yeah, he is. That’s the whole point of the matter. If there is a God, and he created everything, he operates out of the fabric of space time where there is no causation because there is no time; there is no need for causation or causal theories, least of all for the being who brought time (and, thereby, causation itself) into existence. This is really a very simple reply to a very simple mistake on his part. But, like we established last time, Dawkins is no philosopher, much less a meta-physician.

Dawkins continues to miss the point of the God Hypothesis when he later continues with, “To return to the infinite regress and the futility of invoking God to terminate it, it is more parsimonious to conjure up, say, a ‘big band singularity,’ or some other physical concept as yet unknown” (p.101-102). Some other physical concept. Again, he’s missing the point of the whole problem of the origin of space-time and matter! An infinite regression of matter is a problem, a huge logistical problem for the same reasons: you can’t have a thing causing a thing causing a thing that goes back infinitely. That’s what he says about God; “who/what created God, then?” People who make this sort of argument fundamentally don’t understand what is meant by “God”; they are still stuck in the matter-and-energy paradigm, instead of shifting to the spiritual paradigm: There is time, so there is causality, and things have causes. This is what happens in space-time. Therefore it is necessary to invoke something that is outside of space-time, something meta-physical, literally super-natural (above/beyond/outside of the naturalistic plane of matter), or however you want to phrase it, in order to give a proper origin for matter. Why? Because the metaphysical is not limited by space-time, and without time as a limitation, causation is not an issue.

Does that mean we just proved God? Hardly. But neither has Dawkins even addressed the issue. To do that, he would need to move into metaphysics, but since he has no background in it, he can hardly hope to accomplish that.

Dawkins likewise blunders all over himself as he attempts a reductio ad absurdum argument on Aquinas’ Argument from Degree. He notes that “You might as well say, people vary in smelliness but we can make the comparison only by reference to a perfect maximum of smelliness. Therefore there must exist a pre-eminently peerless stinker, and we call him God” (p.102). Here Dawkins is substituting “smelliness” or “any dimension of comparison you like,” for Aquinas’ arguments about Goodness and Perfection.

Here is where he very, very clearly does not have a philosophy degree. He is confusing metaphysical qualitative things like Perfection and Goodness with a physical descriptor of sensory perception (smelliness). This is what we call a Category Error in the philosophy world, which is another fallacy. Any amount of Plato would have taught him the distinction.

Moving finally to tackle the Ontological Argument, Dawkins strikes the reader as a child approaching the arena of men. Why might that be? The same reason: he doesn’t have a philosophy degree. His arguments against the Ontological Argument consist basically of his gut-level reactions to it (“The very idea that grand conclusions could follow from such logomachist trickery offends me aesthetically” p.105), followed up by invoking Kant to solve the problem for him. The text lacks any discussion of why existence as a property is problematic, or if that is even the move Anselm is making. Since Plantinga, that latter presumption has been open to serious reconsideration, and Kant’s “devastating” critique has fallen by the wayside as largely off-topic. And, like so many other occasions, the Ontological Argument lives on. Dawkins as a whole says very little about the Ontological Argument itself, and it is little wonder: the argument is so long-lived, so virile and dexterous as to have shrugged off countless philosophers and critics, we cannot realistically expect Dawkins to even come close to unpacking it. And we are not surprised: he leaves the whole issue packed up neatly, never even dipping his feet into the great depth of the problems involved, content to insult the argument from afar. This is probably the weakest point in the ENTIRE text. When he moves on, I cannot imagine what kind of person with any amount of philosophical training could be anywhere near satisfied with his analysis.

In short, in addressing the major arguments for the existence of God, Dawkins doesn’t even come close to unpacking the arguments. Does that mean, then, that because Dawkins fails God exists? Not necessarily. But if a text is going to accomplish the goals Dawkins set out to do, it’s going to need to be massively more thorough than this.

That’s all I have for today. If you want an excellent review of the God Delusion by one of the great philosophers of our age, read Plantinga‘s review!

~

After a great deal of different kinds of writing, I found that I’ve penned my best words when I wasn’t trying to write particularly well, but instead, just writing what I was honestly thinking, the words that were in my mind, lingering on the tip of my tongue. Writing freely into my journals, with no editors, no readers, I found the most honest words I had ever written, and in that, some of the most powerful. Reflecting on it, it may come as some surprise to us who grew up surrounded by quotes and sayings that those men and women of powerful prose were people writing not for the sake of writing, writing not to “look smart”, living life with no thought to its being scrutinized, but simply and honestly, recording the deep and unshakeable convictions which came, unavoidably, over the horizons of their minds.

If I had to guess, I would say that something about our generation, about this whole age, is one that is overly self-reflective. We learn, from studying and objectifying the successes of those who came before us historically, that we are studied and objectified, that because we will be scrutinized we must live our lives accordingly, and so we reach for success like a wooing girl, who flaunts and poses her beauty because someone is watching, and she knows this, but pretends she does not. It is all a lie, of course; she wants to pretend to be caught alone, in a moment of fake honestly, so that her admirer will see her “as she is.” But the admirer does not see the real her; only the pretend girl, and in that sense, sees only her pretend beauty. She is like quantum trickery, shifting and changing because she knows we are watching. We are like that, as a generation: we are always trying, acting, pretending, putting on the airs and appearances of, but our insides never show, our authentic selves so rarely come out to grace the world with the beauty of a true thing, a thing as it really is. We have become so caught up in the science of making that we are never doing. We are forever attempting success, trying to achieve the things that life has to offer us because of the expectations around us, because we want to be caught in the eyes of another and seen as something, some persona, some outer mask with which we can be associated. We try for things, and wonder why don’t achieve them. Try and catch all the water, and it will only slip through your fingers. But let it go, and you have the whole of it as your swimming pool.

