Kenny on Dawkins

Anthony Kenny on Richard Dawkins:

Richard Dawkins and I have been Oxford colleagues for most of our lives, and have been sparring with each other for many years. We agree with each other that most of what religious people believe is false, but unlike Richard I accept that religious beliefs may be quite reasonable, even if untrue. While I am not competent to challenge any of Richard's scientific statements, and while I regard his The Extended Phenotype as one of the last century's finest books of popular science, I believe that he greatly exaggerates the power of genetics to explain human life and thought. We first clashed in a seminar at Holywell Manor, chaired by Denis Noble, shortly after The Selfish Gene appeared. Richard thought that now the DNA code had been cracked, we would be able to understand the book of life. 'Do you think that a knowledge of the English alphabet is all you need to understand Shakespeare?', I asked him.

When I read The God Delusion I found I agreed with about 90 per cent of what it said, but that the area of disagreement meant that the two of us came to quite different positions about the rationality of religious belief. I will mention just one example. I am an agnostic about the existence of God, whereas Richard is an atheist and believes that he can prove that God certainly does not exist. A designer God, he maintains, cannot be used to explain the organized complexity we observe in living beings, because any God capable of designing anything would have to be complex enough to demand the same kind of explanation in his own right. He calls this argument 'The Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit', in tribute to Fred Hoyle, who once said that the probability of life originating on earth is no greater than the chance that a hurricane, sweeping through a scrapyard, would have the luck to assemble a Boeing 747. God, according to Dawkins, is the ultimate 747.

A traditional theist would say that Dawkins' argument misrepresented the notion of God in two ways. First of all, God is as much outside the series complexity/simplicity as he is outside the series mover/moved. He is not complex as a protein is; nor, for that matter, is he simple as an elementary particle is. He has neither the simplicity nor the complexity of material objects. Second, he is not one of a series of temporal contingents, each requiring explanation in terms of a previous state of the universe: unchanging and everlasting, he is outside the temporal series. What calls for explanation is the origin of organized complexity: but God had no origin, and is neither complex nor organized.

I made this point in a lecture to the Royal Institute of Philosophy in 2007. A few years later I was asked to take part in a debate, in Oxford's Sheldonian Theatre, between Richard and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. The topic of the debate was 'the nature of human beings and their ultimate origin'. As an agnostic, I was supposed to be a neutral chair holding the balance between the Christian and an atheist. But as the debate proceeded I began to think that the kindly archbishop was letting Richard get away with some pretty feeble arguments, and so I began to intervene on the other side. When Richard again produced his Boeing 747 argument, I protested that he was confusing two kinds of complexity – complexity of structure and complexity of function. A cut-throat razor was a much simpler structure than an electric shaver, but unlike the shaver it could also function as a cut-throat as well as a razor. The archbishop, fingering his beard, said that he did not feel competent to adjudicate between us.

Richard and I have always got on amicably face to face, but have not been afraid to be rude to each other in absence or in print. At dinner, after the Sheldonian debate, I remarked to Richard that moving from The Extended Phenotype to The God Delusion was like moving from the Financial Times to The Sun. This did not go down well, and led to a frosty exchange of emails. Later, Richard took part in a debate in Sydney with Cardinal Pell. At some point in the debate, I am told, the cardinal referred to my critique of the argument for atheism: 'Ah, Kenny', Richard said. 'He is a qualified obscurantist.' Well, I do have a doctorate in theology, which I suppose from Richard's point of view is a professional qualification in obscurantism.

(Brief Encounters: Notes from a Philosopher's Diary, pp 183-185.)