Richard Dawkins and Divine Simplicity: A Short Essay (Part One)
No cause but He
Who creates causality.
--Adam of St. Victor, Hymn for the Feast of the Trinity[1]
Spaghetti Monsters and Nice Sprites
In
2006 the doctrine of Simplicity got to make an unlikely cameo (at least
indirectly), in a New York Times best-selling
book. In The God Delusion,[2] amongst many of its dry North-Oxford
sneers masquerading as argument (one, for example, trying to shame God-fearers
into seeing that they have just as much reason to believe in God’s awkward,
carb-heavy cousin, “The Flying Spaghetti Monster,” as they do in God himself),[3]
New-Atheist front-man Richard Dawkins brings to bear what he considers to be “a
powerful argument.”
The
argument, so it goes, is that any entity capable of designing the universe would
have to be more complex than the
universe itself. This is a problem for
Theists, as he says, who attempt to invoke God as the best explanation for the
existence of the universe, since the probability of an explanation that is more complex than the phenomenon being
explained is mitigated by (what Dawkins takes to be) Ockham’s famous “razor” or
rule of parsimony: that is, the simplest explanation tends to be the best.[4]
This
creates a bit of an awkward situation for Dawkins, not least of which because
he then has to spill considerable ink in regards to why, as such, his
invocation of a Multiverse hypothesis of the so-called “infinite
world-ensemble” is less complex than invoking one God. Moreover the argument as it stands badly misunderstands the principle of parsimony; as John Lennox likes to point out, Henry Ford was much more complex than the Model-T, but was still its cause. But for our
purposes these are beside the point.
More embarrassing perhaps is that by this critique Dawkins attacks a vision of God that for quite a large span of its existence, would have been one of the many gods Christians likewise agree does not exist.[5] In William Placher’s user-friendly analysis:
I might for instance, ordinarily think about something by distinguishing its component parts. A carburetor has a tube through which air flows, and a jet that sprays fuel into it. But God, as simple, has no component parts, so we cannot understand God in that way. Again I might understand the carburetor in terms of its form and matter: take some tempered steel and shape it into a large tube with a small jet entering it. But, Aquinas says, God is not composed of form and matter, since God is not a material body, so we cannot use such distinctions to understand God. I might think about my carburetor in terms of potency and act—that is, I might say something like “Here is how you make a carburetor, and then, when you pump fuel and air through it, here is what it does.” But divine simplicity, Aquinas says, does not admit of potency, so that distinction is likewise of no use. Yet again if we had a carburetor on the table in front of us and I were trying to explain it to you, you might ask about some piece sticking out of the top, and Id reply, “Oh that must be how it fastens to the rest of the engine. That doesn’t really have anything to do with being a carburetor.” In other words, I would distinguish its essence from something distinct from that essence. But this also does not work with respect to God, who has no properties distinct from the divine essence. The list goes on. It seems that none of the ways we would ordinarily go about understanding something work with respect to God…A decade or so before the Summa, Aquinas covered much the same ground in his Disputed Questions on the Power of God, and concluded, “Wherefore man reaches the highest point of his knowledge about God when he knows that he knows him not, inasmuch as he knows that that which God is transcends whatsoever he conceives of Him.” (On the Power of God 7.5 ad. 14.)[6]
In other words, when we look at the world for Aquinas, what individual things are--mountains, galaxies, coffee cups--do not contain the explanations for the fact that they are. Their essence is not their existence. Rather there existence is contingent--they could also at any moment not be, nor did they have to be in the first place. But if one pushes this explanation far enough, there is nothing that explains itself, leading to what is known as an "infinite regress." There must, to cut the argument short, be something whose essence is its existence, namely God. Now of course I have oversimplified the argument, but that is its outline. Some might respond that this is simple special pleading in the case of God but everyone, atheist or theist, has to posit something that was always just there, since something cannot come from nothing.
