[In previous posts I introduced Richard Dawkins' "Ultimate 747 Argument" against the existence of God. Dawkins has recently made this argument the centerpiece of his book,
The God Delusion. In my
first post I pointed out that the argument suffers from a debilitating lack of clarity. In the
second post I attempted to construct the argument formally so that we would have an easier time of dealing with it. In this post I present my first counterargument to Dawkins' claims.]
Counterargument 1: The 747 Argument Fails to Show that Theistic Belief is Irrational
First, Dawkins understands his argument to be a very powerful
ontological or
metaphysical argument, outlined
in the last post as 747m. The problem here is that even in this version Dawkins is mixing his metaphysics with his epistemology in an unacceptable way. Consider premise (iii). Recall that (iii) was:
(iii) For any degree of I possessed by E, however, E’s possessing I entails E’s possessing a level of explanatory requirement (R) in a degree that is proportional to the degree of I possessed by E.
Furthermore, according to premise (iv) the degree of R possessed by E is directly proportional to the degree of I possessed by E. But (iii) contains a subtle and not entirely legitimate assumption. To understand this, consider the following two propositions:
(HI) It is highly improbable that God exists.
(HR) It is highly irrational to believe that God exists.
The conclusion of Dawkins’ argument (or at least to 747m and 747s) is (HI). But (HI) is a metaphysical claim, while (HR) is an
epistemological claim. It is clear that Dawkins thinks that (HI) somehow
entails or at least
implies (HR).
Now, Dawkins may be entirely correct here. (HI) may entail or imply (HR). For argument’s sake let us assume that it does. But if this is so, then Dawkins needs to give us a compelling account of how that entailment or support actually goes. And considering the high level of cogency he assigns to the 747 argument, this account of the (HI)/(HR) relationship must be extremely compelling. Since he gives us no such account, I think we can come up with numerous counterexamples that show that, even if we were to accept (HI) (and I will show in later posts that there are good reasons to reject it), there are good reasons to think that it doesn’t entail or even support (HR). In other words, most people are perfectly rational in accepting the existence of God even if He
is extremely improbable.
Thought experiments can help us here. Here is one, although we could undoubtedly cook up a few more just like it. Suppose there is an alien society that has, as its primary living species, beings that are significantly less complex than human beings, but that nevertheless possesses the powers of language, reason, and rudimentary philosophy and science. We will call these aliens
spidermen. For purposes of argument we can create an imaginary unit of complexity (although, in the real world, the notion of “measuring” complexity can get pretty hairy), and that unit is a
bawk. Generally, a human being contains 5,000 bawks of complexity, while (generally) an average spiderman contains 2,000 bawks of complexity.
Now suppose that NASA has just discovered Spidermania, the planet of the spidermen. They send their best astronaut to investigate and collect data on the spidermen, and thus he blasts off and lands in the field of a spiderman farmer, who we will call “Paul”. After Paul has recovered from his inaugural shock, the two beings have a cordial chat. The astronaut shows the spiderman our very advanced technology, tells him about the history and the abilities of human beings, and generally wows the little fellow with how awesome and wonderful we humans really are. Then the astronaut blasts off and flies back to Earth. Now suppose that the next day Paul the spiderman takes his hat and his coat and goes to a meeting of the local chapter of the Spiderman Philosophical Society (the SPS, we will call it) to announce his great discovery. Once he makes his announcement, however, the local president of the SPS (we will call him “Richard”) formulates his own 747-style argument. Richard argues that this “human,” were he to exist, would be a highly improbable entity, and since Paul has given no plausible account of how this human could exist, he is irrational to believe that the human
does exist.
Well, what would Paul’s response be? I think he would be pretty baffled and bewildered. The fact is that Paul’s
experience of (or
perception of, or
encounter with) the astronaut provides him all the justification he needs for believing the proposition that a human actually exists. In fact, he will probably think that
Richard is actually the one acting irrationally by offering such a bad argument for the human’s non-existence. I think he would recognize Richard as simply saying, “Well
I don’t see how this human could exist (he is highly improbable, you see), and
I wasn’t there when you supposedly encountered him, so therefore you are acting irrationally by believing that he exists.” At this point, Paul should take his hat and his coat and head to greener philosophical pastures.
“But wait just a minute here,” says the Dawkinsian defender, “your little science fiction story is missing something. You are ignoring the fact that Richard - if he is worth his philosophical weight in crackers - will no doubt have some natural explanation for
the existence of the spidermen. If Richard makes the kind of claim that you say he does, then he probably has his own story of how spidermen came to be via natural processes. He would probably just believe in the human and just say that he came about by the same natural process as the spidermen. Since the spidermen have an understanding of how biological organisms like humans and spidermen come about, then the astronaut in your story is not analogous to God.” This is true, but this robs the counterexample of none of its force. Let’s say that Paul – now quite distraught – returns to his farm and finds that a
new alien being has landed in his poppy fields, one that possesses even more complexity than the human astronaut (let’s say this new alien possesses 7,000 bawks of complexity). The next day – much to Paul’s surprise – another alien shows up, this one with
12,000 bawks of complexity. This scenario continues every day until the beings showing up are very god-like indeed. The question is this: at which point (at which level of alien complexity) does Paul’s belief in one of these aliens become irrational? At which point is the level of complexity just too high for even the Spidermanian view of the origins of life to make sense out of? I think it is clear that – as long as Paul has what seems to him to be a veridical encounter with each of these aliens – his belief is rational, and the complexity of each alien is perfectly irrelevant to the justification of Paul’s belief.
