Responding to what Dawkins considers his central argument On pages 157-158 of “The God Delusion,” Dawkins summarises what he maintains as “the central argument of my book”: 1. One of the greatest challenges to the human intellect has been to explain how the complex, improbable appearance of design in the universe arises. 2. The natural temptation is to attribute the appearance of design to actual design itself. 3. The temptation is a false one because the designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer. 4. The most ingenious and powerful explanation is Darwinism evolution by natural selection and we don’t have an equivalent explanation for physics. 5. We should not give up the hope of a better explanation arising in physics, something as powerful as Darwinism is for biology. God almost certainly does not exist. Preliminary Note Before I go into Dawkins’ main points, I would like to address his conclusion “God almost certainly does not exist.” My main issue is – how does he conclude that God doesn’t exist from the above statements? It seems to me that his conclusion just jumps out of thin air, to infer that God does not exist just shows how invalid his argument is. It seems to me that the only delusion is Dawkins’ conviction that his arguments undermine the existence of God. If we could conclude anything from Dawkins’ argument it would be that we should not conclude that God exists based on the design of the universe. However, even if that is true, it doesn’t mean that God doesn’t exist; we can believe in God’s existence from many other arguments, which include: • The argument from morality; • The miracle of the Qur’an; • The cosmological argument; • The argument from personal experience; • The argument from consciousness. If we were to accept all of Dawkins’ statements, it would not be enough to reject the idea that God exists, and it certainly does not provide a positive case for Atheism. However, many of his statements are false. Let us take his statements and respond accordingly.
Posted on: Sun, 08 Dec 2013 21:54:57 +0000
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