That Dawkin’s misses these necessary subtleties is mitigated somewhat when one considers that one of the greatest twentieth-century theologians, Karl Barth, wrote that the statement “God is,” is the “hardest and at the same time most extensive task of church dogmatics.”[7] As such, we have to charitably allow that Dawkins, who is not a trained theologian, is not only stumbling into difficult territory but undoubtedly also attacking how many Christians actually speak of God.[8]
That Dawkin’s misses these necessary subtleties is mitigated somewhat when one considers that one of the greatest twentieth-century theologians, Karl Barth, wrote that the statement “God is,” is the “hardest and at the same time most extensive task of church dogmatics.”[7] As such, we have to charitably allow that Dawkins, who is not a trained theologian, is not only stumbling into difficult territory but undoubtedly also attacking how many Christians actually speak of God.[8]
Indeed
theologians in our century have often been the first to admit a certain
bewilderment regarding how the word “God” functions, and the fact that protest-atheism has many valid (if only
propaedeutic) points that must be incorporated into the body of theology
proper.[9] Dawkins
unwittingly becomes a Christian manqué, however, just insofar as we can
(perhaps all too-charitably) interpret him as tearing down an idol. For this “god” of Dawkins is not the infinite
wellspring of all being (the one "in whom we live, and move, and have our being" as Paul puts it in Acts), perfectly transcendent (and just so: completely
immanent)[10]
to beings, but a sort of hyper-complex object amongst, or just outside, the
universe’s tableau of objects. An Artisan or Engineer writ large.
This
god is, in terms of Plato’s Timaeus,
a demiurgos or craftsman, but hardly the
“o
theos” of Judeo-Christian
reverence who creates, ex nihilo, causality itself as Adam of St. Victor says above in the epitaph to this
chapter—along with time, matter, and being.
Dawkins is, as such, actually “not talking about transcendent reality at
all, but only of a higher or more powerful or more splendid dimension of
immanent reality.”[11]
What
“more splendid dimension of immanent reality” here means is not that Dawkins is
rejecting a pantheist vision of God, but rather a God conceived under Scotus
and Ockham’s univocity of being,[12]
so that this god as an agent is conceived along lines straightforwardly comparable to us as
agents—that is to say as an entity discrete and exterior to what it operates
upon and who, we might say, could be counted in the total set of all objects
alongside collisions and car-keys, but whose mode of existence is
(quantitatively) infinite.[13] To put it plainly, God in this picture is just a rather large human, who acts and creates pretty much like we do. But these anthropomorphisms quickly break down. It often leads to the conclusion, for example, that if natural causes can be utilized to prove the existence and function of an object (say biologically) that God is thereby ruled out. This sort of logic makes sense if one assumes a post-17th century mechanical understanding of God's actions, but it is not at all how the early church envisioned God's actions which are not "in competition" with finite causes but work in and through them.
Conor Cunningham, writes: “a proper understanding of creation does not suffer any anxiety about a physical origin of the universe, just as it does not worry about common ancestry…For example [for] Aquinas…creation was a metaphysical relation, not a relation articulated by physics. Thus though the world-order in the tradition was seen as evidence of the rational Logos, this is quite different than many modern criticisms (and indeed: modern apologetic defenses) taken to be analogous to a sort of “God-of-the Gaps” enterprise where “God” is implicated precisely in the lack of our ability to explain some naturalistic mechanism.
On the contrary, says Hart, all the classical theological arguments regarding the order of the world in fact “assume just the opposite: that God's creative power can be seen in the rational coherence of nature as a perfect whole; that the universe was not simply a factitious product of a supreme intellect but the unfolding of the omnipresent divine wisdom or logos.” In the Angelic Doctor’s own wonderful way of putting it: “It is clear that nature is a certain kind of divine art impressed upon things, by which these things are moved to a determinate end. It is as if a shipbuilder were able to give to timbers that by which they would move themselves to take the form of a ship.”
Conor Cunningham, writes: “a proper understanding of creation does not suffer any anxiety about a physical origin of the universe, just as it does not worry about common ancestry…For example [for] Aquinas…creation was a metaphysical relation, not a relation articulated by physics. Thus though the world-order in the tradition was seen as evidence of the rational Logos, this is quite different than many modern criticisms (and indeed: modern apologetic defenses) taken to be analogous to a sort of “God-of-the Gaps” enterprise where “God” is implicated precisely in the lack of our ability to explain some naturalistic mechanism.
