Sep
17
Dawkins and the Eternal God
I cited from John Lennox’s book God’s Undertaker not long ago. The mathematician discusses various factual and logical challenges to Richard Dawkins’ analogy for natural processes which posits an infinite number of monkeys “randomly” typing works of Shakespeare — or even just a single target word. In my opinion, the refutation of the typing monkeys (or chimps, as the case may be) was devastating.
This week, I would like to present another citation from the same book, just a few pages later, in fact. This time, the focus is on Dawkins’ attempts to deny the existence of God. After discussing Dawkins’ flawed objection via the question of God’s complexity, Lennox addresses the common question of “Who made God?”.
— — —
“There is another objection to the existence of God that is related to the preceding one. Much attention has been drawn to it by the fact that Richard Dawkins has made it a central issue in his best-selling book The God Delusion. It is the age-old schoolboy teaser: If we say that God created the universe we shall have to ask who created God and so on, so that, according to Dawkins, the only way out of an impossible infinite regress is to deny that God exists.
Is this really the best that that Brights can do? I can hear an Irish friend saying: ‘Well, it proves one thing — if they had a better argument, they would use it.’ If that is thought to be a rather strong reaction, just think of the question: Who made God? The very asking of it shows that the questioner has a created God in mind. It is then scarcely surprising that one calls one’s book The God Delusion. For that is precisely what a created god is, a delusion, virtually by definition — as Xenophanes pointed out centuries before Darwin. A more informative title might have been The Created-God Delusion. The book could then have been reduced to a pamphlet — but sales might just have suffered.
Now Dawkins candidly tells us that he does not like people telling him that they also do not believe in the God in which he does not believe. But we cannot afford to base our arguments on his dislikes. For, whether he likes it or not, he openly invites the charge. After all, it is he who is arguing that God is a delusion. In order to weigh his argument we need first of all to know what he means by God. And his main argument is focussed on a created god. Well, several billion of us would share his disbelief in such a god. He needn’t have bothered. Most of us have long since been convinced of what he is trying to tell us. Certainly, no Christian would ever dream of suggesting that God was created. Nor, indeed, would Jews or Muslims. His argument, by his own admission, has nothing to say about an eternal God. It is entirely beside the point. Dawkins should shelve it on the shelf marked ‘Celestial Teapots’ where it belongs.
For the God who created and upholds the universe was not created — he is eternal. He was not ‘made’ and therefore subject to the laws that science discovered; it was he who made the universe with its laws. Indeed, that fact constitutes the fundamental distinction between God and the universe. The universe came to be, God did not. The ancient Greeks were already aware of this distinction and the Christian apostle John refers to it in the opening statement of his Gospel: ‘In the beginning was the Word (that is, ‘the Word already was’).’ And the Word was with God. And the Word was God… All things were made (that is, ‘all things came to be’) by him’ (John 1:1,3). God belongs to the category of the uncreated. The universe does not. It came to be; it was created. By him.
We have already seen in chapter 3 that what we mean by the term ‘creation’ is a fundamental issue that still divides the world’s philosophical and religious systems.
The Greeks taught that:
- Matter has always existed and always will. It is eternal. In its basic state it was formless, unorganized and boundless — chaos. But then some god or other arose and imposed order on this pre-existent material, and turned it into a well ordered universe — cosmos. This process is what the Greeks meant by creation.
- The creator is part of an eternal system in which everything in the universe emanates out of God, like sunbeams out of the sun; and so, in some sense, everything is God. God is somehow in the matter of the universe, actively engaged in moving and developing matter to the best effect.
The ancient Hebrew tradition, inherited by Christianity and Islam, is very different and, we might note, it had been around for centuries before the time of the Ionian philosophers. It taught that:
- Matter is not eternal: the universe had a beginning, and there is only one eternal God and Creator of all.
- God existed before the universe, and is independent of it. The universe is not an emanation out of God. God created it out of nothing, not out of himself, though he maintains it and is guiding it to its destined goal.
Dawkins, therefore, is way back with the Greeks and their notion of gods ‘descended from heaven and earth’ and so created. Indeed he might do well to join the audience that listened to the Christian apostle Paul in the philosophical school of the Areopagus in Athens in the first century.
The historian Luke records how Paul had noticed in his walks around the city how inadequate the citizens’ view of God was — the place was full of idols, even one labelled ‘To an Unknown God’. Paul, far from fitting into the atheist stereotype of an anti-intellectual bigot grasping at fantasies, had thoroughly studied the Greek worldview and was no less amazed at the credulity of the Athenians than Dawkins would have been. He pointed out to them that one of their own poets had grasped that human beings are, in a sense, the offspring of God. He drew the logical inference for them to consider: ‘Being then God’s offspring we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man.’ Gods produced by the restless fertility of the human imagination — created gods — are nothing new.
The very fact that Dawkins asks the question about who made the Maker shows that he may have a conceptual difficulty with envisaging the existence of something uncreated and eternal. However, if that is the case, then he is guilty of a further serious inconsistency. One would have thought that his worldview obliged him to believe (in common once more with the ancient Greeks) that matter and energy (and the laws of nature) were always there. If that is the case, he does believe in something eternal — lots of it in fact — the very stuff of the universe all around us.
It used to intrigue me on my many visits to the former Communist world how often old-style communist academics would ask me the question ‘Who made God?’ It was interesting to see the dilemma they got into when their own belief in the eternity of matter was pointed out. In the end we were often able to pinpoint the key issue. For them, eternal mindless matter was perfectly acceptable, but not an eternal personal God. Logic was not on their side. Nor is it on Dawkins’. Eternal energy, yes; but an Eternal Person, no. Where is the logic in all of this?
Whether or not Dawkins espouses old-style materialism with its eternal universe, he certainly is obliged to believe that the universe created him, and so we are then entitled to turn his ‘Who created the creator?’ question back on him and ask him who created his creator, the universe? What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.”
— — —
Lennox proposes that Dawkins has “a conceptual difficulty with envisaging the existence of something uncreated and eternal.” That may be. I wonder, though, if Dawkins does understand but, in his rebellion against God, stubbornly uses the “Who made God?” and similar challenges in order to confound those who do not take the time to learn and logically think these things through.
Regardless, I appreciate Lennox’s efforts in explicating this subject. As usual, he has a wonderful, winsome, non-condescending way of doing so, which is probably why he is a beloved author and educator.