How many times has a teacher or parent echoed dimly, “just be yourself”? So often that it has begun to ring hollow and ragged. Yes, that IS the immortal secret: do all that is written on your heart to do and you will achieve greatness, “speak your latent conviction and it shall be the universe sense.” But like everything in this age, we have but a part of the secret: we have information, but no wisdom; we have concepts, but no understanding; we have knowledge, but no conviction. “Be yourself,” they say, and not a word follows afterwords about how to do this, or even to explain what yourself is, or why such a thing is desirable in the first place.

It came to me when I was reading the introduction to the Complete Sherlock Holmes. Christopher Morley wrote of the series’ magnificent author, “What other man led a fuller and heartier and more masculine life? Doctor, whaler, athlete, writer, speculator, dramatist, historian, war correspondent, spiritualist…big in every way, his virtues had always something of the fresh vigor of the amateur, keen, open-minded, flexible, imaginative…that brave and energetic lover of life.” That last part stuck with me, that brave and energetic lover of life. Suddenly there was conjured into my mind not a man who sat and fretted and fussed about what he would do, and how, and why; not a man looking at himself, but a man looking at the world, and seeing in it all the delights of his heart, took no look at himself to judge his ability or worthiness, but simply went off and did, spurred by nothing but his great enthusiasm, forgetting himself (I imagine) altogether in the living of his life rather than the waking analysis upon it.

So take the things that rest powerfully upon your heart and go forth and do them, achieve them, make them, grow, design, build, learn, write, teach, found. Do it, do it now; don’t think of what others will think, even though we do, we do always, but forget those others, and forget yourself; do not dwell on selves; and do not dwell on failure. You will meet it soon enough! We all stumble and fall, sometimes we fall in great pits in the ground and it takes many years to climb out, but there are so many more years. Failure is inevitable, so it is not something we should spend much time thinking about beforehand. Perseverance, however, is not, and so we must foster such a virtue endlessly; little else will serve us so well and for so long.

This is the question that should now be dwelling in your mind: what is it that is in your heart to do? Reach for it; it waits for you.

Here’s my latest on Sickness Unto Death. It was, actually, sub-par in my opinion because I was forced to go into the essay without a good grasp of Kierkegaard’s conception of the self and I wonder if the paper suffered because of it. The conclusion is something I felt needed another essay on its own, but the Professor wanted mostly summary.

Hope you enjoy.

Sin is the Sickness Unto Death

[Alternate title: Down With the Sickness]

The inability for human beings to be happy, though they all seem to be trying to achieve that end, is something worth noting, and the great Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard made clear and distinct note of it. He found that the misery in mankind, this inability to “be happy,” stems ultimately from a fundamental despair inherent to the very nature of humanity, something from which there is no escape. And further, that it is precisely the awareness of this problem and the solution to it which Christianity attempts to provide.

We must begin first with the self, as a robust understanding of what the self is and what that means will be fundamental in explaining and demonstrating the universality of despair. The problem begins with the very nature of humanity, which is itself in conflict. “A human being”, Kierkegaard writes, “is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short, a synthesis.”[1] This synthesis arises out of the separate parts of these dualities, and it is these dualities which result in a kind of self-referentialism out of which the Self arises. “The self is a relation that relates itself to itself,” — that is, it is this dialectical tension, the two selves relating to one another — “[…] the self is not the relation but is the relation’s relating itself to itself”[2] – that is, the self arises out of a self-referentialism. Now, with this formulation in mind, that man is a dialectical synthesis, that the self is itself a conflict, we can move into a proper treatment of despair.

Despair arises out of this problem, of this dialectical tension within the very self that makes up the man. The problem lies in the nature of man, and so man despairs of himself. “To despair over oneself, in despair to will to be rid of oneself – this is the formula for all despair.”[3] This is what despair essentially is, and Kierkegaard makes a point to distinguish it from what might be called “depression” as a disease, as something that happens to a person, rather than something which that person is. “[It is not] something that happens to a man, something he suffers, like a disease to which he succumbs, or like death, which is everyone’s fate. No, no, despairing lies in man himself. If he were not a synthesis, he could not despair at all.”[4] Again, the problem lies in what man himself is, and so the solution is to try and escape oneself. But man cannot escape himself, and so is miserable either way. If he wills to be something other than himself, he will despair that he is not that thing which is not himself. But if he reflects on himself, he despairs of himself for being himself! Thus all people are in despair, regardless of what form this despair takes, for man cannot escape despair any more than he can escape himself.

One may object, however, that this is a morbid view of humanity: that all men are not in despair, for we all know many happy, consistent people who enjoy themselves and others, and it would look very much like their natural state would be to be free of despair until some misfortune befell them, and they were mired in despair for some short amount of time until they overcame it, and then proceeded to return to a state free of despair and pursue their normal lives. Kierkegaard says that these people are nevertheless in despair themselves. “Not being in despair, not being conscious of being in despair, is precisely a form of despair.”[5] These people, for whatever else they may do or enjoy, have willed to be something other than themselves because they have not acknowledged the problem of human synthesis, the dialectical tension; just because they may or may not be aware of the fact that they are in despair does not change the fact that they are in despair. This misconception is especially easy to come by, because people who are in this sort of despair (what Kierkegaard call’s “finitude’s despair”[6]) can “very well live on in temporality, indeed, actually all the better, can appear to be a man, be publicly acclaimed, honored, and esteemed [and] be absorbed in all the temporal goals”[7] for the materialism of the world does not make real selfhood a prerequisite for success. “They can use their capacities, amass money, carry on secular enterprises, calculate shrewdly […] perhaps make a name in history,” but, Kierkegaard concludes, “themselves they are not; spiritually speaking, they have no self, no self for whose sake they could venture everything […] however self-seeking they are otherwise.”[8] Precisely because this sort of despair “makes life cozy and comfortable” it is “in no way, of course, regarded as despair”[9] by the world. Playing the world’s game, then, does not solve the problem of the self, and in so far as it seeks to remove one from one’s self, the self remains in despair. Just because it has “mortgaged itself to the world” changes nothing, and it the self may be further from selfhood than before, because, as we said, man cannot escape from himself, but neither has he yet accomplished the task of becoming a self. Despair is never-ending, and “the reason for this is that to despair is a qualification of spirit and relates to the eternal in man. But he cannot rid himself of the eternal – no, never in all eternity. He cannot throw it away once and for all, nothing is more impossible; ”[10]