On the contrary, says Hart, all the classical theological arguments regarding the order of the world in fact “assume just the opposite: that God's creative power can be seen in the rational coherence of nature as a perfect whole; that the universe was not simply a factitious product of a supreme intellect but the unfolding of the omnipresent divine wisdom or logos.” In the Angelic Doctor’s own wonderful way of putting it: “It is clear that nature is a certain kind of divine art impressed upon things, by which these things are moved to a determinate end. It is as if a shipbuilder were able to give to timbers that by which they would move themselves to take the form of a ship.”
[1] Quoted in Henri de Lubac, The Mystery of the Supernatural (New York: Herder & Herder,
1998), 232.
[2] Richard Dawkins, The
God Delusion (New York: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 2006).
[5] We should not forget that a frequent charge against
Christians early on was that they were aqeoi! And this precisely because they did not believe in the gods
of the Roman pantheon and Imperial cultus
of the Emperors. C.f. Robert Louis Wilken, The Christians as the Romans Saw Them (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2003). As such despite the prima facie discomfort the term might cause, those claiming the
title of “Atheist” are not, a priori,
opposed to Christians. Definitions here,
as always, are important for the context of the discussion. C.f. the magisterial study which we shall
return to in ch.2: Michael Buckley, At
the Origins of Modern Atheism (Yale: Yale University Press, 1988).
[6] William Placher, The
Domestication of Transcendence: How Modern Thinking About God Went Wrong
(Westminster: John Knox Press, 1996), 22-23.
[7] Karl Barth, Church
Dogmatics, I/II 257.
[8] Michael
Buckley, At the Origins of Modern Atheism,
14-15: "Atheism does not stand alone. The term and the persuasions which
cluster around it take their meaning from the divine nature which has been
asserted by the religions and the philosophies, by the superstitious practices
and mystical experiences of those who adhere to the divine existence...The
conflict between [atheism and theism] is mortal because of a more general unity
of meaning. If the antagonism does not bear upon a single subject there is no
contradiction. Affirmation and denial are only possible if the subject remains
the same. This subject is determined not by the atheist but by the theist, by
the going beliefs...by the sense of the divine which is the issue of religious
and philosophical sensibility and argument, or by the proclaimed personal God
of the monotheistic religions. Any or all of these can be objects of skepticism,
denial, or uncommitted opinion, but outside these affirmations the correlative
negative loses any meaning whatsoever...Theism and atheism are not merely an
accidental conjunction, a successive conjunction of contradictory opinions A
bond of necessity stretches between them: atheism depends upon theism for its
vocabulary, for its meaning, and for the hypothesis it rejects."; Charles Taylor, A
Secular Age, 269: "Of course there could be a society
without any sense of that they do not believe in the God of Abraham. There are
many such today. But the intervening issue is whether there could be unbelief
without any sense of some religious view, which is being negated...If so it
would be different from our present world in one crucial respect. Unbelief for
great numbers of contemporary unbelievers is understood as an achievement of
rationality. It cannot have this without a continuing historical awareness. It
is a condition that cannot be only described in the present tense, but which
also needs the perfect tense: a condition of 'having overcome' the
irrationality of belief [in a specifically defined God].”
[9] Walter Kasper, The
God of Jesus Christ (London: S.C.M Press, 1984), 10-12, 47-55; C.f.
Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology
vol.I trans. Geoffery W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s, 1991), 64: “With
the fading of the concept of God and its function for humanity in the public
consciousness of a culture that has become religiously indifferent, the
existence of God has not only become doubtful but the content of the concept of
God has also become unclear.” And 49: “If the theses of Christian doctrine do
not make the world’s questioning of the reality of God, its contesting and
rejecting of this reality, a question which is put to its own Christian truth
consciousness, then these theses will not make contact with worldly reality but
will hover over it, and will not, therefore, be true.”; Karl Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith (New
York: Crossroads, 1978), 46: “This word [God] has become as enigmatic for us
today as a blank face.”; Eberhard Jüngel, God
as the Mystery of the World: On the Foundation of the Theology of the Crucified
One in the Dispute Between Theism and Atheism (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s
Publishing, 1983) 4: “A theologically responsible use of the word ‘God’ which
fails to come to terms with this dubiousness [of modern protest-atheism] is
difficult to conceive of. Nevertheless .
