As for "arguments for atheism," I'd state that one can't argue "for atheism" but merely "against religion" and with that, Dawkins does just fine. Hitchens trumps all, but in terms of science and how it relates to a possible intelligent designer, Dawkins can hold his own.
So let's say for the sake of the argument that religion just "sucks" and is the "source of all evil" in the world (while ignoring the blatant inconsistency with postmodern relativism regarding the use of the word "evil").
Does that make God's existence any less viable?
The answer should be pretty clear: not at all. Religion, just like science, or education, or math -- etc -- is morally neutral. It can be used for good or used for bad. Regardless, you cannot judge the truth of a worldview by its social impact.
And regarding Dawkins' "argument," it really is quite interesting how atheists have deluded themselves to believe that it is any bit a "good" argument against the existence of God. His "argument" is not even logically coherent and serves only to demonstrate just how in over his head he is in inviting the crippling criticism from philosophers by publishing such a petty and laughable book as
The God Delusion. Here is his "argument":
P1.) One of the greatest challenges to the human intellect, over the centuries, has been to explain how the complex, improbable appearance of design in the universe arises.
P2.) The natural temptation is to attribute the appearance of design to actual design itself. In the case of a man-made artefact such as a watch, the designer really was an intelligent engineer. It is tempting to apply the same logic to an eye or a wing, a spider or a person.
P3.) The temptation is a false one, because the designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer. The whole problem we started out with was the problem of explaining statistical improbability. It is obviously no solution to postulate something even more improbable. We need a "crane," not a "skyhook;" for only a crane can do the business of working up gradually and plausibly from simplicity to otherwise improbable complexity.
P4.) The most ingenious and powerful crane so far discovered is Darwinian evolution by natural selection. Darwin and his successors have shown how living creatures, with their spectacular statistical improbability and appearance of design, have evolved by slow, gradual degrees from simple beginnings. We can now safely say that the illusion of design in living creatures is just that – an illusion.
P5.) We don't yet have an equivalent crane for physics. Some kind of multiverse theory could in principle do for physics the same explanatory work as Darwinism does for biology. This kind of explanation is superficially less satisfying than the biological version of Darwinism, because it makes heavier demands on luck. But the anthropic principle entitles us to postulate far more luck than our limited human intuition is comfortable with.
P6.) We should not give up hope of a better crane arising in physics, something as powerful as Darwinism is for biology. But even in the absence of a strongly satisfying crane to match the biological one, the relatively weak cranes we have at present are, when abetted by the anthropic principle, self-evidently better than the self-defeating skyhook hypothesis of an intelligent designer.
C.) Therefore, God almost certainly does not exist.
See, the overwhelming facetiousness of this argument is that even
if we were to grant all the 6 premises as being true, the conclusion does not follow. One is left bewildered as to wonder just how it is that so many atheists, although proclaiming themselves as the "reasonable" or "rational" or "bright" ones, have come to support Dawkins'
The God Delusion so fervently and to bring themselves to buy it by the bushel...
As Craig quite fittingly put it:
"Several years ago the atheist philosopher Quentin Smith unceremoniously crowned Stephen Hawking's argument against God in
A Brief History of Time as 'the worst atheistic argument in the history of Western thought.' With the advent of
The God Delusion the time has come, I think, to relieve Hawking of this weighty crown and to recognize Richard Dawkins' accession to the throne."
Topic: The "What Are You Currently Reading?" Thread (Read 271701 times)