As it should be clear by now, the self, in trying to escape itself, fails, and therefore, the self does not have the power to free itself from despair. “In spite of all his despair, however, he cannot manage to [free himself]; in spite of all his despairing efforts, that power is the stronger and forces him to be the self he does not want to be.”[11]

The only way to escape despair is to will to be oneself. “The formula that describes the state of the self when despair is completely rooted out is this: in relating itself to itself and in willing to be itself, the self rests transparently in the power that established it.”[12] The reason the self must, in addition to willing to be itself, rest transparently in the power that established, is because “itself” as it is in actuality is a created self, something that “has been established by another”[13], so in willing to be oneself, one must be willing to embrace all aspects of itself, primarily, that it was established by something other than itself. Indeed, this is where the synthesis reaches its most important point, as man’s dual finitude and infinitude are reconciled in God, we can now replace the word “sin” with “despair” and look at the Christian reconciliation through a much clearer lens. Any ideas of “innate” or “original” sin simply refer to the paradoxical state of humanity which by definition is in conflict (in “sin”) and requires reconciliation to the power that established it (“God”) in order to be free of despair (again, “sin”).

The conception of Hell, then, arises as the only alternative for the self, should it choose not to will to become itself. If the self does not freely will to be itself –and therefore to rest transparently in the power that established it– it will go on being in despair, and because the self is spirit and cannot die, then there will never be an end to its suffering. “This […] is precisely the torment, is precisely what keeps the gnawing alive and keeps life in the gnawing, for it is precisely over this that he despairs (not as having despaired): that he cannot consume himself, cannot get rid of himself, cannot reduce himself to nothing.”[14] and because of that, if he does not will to be himself, he will be in torment forever. This is the meaning of the eternal suffering of Hell; not as a place to which people are sent by an angry God, but as a state in which the despairing refuse to be themselves and can never die in their infinite misery.

With Kierkegaard and a correct conception of despair in mind, Christianity takes on a new and clearer meaning: moving beyond the dogma of “us-and-them” lines of argument, away from the persecution of the secular by the religious, indeed, away from the distinction all-together, and into a clear conception of the problem of human angst and misery, and the potential for freedom from sin and despair alike.

Works Cited

Kierkegaard, Søren. Basic Writings of Existentialism, ed. Gordon Marino (New York: Random House Inc., 2004)

[2] Ibid., 42

[3] Ibid., 49

[4] Ibid., 44

[5] Kierkegaard, Søren, Basic Writings of Existentialism, ed. Gordon Marino (New York: Random House Inc., 2004), p. 52

[6] Ibid., 52

[7] Ibid., 64

[8] Ibid., 65

[9] Ibid., 64

[10] Ibid., 45

[11] Ibid., 49

[12] Ibid., 52

[13] Ibid., 42

[14] Kierkegaard, Søren, Basic Writings of Existentialism, ed. Gordon Marino (New York: Random House Inc., 2004), p. 47

Let me start by conjuring up a scenario we have all run into. You do a search, or stumble upon some sort of interesting blog. It’s a blog of promise and zeal, and probably has one or two interesting entries in it. Then, as you pick around, you notice that there aren’t that many entries after all, and this is somewhat disappointing. You rationalize to yourself, thinking that it might just be a new blog, but then you check the date and its from 2003 or something, and it’s just been sitting there on the internet, collecting cyber-dust because someone got excited about writing a blog, but never kept it up.

Most blogs die like this, not with a bang nor a whisper, but by abandonment, without even the decency to board up the windows; people just forget, their interest peters out, and they move on to other things.

I had always prided myself in my commitment to updates, and though they didn’t always come regularly, there was always a post, here and there, to remind my wonderful readership that I was still alive.

And so I am; the three couple months scared me and I thought I too was giving up on my own blog, but I’m back now and I’m sorry to have kept everyone waiting for so long. To have people stop me in my day-to-day and ask about Truth is a Snare made me realize that this wasn’t something I should give up on, no matter how bad I felt.

The truth is, after maintaining this blog for over two years, I was burnt out. Intellectually, I encountered some difficulties; the last semester at the new school was extremely rough, and all manner of problems seemed to come out of the woodwork for a joint assault. But I am alive, and that’s more than I can ask for.

Two years! That’s a long time. I rarely see casual blogs get maintained with any level of dedication. I guess I should have some sort of Anniversary post, but that can be saved for next week.

This year I want to start addressing some of the huge problems and considerations that I have been in almost constant thought about for the time that I was not updating; they have been stewing inside of me for a long while, and I think I have them outlined with some sort of coherency. I have, among other things, cultural considerations, primarily about our culture as a mediocracy, issues with the modern movement in intellectual and artistic realms towards the rejection of truth, a treatise on Being (hurray!), a treatise on the Soul, a fleshed-out summary of how Magic: the Gathering works as philosophy, and a return to the inauthentic pseudo-intellectual who haunts and hounds the authentic man.

But first things are first. Next week I will FINALLY wrap up the whole Dawkins fiasco, and this week I will post up my Ethics final paper on Nietzsche, which several people asked about.

My preface for this paper is that I was braindead, and it took me a whopping NINE hours to write, during which I barely met the minimum page requirements. I don’t think I have to say that this was overwhelmingly uncharacteristic of me, but considering it was the very last thing I did finals week, I may be excused on account of the low sleep and food intake.

Please enjoy.

