Search results
Religious faith is assumed by Dawkins to be unevidenced belief. But Christian faith is grounded on a combination of evidence, including that drawn from history, personal experience and the world around. The justification for such belief is in the nature of a cumulative case. Like the clues in a detective story, no single item of evidence may be ...
Jan 6, 2023 · Dawkins would do better to stress that while a god might have been a possible cause of the Universe, it is clearly impossible for all of the conflicting ideas about god promoted by major religions to be correct, and to remind people that religious beliefs in that sense are a form of programming carried out by religious organisations.
- The First Three Proofs
- Types of Causation
- The Fourth Proof
- The Fifth Proof
- Divine Attributes
- Answering Dawkins with Thomas
- The Real Vacuity
Dawkins’s response to Thomas’s first three proofs begins with the claim that, “[they] are just different ways of saying the same thing.” It is true each proof ends with the conclusion that God as the ultimate cause of the world exists, but they do not reach this conclusion in the same way. The first one, or the argument from motion, proceeds from t...
An accidentally ordered series of causes is one in which one independent object interacts with another independent object and causes it to move or change, similar to a series of dominos falling one after another. These changes take place over a period of time, whether short or long. Dye, for example, is applied to hair, and after a few minutes it c...
In the fourth proof, the argument from degrees of being, Thomas argues from the idea that there is a great chain of being in which creatures become more perfect. For example: rocks, then animals, then man, then angels, and so forth. But if this chain is to be meaningful, there must be a perfect being, or what we call God. A modern understanding of ...
Thomas begins his fifth proof by talking about things that lack intelligence but which routinely act for an end that is good. The Latin text that is often translated as ‘designedly’ in the fifth way is ex intentione, which, in other passages, Thomas identifies with the natural inclinations of non-intelligent things. Since these things lack intellig...
Dawkins also thinks that he can undermine Thomas’s proofs by claiming they are non-sequiturs, or that the conclusion of God’s existence does not follow from the premises in the arguments. He writes: Even if we allow the dubious luxury of arbitrarily conjuring up a terminator to an infinite regress and giving it a name, simply because we need one, t...
So we’ve seen that Dawkins has not undermined the evidence for the existence God in his supposed refutations of St. Thomas’s Five Ways. But there is something else Dawkins has failed to do in The God Delusion. In what he calls his “central argument” Dawkins says that the popular design argument for God actually refutes God’s existence because if th...
So what have we learned? First, Dawkins “central argument” against God doesn’t work because it’s not even addressing the strongest, most logical conception of God that is believed by theists like St. Thomas Aquinas. His objections to the theistic arguments in favor of God also suffer from similar misunderstandings and logical gaps. Dawkins erroneou...
To Dawkins there are two types of harm caused by religion: 1) People thereby come to believe what is not true, and. 2) Moral harm in terms of prejudice and violence e.g. homophobia, misogyny and murder. For Dawkins, both these forms of harm stem from people believing simply because of blind faith.
Dec 4, 2019 · December 4, 2019. Paleontologist Neil Shuber writes of Richard Dawkins’s recent book Outgrowing God: With wit, logic, and his characteristic flair for expressing complex ideas with uncanny clarity, Richard Dawkins separates myth from reality in Outgrowing God. His book is more than a beginners’ guide to atheism: it is a primer that ...
Sep 27, 2023 · Dawkins promised them a world of secure certainties and a rational approach to life — yet on closer examination, he offered them only another set of beliefs, rather than scientifically or ...
People also ask
How does religion affect Dawkins?
Does Dawkins believe in God?
Why does Dawkins say'religion' & 'Blind Faith'?
What does Richard Dawkins claim in the God Delusion (2009)?
What is Dawkins' strongest argument against God?
Why does Dawkins think religion is a virus?
Abstract. Dawkins’ ‘The God Delusion’ renews an old debate concerning the existence or nonexistence of God at the instance of moral and physical/natural evil in society. He repudiates all ...
