To Mr. Dawkins:
Dear Mr. Dawkins, a number of things struck me as I watched your lecture on C-Span the other night; some good, some bad. I was struck, first of all, by the manner in which you ridicule your opposition. I thought that if you could philosophize with a small degree of humility and half the ability you have to ridicule, trivialize and condescend you would certainly recognize how wrong it is to lend your well deserved reputation in the field of science to debasing subjects which, tied to the field of philosophy, I do believe escape your area of expertise. Forgive me for saying this – I do not mean to sound rude – but I think that your philosophical triumphalism only serves to demonstrate a superficial understanding of the principles behind not only the views of your philosophical and religious opposition, but of your own views as well. Ridicule based on false certainty is an affront to the concepts of humility and intellectual honesty – let alone compassion.
When you ridicule a claim that a fossilized dinosaur print is only three thousand years old, I believe you speak from a firm position of certainty and I understand your indignation. However, when you hold the consequences of rejecting the spaghetti monster as somehow comparable to those of rejecting the God a young and quite obviously simple minded Christian confronts you with, dismissing them both as if they rest on the same arbitrary and fantastical grounds, you cannot be aware (as you should be in order to bully young girls) that many philosophers (Christian and Deist alike) arrive at the concept of God a-posteriori, by the application of the laws of thought to the world of changing things which confront our senses. The flying spaghetti monster is not arrived at through a chain of reasoning like God is claimed to be, it is merely a fiction of the imagination. You, sir, should be able to recognize that there is a difference in methodology, and that you cannot therefore merely dismiss the one in the same way you do the other without knowingly committing an injustice or rashly speaking from ignorance. Again, take the case of the young man against whom you argued that positing God (a “complex intelligent being”, you say) at the beginning of the long process of evolution was simply too easy, that evolution doesn’t work that way. But surely you’re aware that both Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas arrived at the conclusion that God exists in an eternal now (present at all stages), even assuming the universe was itself everlasting in both directions of time. In other words you arbitrarily reduced the full concept of God, which philosophers have claimed to rationally infer, to fit your own purpose: you created a straw man (and I have to wonder that you really didn’t realize this; and if you didn’t what business you have belittling people’s faith in the name of reason).
I am going to get to some real substance here, right after I point out that this callousness I perceive, and which I feel is unwarranted, has a direct connection to what I view to be your Achilles Heel: failing to acknowledge the importance of the prescriptive arena in philosophy -- the field which deals with “ought” and “should”, with human action and desire -- and it’s relevance even to your own philosophy (I realize that this all may sound like nothing more than an emotional outbreak, but I will attempt to demonstrate that it’s much more than some insignificant rant). Whether or not you ultimately judge my critique to be worthy of rational consideration, you do at least have my gratitude for clarifying the widespread misunderstanding of Darwin, natural selection, randomness, and chance as they relate to each other: you were both eloquent and clear; wonderfully captivating.
Here, finally, is the crux of my argument, which is two-fold: your atheistic arguments work only if you ignore both the prescriptive dimension of philosophy as well as the inner or deeper dimension of descriptive reality; both cases reveal, to my mind, that your philosophy is literally too shallow.
I’ll deal with the latter first, but it will ultimately have to be reduced to the former – based on your own principles by the way. In the field of philosophy the descriptive arena – as I’m sure you know -- is the arena with which our senses come into contact, it is the reality outside our minds with which science deals, the objective world which science assumes. At your lecture a young fellow made the point about dropping a ball; that seeing the ball drop a number of times creates the expectation that it will always do so under similar circumstances; this, both you and he agreed, was rational faith: this you then opposed to the irrational faith of the Christian. However, you gave no reason why the expectation of laws governing the action of the ball would continue to hold, and this you cannot do precisely for the reason that such laws are induced and assumed to hold in the future, not deduced from self-evident principles or already given facts. This means simply that we cannot find such laws in objective reality itself. G.K. Chesterton puts the point in these terms:
“I observed that learned men in spectacles were talking of actual things that happened – dawn and death and so on – as if they were rational and inevitable. They talked as if the fact that trees bear fruit were just as necessary as the fact that two and one trees make three. But it is not. There is an enormous difference… which is the test of the imagination. You cannot imagine two and one not making three. But you can easily imagine trees not growing fruit… These men in spectacles spoke much of a man named Newton, who was hit by an apple, and who discovered a law. But they could not be got to see the distinction between a true law, a law of reason, and the mere fact of apples falling. …We have always… kept a sharp distinction between the science of mental relations, in which there really are laws, and the science of physical facts, in which there are no laws, but only weird repetitions… The man of science says, “cut the stalk, and the apple will fall”; but he says it calmly, as if the one idea really led up to the other… [T]the scientific men do muddle their heads, until they imagine a necessary mental connection between an apple leaving the tree and an apple reaching the ground. They do really talk as if they had found not only a set of marvelous facts, but a truth connecting those facts. They do really talk as if the connection between two strange things physically connected them philosophically. They feel that because one incomprehensible thing constantly follows another incomprehensible thing the two together make up a comprehensible thing. Two black riddles make a white answer. …[W]e avoid the word “law”…(A) law implies that we know the generalization and enactment; not merely that we have noticed some of the effects. … It is not a law...it is not a necessity, for though we can count on it happening practically, we have no right to say that it must always happen.”