——————-

Zachary Porcu

Craig A Boyd

Ethics

Nietzsche’s Ethics, a Critique

It may be that we have a well-educated society, here in America, or elsewhere in the so-called western world, but the study of philosophy and the geneology of ideas as they grow and evolve from century to century is something that remains, for the large part, inaccessible to the modern citizen. We have what may be called a trickle-down understanding of philosophy, where superficial readings of great works and writings glean off only the most explicit concepts and pass them among the populace, and thence, wrenched from their context, to be confused and misquoted for generations. Nietzsche is one such thinker, and it is precisely this uncritical approach that has allowed his ethical philosophies to become so romanticized by a new generation of skeptics, and to give birth to an equally uncritical kind of normative secular ethics. Indeed, once one takes a critical look at these ideas, presented primarily in such works as Beyond Good and Evil and The Geneology of Morals, one cannot help but see the problems that arise, and all talk of a normative ethics as espoused by Nietzsche becomes meaningless in his own terms.

We must first begin with Nietzsche’s formulation of the age-old labels “good” and “evil,” the way in which he formulates his new definitions being typical of his very un-typical approach to philosophy. Most of us take the terms “good” and “evil” with a host of assumed meanings and definitions, and most of us assume that the two have pretty much always existed. Nietzsche disregards this conception of morality, including also the utilitarian idea at the time, of “good” as the most benefit for the most individuals. Nietzsche asserts that “goodness” did not arise from those to whom good was practiced towards, but rather “it was ‘the good’ themselves, that is to say, the noble, powerful, high-stationed and high-minded, who felt and established themselves and their actions as good…they first seized the right to create values and to coin names for values.”1 Hence, the “good” came about as a positive self-assurance on part of those in power. Note that the important part of the so-called “master morality” is its proactivness. The master, or the powerful, or the noble, are always acting, creating, making, doing, ruling. They reach forward themselves, of their own power and will, and create for themselves their ideas. Hence, their idea of good primarily revolves around themselves, and becomes a kind of self-definition. It is only later that they find a use for the antithesis, for “bad” things, which are those things that are in contrast to themselves. The second thing to note is that this description is not necessarily negative; Nietzsche is not about to take a Marxist turn and begin defaming the ruling classes as oppressors and tyrants. Instead, what is important to note about the “master” or “noble” is that he is free, free to relate to and define his environment, and, of huge value to Nietzsche, free to be creative, as opposed to what he calls the “slave morality,” as we shall see. For the slave, or the “low, low-minded, common and plebeian,”2 is centered around what Nietzsche calls “ressentiment” (basically, resentment). The “low” man starts first in a state of resentment towards the masters, and defines them as “evil.” The slaves “understood themselves to be ‘good’ only derivatively. Judging their masters ‘evil,’ they concluded that they were ‘good,’ in the negative sense of lacking the masters’ evil traits.”3 Again, there are two important things of which to make note. Firstly, “slave morality” is essentially reactive; unlike the masters’ morality, which begins with the positive affirmation of the self, slave morality begins with the evilness of the master, and only lately coming to call itself “good” by contrast. For Nietzsche, it becomes clear that this reactive morality is restrictive; unlike the master, who is free to express himself creatively –indeed, he possesses the very power to definite himself as “good”– the slave can only define himself in relation to the master. This makes him constrained, and in a position where he can be neither creative nor expressive. The second point of interest lies in the distinction between “bad” and “evil.” The master has his own goodness as his starting point, and sees others things as merely not-good, that is to say, “not-like-him.” That is the extent to which the term “bad” has meaning to him. The slave, however, is full of resentment against the master, which solidifies into hatred. In his hatred, he villainizes the master, painting him as not merely “bad,” but actually “evil.”4 Thus, the whole dichotomy of good and evil, according to Nietzsche, is a fabrication of the slaves, of the weak, of the “impotent” whose resentment of the strong, or masters, causes them to flip the value judgments of the masters. The weak make weakness itself the very object of value, and the strength of the masters a crime, or sin.

To further solidify his point, Nietzsche turns to etymology. Beginning in his own language, Nietzsche points out that German word schlecht (bad) is one letter different than schilcht (plain), points out the similarity of root with schlechtweg (plainly) and schlechterdings (simply).5 This supports his theory that, from the perspective of the nobles, of the masters, “bad” originally referred merely to that which they were not. In contrast to the grandness and active creative power of the masters, all that might be seen as “not them” would indeed seem simple and plain by comparison. He then turns to Latin, supposedly to trace the evolution of moral language back even further. The Latin word bonus merely means “good,” but Nietzsche attempts to trace it back to the word bellum (war).6 Here we have the masters’ definition of “good,” namely, that of conquest, of action. Having provided several other examples,7 8 9 Nietzsche makes a fairly convincing case in tracing the evolution of morals language through traditional etymology.