. .it would appear, then, to be appropriate to work through this basic aporia
[of God] which has emerged in the modern age around all talk about God, as an
opportunity…”; and again: “As far as the concept of God is concerned, the
history of European Christianity until now has fallen prey to this danger in
one regard. It has considered itself
capable of thinking God without thinking of him simultaneously as the crucified
. . . the perfection of God required
by the law of metaphysics forbade imagining God as suffering or even thinking
of him together with the one who was dead.” (39) This in essence is the
historical condition for the unthinkability of God in his absolute
transcendence, according to Jüngel. Thus
“one of the peculiar characteristics of this proposition [that God is dead] is
that it was not always germane. Its time
emerged. The truth concealed in this
dark statement cannot be understood as independent from the events of
history. It can be grasped only as an
historical truth, that is, through understanding what has taken place in the
history of those particular traditions in which such a statement becomes
possible.” (46); Jürgen Moltmann, The
Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian
Theology trans. R.A. Wilson and John Bowden (Minneapolis: Fortress Press,
1993), 227: “The only way past protest atheism is through a theology of the
cross which understands God as the suffering God in the suffering of Christ,
and which cries out with the godforsaken God ‘My God why have you forsaken
me?’”; Philip Clayton, The Problem of God
in Modern Thought (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing, 2000), 3: “Not to
put too fine a point on it: the context for treating the question of God today
must be skepticism.”; W. Waite Willis, Theism,
Atheism, and the Doctrine of the Trinity: The Trinitarian Theologies of Karl Barth and Jürgen Moltmann in
Response to Protest Atheism (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1987), 5-6: “Trinitarian
thinking does not mean the simple rejection of atheistic critiques. On the one
hand it says 'yes' to them. It learns something from them. Trinitarian thinking
understands that atheism in this form has indicated serious problems with
traditional theism...the doctrine of the Trinity then identifies the Christian
God whom atheism has misidentified as the God of theism. If the doctrine of the
Trinity enables theology to incorporate the atheistic protest and then reject
the God atheism negates, then Trinitarian theology provides the basis for a
response to atheism.”; G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (San Francisco: Ignatius
Press, 1995), 139: “let the revolutionists choose…a god from among the
gods…they will not themselves find another God who has himself been in
revolt…(The matter grows too difficult for human speech)…let the atheists
choose a god. They will only find one
divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God
seemed for an instant to be an atheist.”
It is in a similar sense that Moltmann legitimates talk of “Christian
atheism.” (Crucified God, 251).
[10] Henri de Lubac, The
Discovery of God (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing, 1996): “Those who
uphold immanence deny transcendence whereas those who believe in transcendence
do not deny immanence. Indeed, they
grasp the idea of transcendence sufficiently to understand that it necessarily implies immanence. If God is transcendent then nothing is
opposed to him, nothing can limit him or be compared to him: He is Wholly Other
and precisely therefore penetrates the
world…[where God] comes to us on all sides through the world…Every creature
is, in itself, a theophany. Everywhere
we find traces, imprints, vestiges, enigmas; and the rays of the divine pierce
through everywhere.” (94, 88. The
pagination break is at the second ellipsis).
[11] David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2013), 30.; Daniel Dennett's likening of 'divine intervention' to a
'skyhook' comes to mind as another such mechanical or artisanal mischaracterization.
C.f. Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolutions and the Meaning of Life
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 73-80.
[12] Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, I:348: “Simplicity was not, for Occam a
distinctive predicate of God. It applies
to all things, since only our conceptual description has to combine general and
specific definitions. Occam, then, could
not, like Aquinas, derive from simplicity the attributes that distinguish God
from creatures. Based on simplicity, the
fact that essence and existence are the same in God also lost its central
importance for the doctrine of God.”
[13] C.f. Pickstock, “Duns Scotus.”; C.f. Dolezal, God Without Parts, 113: “God is not to
be counted as existing in an ontological series with any creature.”
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