A flaw in Richard Dawkins logic. Do you agree?

Question

Richard Dawkins makes the incredibly stupid claim that there is no God. He says this because he's never seen him personally and most of what we know about God comes from the Bible.

Well, guess what? Using that same logic, I can say that Richard Dawkins does not exist because I have never seen him myself in person.

ALL I know about Richard Dawkins is from a book.

Actually, for all I know, England doesn't exist because I have never been there. All I know about it are from second hand accounts.

It's all so simple now! There is no God and Richard Dawkins does not exist!

Answer 1

Which book of his have you read Chris? I seriously doubt Richard Dawkins ever made such a simplistic case against theistic belief. Just read his book “The God Delusion”. It goes through an entire section showing how the traditional arguments for the existence of God do not hold up to rational scrutiny. Furthermore, he goes one step further to show that though no one can ABSOLUTELY disprove God, for it is impossible to disprove an ABSOLUTE NEGATIVE, one can demonstrate that his existence is so highly improbable and so superfluous as an explanation for why our world is the way it is, that is highly probable that he doesn’t exist.

He uses a good example of the “Flying Spaghetti Monster”, which is somewhat similar to Bertrand Russell’s teapot in space scenario. If I posited the existence of a Flying Spaghetti Monster somewhere in the universe, you could not disprove it absolutely, for in order for you to disprove it with a 100 percent certainty you would have to have omniscient knowledge about the universe and everything in it. Yet, we can say with high probability, even not knowing everything about the universe that a Flying Spaghetti Monster is not likely to exist, and therefore we could be justified in not believing in it.

As Dawkins is fond of saying in his countless interviews, and in his elegant work The Devil’s Chaplain: “Modern theists might acknowledge that, when it comes to Baal and the Golden Calf, Thor and Wotan, Poseidon and Apollo, Mithras and Ammon Ra, they are actually atheists. We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”

Ultimately, the onus of proof does not rest with that atheist, but with the one that postulates an assertion. What Dawkins does, quite eloquently and cogently I might add, is explain that the universe, in and of itself, provides the answers for its own complexity through evolutionary theory and astrophysics, and to posit a God is unneccessary and in fact doesn’t really resolve the issue. For if one offers God as an explanation for how the universe is they way it is, it merely begs the question of how God came to be? If one answers, as many theists are inclined to do, that God is somehow exempt from this succession of causality, they are committing a logical fallacy. The apologist is begging the question in that they are assuming one of the properties of the very thing they are trying to prove. Furthermore, there is no justification for this special pleading except to promote the argument. In other words God does not clarify anything, and is therefore an unparsimonous explanation at best. If anything God makes our existence and orgins much more confusing.

Chris, I think ultimately, you haven’t read Dawkin’s polemic, because he would never make an argument like that. You are putting up a strawman. Cite the source from where you supposedly saw Dawkins state such a simplistic argument as what you stated. I doubt seriously that it was from him because it seems unbecoming of man of such a learned background.