Nietzsche’s formulation of good and evil doesn’t quite reach its climactic fervor until he begins to deal with what he calls “priestliness,” and “priestly” societies, like those of Judaism. Nietzsche conceives of the beginnings of priestliness, and thus of the ideas (and words) “pure” and “impure” as being “from the beginning [they described] a man who washes himself, who forbids himself certain foods that produce skin ailments, who does not sleep with the dirty women of the lower strata, who as an aversion to blood – no more, hardly more!”10 However, as this develops, Nietzsche notes that values like this, in an “essentially priestly aristocracy…could in precisely this instance soon become dangerously deepened, sharpened, and internalized.”11 Eventually, the priestly ways break off from that of the aristocracy and develop in opposition to them. For the masters are strong and vigorous, they live in a state of action and acquisition; the priest, by contrast, lives a life of denying his indulgence in the world of experience, the very world itself. Therefore priests become “the most evil enemies – but why? Because they are the most impotent. It is because of their impotence that in them hatred grows to monstrous and uncanny proportions, to the most spiritual and poisonous kinds of hatred.”12 Here again is the slave-type morality dangerously breaking through. If slave morality grows up in response and in opposition to the masters’ morality, the priestliness would be the most potent kind of slave morality, not only because priests have even less than the common man (by way of their own self-denial) but because they can solidify slave morality into a system in itself, bringing their vengeance not in earthly terms, but exalted into a spiritual, everlasting revenge. Their anger has the room, in such a system, to develop infinitely larger and larger. Thus the “truly great haters in world history have always been priests; likewise the most ingenious haters; other kinds of spirit [geist] hardly come into consideration when compared with the spirit of priestly vengefulness.”13 He sees the ideas of the priest as “dangerous in such a conflict because of their hatred, which they can’t release into a healthy physical form, and their hatred turns into a permanent desire for vengeance.”14 Nietzsche turns at once to the “most notable example,” “the Jews, that priestly people, who in opposing their enemies and conquerors were ultimately satisfied with nothing less than a radical revaluation of their enemies’ values, that is to say, an act of the most spiritual revenge…for this alone was appropriate to a priestly people, the people embodying the most deeply repressed priestly vengefulness.”15 Slave morality, that reactive, unproductive, unfree, uncreative, unimaginative, unreal morality finds its full voice in Jews and, later, Christians. Nietzsche’s antagonism towards the Judeo-Christian system can perhaps be better understood once this perspective is taken. The implications of such a standpoint on one of the oldest and most influential moral systems in history are profound and next to baffling. Indeed, this is no mere critique, no mere nitpicking of a single religion, but the blatant overthrowing of the entire Judeo-Christian system of thinking as it is embodied in all culture as a form of “slave” morality In this formulation, Nietzsche has inverted the values of modern morality (ironically, the morality which he claims is itself an inversion): humility, piousness, meekness, respect, charity; all of which he claims are the reactionary inventions of the “slaves,” mob morality which can aspire to no greater.

There are several issues with Nietzsche’s formulation of ethics so far, the most obvious being his oddly uninformed characterization of Christianity. Nietzsche, as has been shown, sees the Judeo-Christian worldview as one based upon resentment, fostered in hatred, and seeking revenge. These claims, while seemingly supported by Nietzsche’s reasoning, become strange and discordant when compared to actual Christian teaching, both from the Bible and theologians. Throughout the Bible the external is often devalued in face of the internal. First Samuel informs us that “the LORD does not look at the things man looks at. Man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart.”16 Nietzsche’s formulation of Christianity contends that it is rooted in hatred, which is internalized, and that it raises up a god to fulfill and justify this hatred. But the God of the Bible focuses on the internals, where the man would be fostering self-destructive hatred, not on the external attributes the slaves would dislike in the master, as Nietzsche contends. Furthermore, the Bible contains many warnings against hatred and resentment. Solomon writes, “Hatred stirs up dissension, but love covers over all wrongs.”17 John warns, “Anyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life in him”18 “Let those who love the LORD hate evil, for he guards the lives of his faithful ones and delivers them from the hand of the wicked.”19 These passages describe, very briefly, Christianity’s viewpoint of hatred, which it paints in no uncertain terms as a negative thing. John goes so far as to say that even if one things about murdering, one is just as guilty of murder (and a murderer, he notes, has no eternal life.) Nietzsche contends that the Judeo-Christian conception of an afterlife and immortality is primarily a tool for the hatred Jews and Christians feel to continue and perpetuate their desires for vengeance. But John is clearly stating that it is the unhateful who can become true sons and daughters of God. In light of the warnings against hatred so thoroughly present throughout the Old Testament and New Testament, Nietzsche’s claims begin to sound dubious.

CS Lewis further weighs in on the matter and, coincidentally, uses Nietzsche’s exact language. In his book, Mere Christianity, Lewis begins discussing virtue ethics in light of the Christian belief that man will “life forever.” It is worth quoting at length:

Remember, we Christians think man lives for ever. Therefore, what really matters is those little marks or twists on the central, inside part of the soul which are going to turn it, in the long run, into a heavenly or a hellish creature. We may kill if necessary, but we must not hate and enjoy hating. We may punish if necessary, but we must not enjoy it. In other words, something inside us, the feeling of resentment, the feeling that wants to get one’s own back, must be simply killed.20

It seems unlikely that Lewis attempted to use such a close term (“resentment”) in describing that aspect of the personality which he identified as the negative attribute of humans. Lewis here brings up the fact that the very things Nietzsche identifies as the main focus of slave morality are the very things that the Judeo-Christian worldview cannot tolerate: hatred, resentment, self-centered feelings of vindictiveness. The fact that such a central point of Christianity – the movement away from hatred and vengeful feelings – would be so overlooked by Nietzsche is odd and difficult to account for, given his rather studious and religious upbringing. Nietzsche was the son of a Lutheran minister and “both of his grandfathers had been ministers just as his father had been. In his paternal line, this clerical tradition reached back several generations.”21 Furthermore, Nietzsche went to a Protestant boarding school, and studied theology at the University of Bonn. It is therefore natural to assume that Nietzsche, were he to criticize the Judeo-Christian tradition, would be substantially more informed than the likes of people like Richard Dawkins. Yet, this does not seem to be the case. Christianity, far from a reactive, is actually quite pro-active. It has a value system based on authority and reason, one which stands on its own and asserts its own truth, not a passive reaction against another value set; something Nietzsche surprisingly misses all-together.

