Dawkins’s argument against the existence of God

Just wondered what people think of this argument from ‘The God Delusion’, which purports to show that the existence of God is extremely improbable. First, a definition: an entity is complex if and only if it consists of a number of parts combined in an intricate way, so as to produce extremely statistically improbable properties. (A human being is a complex entity: not every way you fling together the atoms constituting my body is going to produce thought, action, perception, kidneys, lungs, etc.) This definition isn’t watertight, but the general idea is intuitive. Anyway, on with the argument:

1) Complex entities can come into existence in three ways: either by design, evolution or chance.

2) God is a complex entity.

3) God cannot have been designed.

4) God cannot have evolved.

5) Therefore, God must have come into existence by chance.

6) The probability of a being spontaneously coming into existence with the remarkable properties of God (omnipotence, omniscience and omnibenevolence) is extremely slight.

7) Therefore, God’s existence is extremely improbable.

I don’t actually agree with this argument, but I think it’s interesting. Any thoughts?

Lolita

It’s not a good idea to make bedroom furniture for young girls under the brandname ‘Lolita’, but this didn’t stop Woolworths from doing it. Check out the story on the Beeb. You can find a summary of Nabokov’s controversial novel on Wikipedia - for those who don’t know (like me until I looked it up on Wiki), it’s about a man who becomes sexually obsessed with a twelve year old girl, and commences an affair with her.

It reminds me of a story in the News of the World about a group of male school teachers who slept with their teenage pupils. I didn’t think the headline PAEDO MASTERS was appropriate, somehow.

A horrible philosophical problem

I’m writing my dissertation on the problem of other minds, and the focus of my research is the nature of our mental concepts. I call the problems raised by mental concepts ‘horrible’ because it seems to me that when we think about our mental concepts, we are struck by two very strong and conflicting intuitions. One intuition supports the claim that the connection between mental states and behaviour is merely contingent, the other that it is necessary and analytic. The first intuition is given full vent in the work of Tom Nagel:

“We can use the general concepts of experience and mind to speculate about forms of conscious life whose external signs we cannot confidently identify. There is probably a great deal of life in the universe, and we may be in a position to identify only some of its forms, because we would simply be unable to read as behaviour the manifestations of creatures sufficiently unlike us. It certainly means something to speculate that there are such creatures, and that they have minds.” (Nagel, T. The View From Nowhere: 24. Oxford: OUP, 1989)

And doesn’t this seem possible!? Think about the ‘what it’s like’ aspect of pain, its subjective feel. Couldn’t that be present in a being that displayed no recognisable behaviour, or, indeed, that didn’t behave at all? And it seems to me that the answer to this question is: yes, of course!

The opposing intuition is given powerful expression in Wittgenstein’s work:

“Look at a stone and imagine it having sensations.–One says to oneself: How could one so much as get the idea of ascribing a sensation to a thing? One might as well ascribe it to a number!–And now one looks at a wriggling fly and at once these difficulties vanish and pain seems to get a foothold here, where before everything was, so to speak, too smooth for it.” (PI 284)

“[O]nly of a living human being and what resembles (behaves like) a living human being can one say: it has sensations; it sees; is blind; hears; is deaf; is conscious or unconscious.” (PI 281)

“Just try–in a real case–to doubt someone else’s fear or pain.” (PI 303)

It seems to me that in each of these remarks Wittgenstein is drawing our attention to the idea that our criteria for the application of mental concepts include behaviour of various kinds. When you see someone else writhing on the ground, it is impossible for you to doubt that they are in pain. This is not merely because of your kind, sympathetic nature, but because it is part of the meaning of our concept of pain to be correctly applied in such situations. Perhaps that is a weak example – the person could be feigning pain, and then the application of the concept would be incorrect. Think of an itch. Could you have an itch without a scratch? That is, is it intelligible that another bring could feel just that sensation and not respond to it by scratching? And here one wants to say: no, of course not. But then, that feeling of an itch on my head now; couldn’t that be present in a being that didn’t scratch?

I’m confused: I feel both intuitions very strongly.