Very well, as it stands both you and the young fellow were rash to imply that your faith in objective natural laws was rational; you both left the point inadequately addressed. The only real way -- that I can tell -- to adequately propose that the expectation is indeed rational was summed up by C.S. Lewis adding commentary to an Arthur Eddington quote:
“‘In science,’ said the late Sir Arthur Eddington, ‘we sometimes have convictions which we cherish but cannot justify; we are influenced by some innate sense of the fitness of things…’ Does this sense of fitness of ours correspond to anything in external reality? …The answer depends on the Metaphysics one holds. If the deepest thing in reality…is a Rational Spirit and we derive our rational spirituality from It—then indeed our conviction can be trusted.”
Typically the atheist’s response is to cry foul upon hearing this sort of reason, charging that it’s just one more “God of the Gap” theories. I’ll say, for my part, that if Aldous Huxley is correct when he says "[s]cience has 'explained' nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness"; and the aforementioned Lewis is correct when he notes, similarly to Huxley, that “…the very nature of explanation makes it impossible that we should even explain why matter has the properties it has… [f]or explanation, by its very nature, deals with a world of ‘ifs and ands’…In order to explain any event you have to assume the universe as…a machine working in a particular way. Since this particular way of working is the basis of all explanation, it can never itself be explained. We can see no reason why it should not have worked a different way”; for my part if Huxley and Lewis are indeed correct (which seems almost certain to me) then there will always be a higher region -- no matter how far we advance the frontiers of science -- that will necessarily remain “opaque to our intellects”, there will always be a void in our knowledge following us like a shadow which, if we assume is reliable, we do by default believe is rational: is a “Rational Spirit.”
The logic here is fairly clear: we believe reality has created this desire or expectation within us (for continuous order, the eternity of order; an eternal faith), but if ultimate reality is not a benevolent intelligence then it’s purposeless, and we’re stuck where we began with an irrational faith, with the inability to trust what we feel we can. It’s therefore the same thing to say “I believe in the uniformity of nature” as it is to say “I believe in the intelligent guidance of nature;” but that is not my ultimate point. Whether or not the subtle logic of Lewis is convincing, one may content oneself to say “well for practical purposes it works… I have no choice but to believe; and see, my faith bears out in reality. So, can you, the person of religious faith, say the same?” Well, let’s first note that by answering this way we no longer claim to be dealing solely with reason and intellect, and that removes a very real tool you, Mr. Dawkins, are using to dichotomize religious and scientific faith. Even so, the felt certainty with which you rest in scientific faith can, I believe, be rescued from irrationality; it can only be rescued, however, by philosophically appealing to the prescriptive dimension of reality, to the rational will. And this dimension is precisely where the religious believer finds the force of his faith both emanating from, and bearing out practically.
To be sure, the traditional Christian (I won’t speak for other believers) locates the deepest desire of our being for something “never fully given—[nor can] even be imagined as given--in our present mode of spatiotemporal experience”, within the prescriptive dimension of reality as a fact we cannot escape and an inherent, undeniable part of consciousness connected to one of the very few self-evident principles capable of being known by human beings. For just as the first principle of non-contradiction governs the descriptive world of the senses via the intellect, so does the first principle that we necessarily seek happiness for itself govern the prescriptive world (the world of moral actions) via the will. Each first principle is just as unquestionable as the other so that asking why, of either of them, is literally nonsensical – they’re just facts. Therefore any proposition tied to them, thus being a property of them, is weighted with the same degree of certainty. *If I cannot live without presupposing the rational reliability of the laws of nature, then that reliability is grounded in the nature of the will – I’m forced to admit that it’s caused by reality itself -- which necessarily desires happiness. Now, because my expectation is grounded in a self-evident principle (that of the prescriptive arena) then I can rest assured that my faith in the constants and uniformity of the universe is rational (grounded in my rational will). But this, unfortunately for the atheist, is not narrow, exclusive ground, it has plenty of room for divine roots as well. A believer in the divine can indeed locate divine existence upon the same (philosophical) ground as the scientist by examining the nature of consciousness (fastened securely to the unquestionable, self-evident principle that we seek happiness), specifically our rational will, to the extent that it (the divine) is an object which promises to fulfill our desire for an “extensive…intensive… and protensive” happiness.
The so called “argument from desire” -- which is less of an argument to my mind than it is an existential reality, an imperative to be lived – which rests upon the descriptive fact of human nature (that we desire eternal beatitude) satisfies, for those willing to meet the necessary conditions, the evidential criteria so dear to the scientist (and which you denied to religionists); it verifies itself by making the human being himself an instrument within the prescriptive arena gathering, through the lenses of humility (understanding his relation to the object he desires above all else) and virtue, the empirical data of a life transformed in happiness. Christianity takes the next step into supernatural faith seeing that God can be known only so far by reason; and recognizing through humility that we cannot achieve a level of goodness which would warrant eternal beatitude, and that we must therefore, in despair, turn to God depending on Him for help: a need which only the cross and the promise of Christ answers. It was Jesus himself who popularized the very scientific, observational criteria that a good tree bears good fruit, and millions will testify that they could never bear even the meager fruit they do without the help of Christ -- let alone the saints like St. Francis whose fruit, it is said, made G.K. Chesterton a convert to his faith; or like St. Teresa of Avila whose life convinced the Jewish born Edith Stein, an eventual victim of the Nazi death camps, to convert to Christianity.
In sum I view your philosophy as a truncated philosophy, one that ignores an entire dimension of reality which is predicated upon an equally valid self-evident criteria as that which governs the outside world; to boot, the rational assertion of your philosophy about the nature of the outside world is irrational without an appeal to that dimension – where, unfortunately for the atheist, the religious believer also finds firm rational support.
P.S. I foresee an objection to a point I made which needs further explication and which I've marked with an asterisk (*). I will post my response to the objection soon.