Although, bolstering Christianity in light of Nietzsche’s attacks is not necessary to undermine the ethical system that Nietzsche has so far proposed, for his ethics are unable to, in themselves, constitute an ethics in any normal, normative sense. So far, we have surmised what Nietzschean ethics is not, namely, a traditional moral system. Indeed, if the dichotomy of good against evil and evil against good is merely an invention of the slave morality as a reaction against the strong, Nietzsche obviously feels it is not worth considering. He is far more concerned with the ethics of the strong, those who are proactive in their definitions, who act, make, and create. But if we look to the master morality to answer the primary ethical question of “how should we live?” it is not at once clear of what the normative drive consists. Nietzsche, in attempting to move beyond what he sees as the contrived morality of the slaves, asserts that the powerful class “will have to be the will to power incarnate, it will want to grow, expand, draw to itself, gain ascendancy – not out of an morality or immorality, but because it lives, and because life is will to power. … it is a consequence of the intrinsic will to power which is precisely the will of life.”22 Note first that such a formulation of morality fits perfectly alongside Nietzsche’s original description of how master morality forms its worldview in the first place: the masters act, which is their primary mode, and, full of their own manifest creative energy, define goodness as synonymous with themselves and they way they act. The masters will it, and they make it so, only later finding some things which are not like them, and so invent a word for it (“plain,” which later becomes our modern “bad”). But in attempting to define any sort of moral system therein, Nietzsche only states what he considers things to be in their natural state. Given this, there is no ethical choice necessary; the master morality is only behaving in accordance with its nature “not out of an morality or immorality” – for ultimately, there are no such terms in this formulation – “but because it lives.” In equating the “will to power” as the “will to live,” Nietzsche does not interject anything new into his equation, but only changes the terminology slightly. “But because it lives” is not really any different than saying “because.” In the end, we are left without a reason for being creative, bold, action-oriented, pro-active, or even to justify any of the positive connotations we have for these words. Though the Will, for Nietzsche, is the primary thing, it is itself unable to produce any sort of normative, any reason for doing anything.

G.K. Chesterton makes the point very nicely that what Nietzsche outlined as his alternative to conventional morality is merely redundant and meaningless. “You can discuss whether a man’s act in jumping over a cliff was directed towards happiness; you cannot discuss whether it was derived from will. Of course it was. …you cannot praise an action because it shows will; for to say that is merely to say that it is an action.”23 This philosophy of Will can be reduced to absurdity by simply asking what the reasons are for choosing any particular thing or any course of action? Chesterton notes that “the worship of the will is the negation of the will,”24 for “To preach anything is to give it away,”25 If the Will is, as Nietzsche contests, then one should not be in the position of having to choose it as a better alternative to other forms of ethics, as he oddly seems to encourage us to do. Separated both from conventional morality as well as from utilitarian pleasure calculations, the Will to power is nothing short of a declarative statement, a description of something that is, and a descriptive thing cannot bridge the is/ought gap.

Nietzsche, in his new moral conception does not, ironically, go “beyond” good and evil, but rather regresses from them, and in abandoning all call for the normative, thrusts the reader into cold world which is merely descriptive, lacking all normative direction for ethics. The ethics of Nietzsche, then, turn out to be non-ethics, a renouncing of ethics. Though he may have dismantled what he considered to be the primary problem of modern ethical thought, Nietzsche offers us no supplement, no alternative, and doesn’t even do us the courtesy of total nihilism, but leaves the reader confused and starry-eyed about some sort of vague “will to power” which is as irrelevant and removed from ethics as resentment is from the Christian life.

Footnotes

2 Ibid

3 Magnus, Bernd and Higgins, Kathleen M., The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 49

4 Nietzsche, Friedrich, Basic Writings of Existentialism, ed. Gordon Marino (New York: Random House Inc., 2004), p.122

5 Nietzsche, Friedrich, Basic Writings of Existentialism, ed. Gordon Marino (New York: Random House Inc., 2004), p.115

6 Ibid., 118

7 Ibid., 117

8 Ibid., 125

9 Ibid., 126

10 Ibid., 119

11 Ibid

12 Nietzsche, Friedrich, Basic Writings of Existentialism, ed. Gordon Marino (New York: Random House Inc., 2004), p.121

13 Ibid.

14 Ackermann, Robert John, Nietzsche: A Frenzied Look (University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), p. 92

15 Nietzsche, Friedrich, Basic Writings of Existentialism, ed. Gordon Marino (New York: Random House Inc., 2004), p. 121

16 1 Sam 16:7

17 Proverbs 10:12

18 1 John 3:15

19 Psalm 97:10

20 Lewis, Clive Staples, Mere Christianity (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), p. 120

21 Magnus, Bernd and Higgins, Kathleen M., The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 91

22 Nietzsche, Friedrich, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), p. 17

23 Chesterton, G.K, Orthodoxy (Wheaton: Harold Shaw Publishers, 1994), p. 37

24 Ibid., 37

25 Ibid., 36

Bibliography

Ackermann, Robert John, Nietzsche: A Frenzied Look (University of Massachusetts Press, 1990)

Chesterton, G.K, Orthodoxy (Wheaton: Harold Shaw Publishers, 1994)

Lewis, Clive Staples, Mere Christianity (New York: HarperCollins, 2001

Magnus, Bernd and Higgins, Kathleen M., The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996

Nietzsche, Friedrich, Basic Writings of Existentialism, ed. Gordon Marino (New York: Random House Inc., 2004)

Nietzsche, Friedrich, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (New York: Penguin Books, 1986)

Thank you for your patience.

I do not believe in Richard Dawkins.

Or rather, I would not believe he was real if it were not for the plethora of evidence which exists, even just the evidence circulating amongst the sprawling content of the internet. The book reviews, blog entries, interviews, lectures, Wikipedia entries, biographies, testimonials, and endless third-party sources seem to all confirm that there is a real, living man, who says the things Dawkins says.

And yet, some days it remains difficult to believe that he is not actually a fictional character, invented as a cruel parody of actual atheism by a group of chortling pranksters. Only such an alternative could adequately explain a book like The God Delusion, a book of such intellectual laziness I struggle believing that an Oxford graduate (a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, no less) could possibly make the kinds of arguments he makes. My rational mind rejects the conclusion of his serious existence sporadically; surely, something doesn’t add up. This can’t be right, it says. This is not atheism, or rationalism (a phrase he so often uses to describe himself and his mission throughout the text), this isn’t even anything. The book can only be a parody of atheism, not worthy of note, and Dawkins himself must be a practical joke, a hired actor, with lines written for him, fabricated with the care and precision of the most sophisticated conspiracy.