The point of this colorful scenario is simply that (returning to our own world now) the religious believer needs no other justification for his God-beliefs than her own personal encounter with God. If the Dawkinsian is going to claim that on Spidermania Paul is justified in regard to his belief in any or all of the super-complex aliens (because of the potential of similar origin stories) but the religious believer is not similarly justified in her God-belief, then he needs to show what the difference is that makes Paul’s alien-belief justified while the theist’s Godbelief isn’t. It seems that, even if God is “very very improbable” (and again, I don’t think that He is) the believer is perfectly justified in her God-belief based on her religious experience, just as Paul is justified in his alien beliefs.
It seems, then, that if I am right on Dawkins’ failure to show how proposition (HI) is supposed to entail (or imply) proposition (HR), then perhaps he would agree that the 747 argument should be supplemented by some argument for the following claim:
(BE) The religious believer’s experience of God is illusory.
And (BE) just means that the believer thinks she is experiencing God in prayer, or worship, or when she beholds the beauty of the ocean, but she actually
isn’t. She is imagining God in the same way a child imagines he sees a rabbit in cloud formations in the sky.
Dawkins, of course, is not impressed with claims about religious experience. Unfortunately he offers no convincing argument that defeats the believer's justification based on her encounters with God. I have dealt with Dawkins' non-argument against religious experience
here, so I won't retread that ground.
Another (mercifully brief) counterexample: suppose I am walking through a large open field in the countryside of north Alabama, when out of nowhere a rare edition of
Detective Comics #27 falls out of the sky and hits me in the head. As I go to pick it up a Siberian tiger runs by, stops to eat the $300,000 comic book, and then disappears over the green hills. I have no explanation for this event. I know this particular comic is the first appearance of Batman and that there are very few of these issues in existence (and of the ones that are, they are probably locked up in a vault somewhere, not dropping out of the sky); I also know that Siberian tigers are not native to Alabama, and the nearest zoo that contains one is probably 300 miles away or more. No doubt this event would be very improbable, and I would have no plausible explanation for it. Must I then conclude that I had dreamed the whole thing? That my brain’s simulation software had conjured up the event just because I like Batman so much? Suppose I tell my friends about the incident and they are convinced that my cognitive faculties have malfunctioned in some way, that the event was just too improbable to be accepted on the basis of experience alone. But I don’t find this convincing: I know what happened to me, and the high improbability of the event doesn’t seem to count against my experience. My friends, very distraught over my sudden lapse into irrationality, break fellowship with me. This is unfortunate, but I just don’t think I’m acting irrationally.
Now suppose the next day I pick up the newspaper to read a story about an eccentric millionaire who owned an estate in that very area I was walking. He was a collector of all kind of pop culture artifacts, and he even had a miniature zoo with numerous exotic animals. According to the report, this millionaire just went nuts, apparently because he saw that The
God Delusion was still on the New York Times bestseller list. He let loose all of his exotic animals and started catapulting his collectibles into the distance with his custom-built trebuchet. Now I have a good reason to believe that the event was not illusory. But am I unjustified in my belief that the event was real in the absence of such an explanation? No. I would not be unjustified or acting irrationally by accepting that I had been hit in the head with a very rare comic book. If I knew it had happened in the same way that I know I played Halo 2 after I ate supper last night, then the one belief enjoys the same justification as the other.
Now, it may be the case that certain experiences that are (1) highly improbable, (2) rare when it comes to standard human experiences, and (3) just plain weird, shouldn’t be accepted by the person who experiences them. That is, say that subject S has an experience of a six-eyed man coming into his bedroom and telling him that Osama bin Laden is really an alien general who is terrorizing the west to make way for the Great Tomato Alien Overlord. In this case S probably has an epistemic duty to attribute the experience to the fantastic simulation software embedded in his brain. S would be rational to reject the experience simply on the grounds that it is not an experience shared by anyone else and because such an event would be very odd and improbable. The theist is not in this position. The Christian who encounters God (in a life-changing conversion, for example) simply sees herself as a participant in a millennia-old tradition of Christian mysticism. There are literally millions of people on the planet who can point to a similar encounter with God, and this gives the theist a good reason to feel justified that her experience with God was veridical.
It seems that what Dawkins is getting at is that the improbability of God (which Dawkins assumes and I reject, although which I am assuming for the sake of argument) serves as some kind of
epistemic defeater for the religious believer. The (unspecified) Dawkinsian rules of rationality seem to claim that the extreme improbability of God outweighs
every argument and
every experience that would otherwise lead a normal person to believe in God. I have argued that this view of rationality – assumed on every page of
The God Delusion - is not tenable. But suppose that it is. In that case, the theistic objector to the 747 argument would then need to show that God is not improbable after all. So,
is God improbable, on Dawkins’ own account of improbability? The answer to this question will be the subject of my next post in this series.
Previous posts on The God Delusion:
