Review of The God Delusion (TGD), part 3

In the previous part of this review, I pointed out that Dawkins had presented a grossly fallacious "argument" for the Trinity. Now while this was pretty poor judgment on Dawkins' part, it doesn't have much to do with his main thesis, which is that God almost certainly doesn't exist. Here, I am mostly dealing with Dawkins' handling of the classical arguments for God, which are more on point. As I pointed out in the first part of my review of TGD, Dawkins correctly deals with some of the classical arguments. However, he offers some disappointments as well.

A digression on the omniscience versus omnipotence

For some reason, Dawkins has embedded in his discussion of the cosmological argument a contention that omniscience and omnipotence are incompatible. He quotes a cute little poem (p. 78):

Can omniscient God, who
Knows the future, find
The omnipotence to
Change his future mind?

One problem with Dawkins' argument is that omnipotence is usually defined in a monster-barring fashion, such that it does not include the ability to do the logically impossible. However, the only reason that our purported God cannot change his mind is because it would be something logically impossible, which God isn't supposed to be able to do anyway. There is another issue. If God knows everything past, present, and future, then God can get it right the first time, and in his omnipotence, he would. Dawkins, then, is arguing that God doesn’t have the power to fix a mistake that he wouldn’t have made in the first place.

That said, the issue of a logical conflict between omniscience and omnipotence is a live one, as seen in the tail end of the article on the ontological argument from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (IEP). Dawkins' mistake here is pretty minor, and only consists of giving the impression that the logical conflict is a certain one, rather than the subject of debate.

Thomas Aquinas' Fourth Way

Here, Dawkins screws up in a less trivial way, by misrepresenting Aquinas' argument. What's odd is that Aquinas' actual argument is easy to knock down, and there was no point in creating a straw man version of it, as biblioblogger Chris Heard points out. This is the "fourth way" by which, according to Aquinas, that one may know that God exists:

The fourth way is taken from the gradation to be found in things. Among beings there are some more and some less good, true, noble and the like. But "more" and “less” are predicated of different things, according as they resemble in their different ways something which is the maximum, as a thing is said to be hotter according as it more nearly resembles that which is hottest; so that there is something which is truest, something best, something noblest and, consequently, something which is uttermost being; for those things that are greatest in truth are greatest in being, as it is written in Metaph. ii. Now the maximum in any genus is the cause of all in that genus; as fire, which is the maximum heat, is the cause of all hot things. Therefore there must also be something which is to all beings the cause of their being, goodness, and every other perfection; and this we call God.

To this, Dawkins exclaims, "That’s an argument? You might as well say that people vary in smelliness but we can make the comparison only be reference to a perfect maximum of conceivable smelliness. Therefore there must exist a pre-eminently peerless stinker, and we call him God." (p. 79, TGD) If Dawkins had left off the part about, "we call him God," he'd have represented Aquinas more or less accurately. As Heard notes, "Thomas might well agree that 'there must exist a pre-eminently peerless stinker,' or at least, that there is a pre-eminently peerless exemplar of whatever is in the genus of stinkiness." Unfortunately, Dawkins either misunderstood Aquinas or let his cheekiness get the best of him, because while the logic of Aquinas' argument implies some kind of maximum stinkiness, it does not imply that this would be called God, since stinkiness is hardly a maximum of perfection, which is what Aquinas claims God to be.

Like I said, what's odd is that Aquinas' actual argument is easy to knock down. It is not the least bit true that "the maximum in any genus is the cause of all in that genus; as fire, which is the maximum heat, is the cause of all hot things," and it would not have even taken a page for Dawkins to point this out. Again, in spite of his agreement that "the real war is between rationalism and superstition," (p. 67, TGD) he offers another irrational argument and a poor example of how a rationalist should behave.

The ontological argument

When I first read Dawkins' piece on the ontological argument, I didn't see anything blatantly wrong with it at the time. As ScienceBlogger John Lynch started to discuss the ontological argument in the comments of the post "Dawkins' 'stock reply'" and then outright denounced Dawkins' treatment of it as "infantile" in his commemoration of Kurt Gödel death, I looked at it more closely and saw just how thin it was.