But then I snap back to reality and am faced with a horrifying situation: The God Delusion is  – in a strictly objective sense – an appalling piece of writing, riddled with logical fallacies of every kind, defended and articulated by rhetoric masquerading as argument, heavy with emotional bias, and put forward with a scholarly ignorance so profound it is next to unbelievable. And yet Richard Dawkins is wildly popular.

How popular? Far from being universally rejected for amateur reasoning, The God Delusion is embraced by hundreds of thousands of readers across the world. The book has sold over 1.5 million copies, has been translated into 31 languages, and has been on the New York Times Bestseller list for longer than I care to ask. My paperback contains almost four pages of testimonials ranging from the Sunday Times to Philip Pullman, all raving about Dawkins’ groundbreaking brilliance (and bravery, no less). Dawkins himself holds honorary doctorates across a diverse range of universities, made Prospect magazine’s 2004 list of the top 100 public British intellectuals, and is a recipient of (among many awards) the Bicentennial Kelvin Medal of The Royal Philosophical Society of Glasgow. “The God Delusion deserves multiple readings,” says Steven Weinberg of the Times Literary Supplement, “not just as an important work of science, but as a great work of literature.”

This is the truly frightening thing, and can only mean our culture has grown so intellectually lazy it mistakes fallacies and rhetoric for “elegant, engaging and persuasive” argument (Financial Times).

My thesis is simple: A critical, objective, informed reading of The God Delusion reveals that Richard Dawkins does not know how to argue systematically, or even to really argue in any formal way. For the majority of the text, his primary strategy seems to be to make unsupported statements, blur definitions between schools of thought, employ rhetoric in place of formal reasoning, and when an actual argument is required of him, make embarrassing mistakes and blatant fallacies. The God Delusion is disorganized almost, at times, to the point of rambling.

If you have the most recent paperback version, put out by First Mariner Books in 2008, you can follow along with my citations.

Inability to Distinguish

Of the many problems the book suffers from, one is Dawkins’ insistence to treat all religions, especially the three Abrahamic religions, as exactly the same thing. “For most of my purposes, all three Abrahamic religions can be treated as indistinguishable” (p.58). Obviously this creates problems with much of the argumentation of the text, as Christianity and Islam, for instance, are completely backwards from one another in other in their theology. I don’t mean stuffy, minute differences in how to pray and where to face while praying, I mean a completely separate, opposite worldview. That Christianity and Islam are “basically the same” is a highly prevalent falsehood. I discuss part of it here, in my post on the issue.

The effect of Dawkins’ lumping together of all the monotheistic religions is an attempt to avoid dealing with Christianity directly. Of course “Religion” can be shown to be sheer craziness and dogma if Islam is your only example. This way, Christianity can be dismissed along with Islam without any special defense.

While it is true that Dawkins brings up many examples of “extremist” Christianity, he confuses the readers by putting those examples up side-by-side with “extremist” Islam. When you see a Christian acting “extremist,” someone completely insane like Fred Phelps or (possibly more insane) Paul Hill, what you are seeing is a man going against everything for which Christianity stands. When you see an “extremist” Muslim, however, you are seeing a Muslim more less following a possible and accurate interpretation of his religion. This distinction becomes unfairly blurred when Dawkins puts both religions in a category and calls up examples of “extremism” like this. Readers walk away being shortchanged of the full truth of the matter.

Further, Dawkins also fails to distinguish between Biblically-based Christian doctrine and the fictional universe brought into being by the Catholic church, with what he (rightly) calls the Catholic “pantheon” of Saints and the nearly divine status of the Virgin Mary (p. 55).

These problems are due to his unsystematic approach, in which he fails to deal with each religion on its own. If he is really attempting to “attack God, all gods, anything and everything supernatural, wherever and whenever,” (p. 57) he is going to have to be vastly more thorough than merely lumping together all religions and attacking them as one entity.

Citations Needed

Dawkins also seems to have an inability to cite his sources. I don’t mean that he doesn’t have an extensive bibliography in the back of his book (he does), but that those pages are devoted to citing all the people and journals and books in his many off-topic tangents and anecdotes. In the times when it really matters, when he is making concrete statements about what a religion actually says or teaches, his sources are nowhere to be found.

“Christianity, just as much as Islam, teaches children that unquestioned faith is a virtue” (p. 346) This is a big claim (and another example of him being unable to differentiate between religions) and no where on the page does he cite anything.

“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty, ethnic genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully” (p. 51). This is the same thing. Now, this would have been an excellent way to open a chapter and lay down what would soon follow to be a systematic deconstruction of the Old Testament, but the rest of the chapter has very little to do with the Old Testament God. If Dawkins were actually rigorous about his deconstruction of religion, again, he would have dealt with this at length. As it is, the remainder of the chapter wanders off into many other, unrelated topics and we are left with empty words lacking citations.

“To which chapter, then, of which book of the Bible should we turn — for they are far from unanimous and some of them are odious by any reasonable standards” (81). Again, Dawkins makes a statement and does not cite any sources or follow it up in any way. He proceeds into a series of rhetorical questions, concluding that he “shall return to such questions in chapter 7.” One cannot help but ask, if he was going to devote an entire chapter to the subject, why he felt the need to drop such a powerfully declarative statement in the middle of another chapter, left standing without support, to be accepted. This is another example of Dawkins’ failure to organize his text in a critical, systematic way, and what makes criticisms of rambling so easy. Throughout the entirety of the text, Dawkins wanders into anecdotes at will (Chapter 3 has many good examples) and returns to his previously unsupported statements convinced of their absoluteness.

Use of Rhetoric

Dawkins’ primary argumentative device, where he should instead be using systematic reasoning, is rhetoric.

