From the Cutting Room Floor.

Richard Dawkins interviewed atheist turned Christian apologist Alistair McGrath for Dawkins' BBC diatribe against religion "The Root of All Evil."

Apparently, McGrath was far too reasonable and intelligent for Dawkins to use the interview. Consequently, Dawkins settled for using excerpts from interviews with more bombastic and outre exemplars of religiosity.

Now, Dawkins has released the McGrath interview.

My thoughts:

First, Dawkins comes across as something different than the image projected in his bombastic writings. He seems puzzled, curious, respectful and, frankly, a decent person to talk to.

Second, there are some really amazing concessions by Dawkins in the video. One such is found at around 17 minutes into the interview; McGrath points out that science may be the fruit of Christianity's empirical commitment to the notion that reality is reasonable and knowable because it was established by a rational God. Dawkins' response is to concede that that might be right, but he doesn't know enough history to comment.

Eh???? Dawkins is committed to the proposition that religion is on-balance a run-away evil and that science is the summum bonum of human existence, and he has never inquired into whether the former was responsible for the latter?

For a person who claims that he is driven by evidence, it seems like a significant departure from his ideal.

Third, Dawkins is weak on philosophy and theology. He attempts to force-fit all theological concepts about God into his materialistic conception. Hence, he argues that God cannot exist because God must be complex - as complex as the human eye - or He couldn't have created a complex universe. But this approach completely disregards the argument for divine simplicity. It also assumes that God's existence is like our existence, an assertion for which there is no evidence.

Dawkins doesn't have to accept either point, obviously - there are theists who don't - but it seemed odd that Dawkins big clinching argument is premised on the notion that God is subject to the laws of nature, rather than the author of those laws.

To be fair, I did not hear McGrath say anything that sounded particularly Thomistic in this part of the interview - although, in other areas, I noted some very Thomistic arguments. I suspect that McGrath wisely concluded that there was no need to get into deep Scholastic territory on the vexed question of the nature of God.

Fourth, evolution is Dawkins' explanation of everything. Hence, Dawkins allows that he would find the concept of God to be more credible if God had resulted from the some processes of evolution.

My sense is that this demonstrates an amazing lack of imagination on Dawkins' part. Must everything be evolved? Might there not be dimensions and universes where evolution doesn't happen because the laws of entropy work really effectively? If we limit our speculation to the material universe, isn't it possible that chance could sculpt the Venus de Milo out of sand or toss together the components of the eye?

Yes, it seems a stretch, but evolutionists have to posit something like this to get past that point where chemicals go from the subject of pure chance - sometimes getting more complex and sometimes getting less complex - to one where evolution can drive the chemicals in the direction of complexity.

Fifth, Dawkins has a naive position - almost fundamentalist - on the complex of question of God's agency in the world and with respect to the question of God's role in saving one child out of thousands. Dawkins' position boils down to the argument that since God could have done something - caused the hijacker of the fourth plane on 9/11 to have a heart attack, for example - it was cruel of God to use human agents to obtain that end.

McGrath made the fair point that God seems to delegate. As Aquinas pointed out:

Two things belong to providence--namely, the type of the order of things foreordained towards an end; and the execution of this order, which is called government. As regards the first of these, God has immediate providence over everything, because He has in His intellect the types of everything, even the smallest; and whatsoever causes He assigns to certain effects, He gives them the power to produce those effects. Whence it must be that He has beforehand the type of those effects in His mind. As to the second, there are certain intermediaries of God's providence; for He governs things inferior by superior, not on account of any defect in His power, but by reason of the abundance of His goodness; so that the dignity of causality is imparted even to creatures.

McGrath alludes to something Thomistic when he points out that we can't really conceive of a world like that described by Dawkins. We live in a world where the "dignity of causality" is given to God's creatures. The world that Dawkins describes is one where causation is taken out of the hand of creatures, which would make them sock puppets: radically different creatures in a radically different kind of creation.

Dawkins also doesn't recognize the concept of "ordinary" and "extra-ordinary." He became obviously perturbed at McGrath's unwillingness to take God out of the situation where one child was saved out of thousands. Dawkins objected that this was inconsistent on McGrath's part since he had adverted to a mechanistic universe filled with plate tectonics to explain the death of the thousands.

The answer may simply be that ordinary things are what happen ordinarily and extraordinary interventions are, well, extraordinary. The late Father William Most made the point - which is the heart of common sense but stunning for its common sense - in discussing salvific grace in "Grace, Predestination and the Salvific will of God" that "it is contrary to Wisdom to make the extraordinary ordinary." (p. 162, fn. 84.)

Now, obviously, scientists aren't going to like that answer. They want things that can be replicated and tested. Unfortunately, God is a person, not a process.

Next, there is Dawkins' revealing tendency to engage in special pleading. Dawkins was very insistent that Stalin's atrocities were not motivated by his atheism and he didn't like the idea of anyone talking about "institutionalized atheism." McGrath properly teed off on this silly claim by pointing out that atheism was at the core of the Marxist project.

Finally, I was fascinated by Dawkins' inability to grasp why anyone should want to be religious. At one point he told McGrath that he understood what McGrath's position was but couldn't figure out why McGrath held that position. He also described himself as a "spiritual atheist." This might account for his intellectual tics that have caused Mark Shea to describe him as "confused."

In any event, the video is worth watching. It also underscores that there is a private Dawkins who is not a bad guy. Unfortunately, there is the public Dawkins who has an agenda, which is why the McGrath interview didn't make its way into the BBC production.

Update:

Mark Shea links to this article by Alvin Plantinga on Dawkins' confusion over complexity and simplicity. Plaintinga makes the point:

First, is God complex? According to much classical theology (Thomas Aquinas, for example) God is simple, and simple in a very strong sense, so that in him there is no distinction of thing and property, actuality and potentiality, essence and existence, and the like. Some of the discussions of divine simplicity get pretty complicated, not to say arcane.3 (It isn't only Catholic theology that declares God simple; according to the Belgic Confession, a splendid expression of Reformed Christianity, God is "a single and simple spiritual being.") So first, according to classical theology, God is simple, not complex.4 More remarkable, perhaps, is that according to Dawkins' own definition of complexity, God is not complex. According to his definition (set out in The Blind Watchmaker), something is complex if it has parts that are "arranged in a way that is unlikely to have arisen by chance alone." But of course God is a spirit, not a material object at all, and hence has no parts.5 A fortiori (as philosophers like to say) God doesn't have parts arranged in ways unlikely to have arisen by chance. Therefore, given the definition of complexity Dawkins himself proposes, God is not complex.

The idea of simplicity takes some getting used to, and it certainly isn't obvious. It took my Aquinas group months of working with the Summa to get a grip on the idea that God's existence is His nature is His goodness is His power etc., etc., but, really, it has to work that way.

For a Baptist perspective on an aspect of simplicity, check out Pastor Jan's recent post.