I’m told theology is outside my field of expertise. But is theology a “field” at all? Is there anything in “theology” to be expert ABOUT?
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) April 16, 2013
The problem, Richard, is not your lack of expertise. It’s you complete ignorance about the most basic theological issues. Take your crackpot views about science showing that it is really, really unlikely that God exists because there are no proven Gaps. Your talking point makes the theological assumption that insists God’s existence should be coupled to the failure of science. Sounds like a theologically ignorant position to me, Richard.
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Then there’s his other argument — “The Ultimate Boeing 747 Gambit” — which comes down to God being the most complex (and therefore least likely) conceivable thing. That one makes the theological assumption that if God exists, he arose by random processes. I’ll be generous, and call that assumption “unconventional”.
TFBW:
Good catch on the “Ultimate 474” argument. Dawkins “reasons” that God must be more complex than anything He creates (an extremely dubious premise based on materialist assumptions), and then concludes that God must be “improbable” because according to information theory, the more complex something is, the more improbable it is.
But, of course, when a complex object is said to be “improbable” from an information theory standpoint, what we mean is that an object exhibiting a particular complex pattern exhibited by that object is very unlikely to come into existence by chance. So what Dawkins’ 474 argument actually “proves” (pretending for the moment that his premises aren’t entirely wrong and misinformed) is that something like God is extremely unlikely to come into existence by random processes. Well, Dick, thanks for that, um, “insight.”
The point being, why are you so obsessed with flagella when you’ve got a much bigger problem on your hands.
Then there’s his other argument — “The Ultimate Boeing 747 Gambit” — which comes down to God being the most complex (and therefore least likely) conceivable thing. That one makes the theological assumption that if God exists, he arose by random processes. I’ll be generous, and call that assumption “unconventional”.
The ignorance is even more basic than that. Dawkins assumes God is contingent, he assumes that if He exists, He must have come into being. And that is ignorance of Theology 101. Neither is his argument original – it’s just a fancy pants way of asking, “Well, who made God?!” It’s the type of question a teenager would ask.