The section of TGD entitled "The Ontological Argument and Other A Priori Arguments" is six pages long. The last one-and-three-quarters page is about other arguments (not all of which are a priori, oddly enough). Of the rest, a little over a page and a third is given to describing Anselm's ontological argument, and a little over one and two thirds of a page meanders into a discussion of how Bertrand Russell was briefly convinced by it, plus Dawkins' own feelings on the argument. There is a half-page with a parody of the ontological argument by Douglas Gasking (p. 83) that, though humorous in its own right, yields little insight into the flaws of the argument because its most obvious incoherency—a premise in which one supposes a God who created the universe without existing—is not an incoherency in the argument that it parodies. This half-page is followed by a brief, quarter page long paragraph discussion of the parody. There is only about a paragraph worth of content (half a page, obviously) that actually discusses the flaws in the ontological argument, and it is surprisingly weak:

The most definitive refutations of the ontological argument are usually attributed to the philosophers David Hume (1711-76) and Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). Kant identified the trick card up Anselm's sleeve as his slippery assumption that 'existence' is more 'perfect' than non-existence. The American philosopher Norman Malcolm put it like this: 'The doctrine that existence is a perfection is remarkably queer. It makes sense and is true to say that my future house will be a better one if it is insulated than if it is not insulated; but what could it mean to say that it will be a better house if it exists than if it does not?' [The tail end of this paragraph introduces Gasking's parody argument.]

Now it wouldn't matter if Dawkins spent only a paragraph if he put paid to the ontological argument in that paragraph, but he doesn't come close. The obvious retort would be that a house that exists would stand a better chance of keeping rain off one's head than a house that didn't exist. Dawkins neglected to even quote Norman Malcolm's response to this anticipated point (according to the IEP), "One might say, with some intelligibility, that it would be better (for oneself or for mankind) if God exists than if He does not—but that is a different matter." Even this is open to criticism, as one could reply, "Ah, but saying it would be better if X existed is what it means to say that existence would make X better." This is a very arguable point, of course, but it's one that would almost inevitably be made. The trouble with Dawkins' line of argument is that it hangs a lot on a precise idea of what it means to be "better" that does not necessarily correspond to the everyday meanings of the word "better." Contrast Dawkins' approach with Antony Flew's, who writes,

Say, if you like, that by the word God we are to mean "a Perfect being"; and then go on, if you must, to gloss this Perfect as itself meaning—among other things "possessing the perfection of existence". Manœuvre how you wish and for as long as you like with the definition. Still you will not have taken one single step towards establishing that there is actually any being such that this word so defined can there correctly be applied. (God: A Critical Enquiry, 4.10)

Flew gets to the heart of the matter the way Dawkins never does. He points out that "X is Y" is in practice used as shorthand for either "X is an object in the real world with properties Y" or "The term 'X' signifies an object with properties 'Y'", and that the error in the ontological argument is to confuse those two meanings. Once he gets to that point, he can and does say what I quoted above. Flew's argument is similar to Kant's argument that existence is not a predicate, to which Dawkins alludes but never actually uses. It was this allusion, I think, that gave me the initial impression that Dawkins did an okay job of handling the ontological argument.

Now I can understand why Dawkins would not want to quote Flew specifically, since he had recently turned deist. However, Flew is hardly the only one with a robust criticism of the ontological argument, and others have been more comprehensive that he has. (Flew's argument, for example, does not address the modal ontological argument, though his approach is a good starting point.) Dawkins is an Oxford don and presumably has access to the Oxford University library, so he should have no shortage of works to consult for guidance. There is no good reason for him to present such an anemic attempt at a rebuttal of the ontological argument when there is better material for him to work with and present. Furthermore, a correct treatment of the argument could certainly have been outlined within those six pages of his section on "The Ontological Argument and Other A Priori Arguments," so he doesn't have brevity as an excuse for not getting it right, especially since his six pages of discussion have so much filler.


An anemic treatment is a problem not only with Dawkins' handling of the ontological argument, but also in his treatment of how the writer of the Gospel of Luke took leave of his census. (Sorry, bad joke.) This, among other things, I'll get into in part 4 of my review of TGD.