Is God Complex?
CADRE Comments
Atheists such as Dawkins often argue that a complex creation such as the universe (or the Multiverse) requires a complex creator. If the creator is complex, these clever people think, then the odds of "him" existing are much less and so God is improbable. It would hysterical to hear what Kierkegaard would say, probably something like, "sure God is improbable, there’s no better proof he’s real." Aside from the ridiculous idea of attaching a probability to the likelihood of the basis of all that is existing, the atheist’s point is to counter the design argument. Of course to make the argument they must assume God is like a big man in the sky rather than the ground of being.
Tillich argues that this big man in the sky is behind much atheism. It is an anecdotal observation that now seems to be backed up by some emerging data. It is certainly the case that atheists are embroiled in a struggle against the superego-like God whom they think of as a “big man in the sky.” Nothing is clearer for that than Dawkin’s approach to the reverse design arguments. In answering God arguments Dawkins takes God as totally a being alongside other beings and in fact seems to think he is perfectly, 1×1, analogous to a biological organism.[1] Dawkins spells it out in no uncertain terms. “why there almost certainly is no God.” Why?Because, a big man in the sky would have to be more complex than the universe he creates. Of course this is based upon the assumption that whatever reality entails has to reflect accurately and be limited to the information we glean from our little dust mote, from which we have never journeyed far.[2]
‘Like’ The Poached Egg on Facebook! Dawkins is working against what he takes to be the most popular pro God arguments (one of the weakest) the monkey’s-writing-Shakespeare-by-accident argument. He couches it in terms of assembling a 747 from a scrap yard by means of a hurricane. [3] The creationist, whose argument this revises, couches his argument in terms of finding some living creature who is too improbable to be assembled by accident. Improbability means complexity. The more complex something is the less likely it is to be assembled by accident. The creationist equates improbability with design. Dawkins points out that it’s not the Darwinians who are trying to get “something for nothing,” so to speak, in assuming that complexity could come about undersigned, but the creationists are seeking the “free lunch,” simply because they don’t recognize that “however statistically improbable the entity you seek to explain by evoking a designer, the designer himself has got to be at least as improbable. God is the ultimate Boeing 747.”[4] Dawkins takes this assumption through the entire book. The view of God that he’s attacking is obviously that of a big man. It may be couched as “big mind” or even “universal mind” but it’s still an entity, a thing, something that has to consciously calculate or deliberate about what it’s doing. Never does he stop to consider that he might have the wrong idea of God. He spends long pages droning on and on about consciousness raising and implying that creationists are stupid and feminists are smarter,[5] never does it occur to him that he just might be dealing with the wrong concept of God…
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CADRE Comments: Is God Complex?
RECOMMENDED APOLOGETICS RESOURCES FOR FURTHER READING:
New Proofs for the Existence of God: Contributions of Contemporary Physics and Philosophy
Thinking About God: First Steps in Philosophy
So why does that bother you so much? If Dawkins is not attacking your God, forget it then. You shouldn’t even pay attention to it. Why do you feel under attack when you’re not? Nevertheless as Dawkins himself admits in the book, he’s not only attacking every god, but every supernatural being conceived. And when he decides to deal with the Christian God, he doesn’t come up with his own definition of a god, but he simply uses the most common definition of Him. Because after all, that’s what counts, since a religion is composed by the nature of the general belief and not by the belief of its apologists.
Any here I would have to go with George H. Smith when he says: “Some religious critics prefer to attack the unpopular ideas associated with atheism rather than face the challenge of atheism directly. Indeed, it is not uncommon to find entire books with the expressed intent of demolishing atheism, but which fail to discuss such basic issues as why one should believe in a god at all. These books are content to identify atheism with specific personalities (such as Nietzsche, Marx, Camus and Sartre[or Dawkins why not?]) and, by criticizing the views of these individuals, the religionist author fancies himself to have destroyed atheism. In most cases, however, the critic has not even discussed atheism.” –George H. Smith.