In one example, Dawkins quotes at length a piece of writing by Theologian Richard Swineburne (P. 89), which attempts to explain something (which is nevertheless off-topic) and instead of addressing Swineburne’s argument, dismisses it by simply saying, “This grotesque piece of reasoning, so damningly typical of the theological mind, reminds me of…” and lapses into another story which is not analogous. Here he deals in what we may call a rhetorical definition, in which he defines what he calls “the theological mind” (which, by the way, is also a Strawman fallacy) though he never actually defines it. All we have is “grotesque piece of reasoning” and “damningly typical.” If one cuts out his rhetoric, we really have no argument to speak of. This is typical of Dawkins, and an exhaustive list of each instance in which he rhetorically defines something he should be logically refuting would be a massive chore, as it occurs so frequently in the text.

This happens again on page 54, when Dawkins brings up the Trinity and offers only the sarcastic, “as if that were not clear enough.” He then quotes St. Gregory on the Trinity, follows it up with how this is a “characteristically obscurantist flavour of theology which – unlike science or most other branches of human scholarship – has not moved on in eight centuries.” No argument here. No argument of how the Trinity is impossible logically, no look at how it might be contradictory with the rest of the Bible, nothing. Dawkins goes on to quote Thomas Jefferson saying that religious people use ridicule as their only weapon, and that no one has ever had a distinct idea of the Trinity. And then, bafflingly, he moves on! Again, if one cuts out the rhetorical definitions, and appeals to Jefferson (which happen much more frequently than one might imagine) there is really no argument here. All we can take from this is that Dawkins doesn’t understand the Trinity. That’s it?

Much later in the text he attempts to give a summary of Christianity: “But now, the sado-masochism. God incarnated himself as a man, Jesus, in order that he should be tortured and executed in atonement for the hereditary sin of Adam. Ever since Paul expounded this repellent doctrine, Jesus has been worshiped as the redeemer of all our sins. Not just the past sin of Adam: future sins as well, whether future people decided to commit them or not!” (286).

What he does with this paragraph, by use of carefully placed adjectives and italics, is rhetorically imply that this is craziness. At no point in here is there an argument of any kind. Perhaps the paragraph is taken out of context? Nope! The paragraphs before and after do not support the implied conclusion, and an unwary reader will walk away with a strong feeling that Dawkins is right about this, and that all this God stuff is nonsense, but he will not be armed with anything substantial. This should come as no surprise, because this is exactly what rhetoric does.

Two more examples of rhetorical definition: “Compared with the Old Testament’s psychotic delinquent, the deist God…” and goes on to describe what he calls the “deist God” (p.59). And again on 68, “The Deist God…is certainly an improvement over the monster of the Bible.” Both rhetorical definitions: no evidence is given to support the argument, but a conclusion is reflexively defined with rhetoric and carried over throughout the text.

Ad Hominem

In addition to rhetoric, Dawkins also enjoys the use of ad hominem throughout his book, though for space considerations I will only give a few examples.

“Jung also believed that particular books on his shelf spontaneously exploded with a loud bag” (74). This is almost a textbook example of ad hominem: he notes that some people hold a belief “without adequate reason” (which is a rhetorical assumption made about theists, also) and then points out this about Jung to discredit him. In reality, what Jung thinks about spontaneously exploding books is not relevant to Jung’s theology. This is a personal attack, and not real reasoning.

Later, after describing one of Swineburne’s more dubious comments, Dawkins goes on to quote the man’s credentials and say, “If it’s a theologian you want, they don’t come much more distinguished. Perhaps you don’t want a theologian.” The first sentence is an implication that, because Swineburne is a theologian, he stands for all theologians, and the second sentence is actually a sentence devoid of meaning, especially given the context of the sentence. (p. 89)

Faulty Reasoning

Finally, when required to make clear arguments, Dawkins can only muster up faulty reasoning and reveal his own ignorance of the philosophical process. He says,

“Any entity capable of intelligently designing something as improbable as a Dutchman’s Pipe (or a universe) would have to be even more improbable than a Dutchman’s Pipe.” 146 This is all. He says nothing else. He does not quantify why it is improbable, he does not give us a step-by-step proof. He merely states, and moves on.

In chapter eight, Dawkins devotes a section to abortion (which is irrelevant, really, in the grand scheme of his argument), and attempts to set up an alternative moral system based on suffering. The problem with this is that he reflexively defines his moral system without giving a reason why such a system should be thusly based, when it could be based on something else entirely. It is times like these in which his philosophical amateurishness becomes easy to see. Any actual philosopher would spend a significant amount of time establishing a moral system from the ground up; Dawkins’ execution, in comparison, is sloppy and rushed.

One of the worst examples of his total disregard for rational modes of argumentation comes in his discussion of a similarity of passages in the Bible (p.273). Dawkins, unassisted by sources or reasoning, says, “The story of the Levite’s concubine is so similar to that of Lot, one can’t help wondering whether a fragment of manuscript became accidentally misplaced in some long-forgotten scriptorium: an illustration of the erratic provenance of sacred texts.” This is pure speculation, ungrounded in citation, evidence, or reason. Or if it is, he gives no reasons for it and does not follow it up with any argument whatsoever. And yet, like the rest of the text, the reader comes away with a feeling, a deep suspicion of everything that might be “wrong” with the things Dawkins attacks but with no concrete evidence or valid chains of reasoning to show as proof.

To Be Continued…?

Unfortunately, yes. If you have not read The God Delusion, you may be surprised at the amount of other fallacies I had to end up cutting out of my last draft to even get this article down to the right size. Strawman, Weasel Words, and Appeals to Emotion all had to be cut. Having fully intended to devote an entire section exclusively to Chapter 3′s numerous errors, I find I must save them for next week’s post.
Thanks to the people who have been patient with my busy schedule. Chapter 3 should be easy to take apart, so look forward to that last week.

Until then, may you think critically.