Dawkins found the evilroot, brewed it and sold it in bottles
I just couldn’t put down reading The Dawkins Delusion by Alister McGrath. At the front cover, there is a blurb by Michael Ruse, Professor of Philosophy in Florida State University, saying, “The God Delusion makes me embarrassed to be an atheist, and the McGraths show why.”
TDD is a short book, and my reading of it so far has been smooth, quick and painless - like a good laxative that clears your system of that filth which has been accumulating for an unhealthy length of time. While - if I can remember - I could understand 98.765% of what Dawkins was trying to say in TGD, it kind of forced me into taking up yogic positions in a mental, conceptual sense.
While I did not become an avowed convert to the Dawkinsian Messianic Movement to wipe out religion off of the face of the Earth and cleanse the Godmeme virus off of the minds of a majority of Man (just joking, my NDA - Non-Dawkinsian Atheist - friends), I did appreciate achieving the objective which I had set when I had intended to read TGD - to allow my mind to try a world view familiar to Dawkins (that is, his notion that there is no such thing as order or beauty - these are human-generated concepts, by-products of Darwinian evolution, to put it plainly and unjustly).
His arguments against God and religion are the same-old, same-old ones I’ve encountered from my years of polymathic reading. The only fresh thing I procured from TGD in the theological (or Atheological) debate was his spin on the old “…Then Who Created God?” question - that if, according to the Intelligent Design theory (anyway, ID is NOT the ONLY conceptual model on the theists’ side of the debate; there are far too many others), Life as we see it is functioning far too complexly for it to have come about without an Intelligent Designer, then the Intelligent Designer Itself is more improbable than the Universe / Life that has supposedly come about from It - so the question begs, Who Designed the Designer?
For the theistic counter / rejoinder to this question, read McGrath’s TDD. But then I guess most people won’t, so I’m just going to spoil it for you here… It seems in our efforts to understand the universe we are in, we encounter the problem of explanations perpetually requiring an explanation themselves. Explanations always have to be explained in an infinite regress.
In physics, the search for the Grand Unified Theory, or GUT, still eludes scientists. At this point I’d like to recommend the reader read Paul Davies’ book, The Cosmic Jackpot or its alternate title, The Goldilocks Enigma, for an understanding of the problem that the very notion of the (existence of the) GUT poses. Even if we find the GUT (assuming there is a GUT), then ultimately what makes that GUT the GUT? Optimistic GUT-ists say the GUT, when found, will express itself in the simplest, most beautiful truth, such that it needs no further explanation - therein lies the problem - it sounds very much like the theist’s argument saying, “God is the Necessary Being, the Ultimate Cause, His Existence needs no further explanation.”
But then theistic, spiritual or religious scientists will simply say, the GUT is (essentially a description of) God.
I highly doubt we will ever find a true GUT, only an increasingly complex series of explanations for explanations for explanations ad infinitum.
I believe the problem lies not in the elusive existence or absence of an Ultimate Explanation but in the notion of explanation itself. Why explain? Of course, in many instances in life, explanation is needed, but to a practical limit. You don’t see the judicial system investigating the genetic make-up of a criminal’s ancestors or her specific neuronal misfirings at age 7 when she was most mentally malleable to explain why she did it or if she did it. You limit investigation only to the empirical data you can collect and study. But you don’t question whether or not the criminal’s parents existed and investigate / debate that.
The underlying law of all existence is causality (things happen because other things happen to cause them) but the word causality itself conjures a confusing and misleading idea that it is a rigid, unilinear thing. The act of explaining is a conscious act of looking back at the line of causality in reverse, finding the causes of things via clues and patterns. Explanation exists because there is existence and existence functions through causality. Here, we find ourselves trapped in tautological territory…
The Dawkins Delusion, Alister McGrath, Michael Ruse, The God Delusion, Grand Unified Theory, GUT, Paul Davies, The Cosmic Jackpot, The Goldilocks Enigma