Is Richard Dawkins a Closet Deist?

[This is one of twenty-one essays in the book Man and the Divine, published in August 2018. The book is available in ePub format from leading retailers of eBooks, such as Barnes & Noble, Blio, Kobo, Itunes, Inktera, Smashwords, etc. Information about Man and the Divine can be found here]

Since the publication of The God Delusion in 2006, those of us who are interested in the history of ideas, both long and short, have got used to a more aggressive and even militant form of atheistic response to discussions of the concept of God, and the meaning of the Divine. Dawkins book is the main reason for this change.

‘The God Delusion’ is not a scholarly treatise on belief and disbelief concerning the existence or the reality of God, and the arguments for and against. Nor does it pretend to be. It is an old-fashioned piece of polemic writing, intended to serve an agenda which is already established. However, this has not stopped some of the readers of the book from imagining that it is in fact the last word on why every possible reason for entertaining the idea of God is delusory, and that anyone still discussing the subject of the Divine is an abject fool.

By writing this book, what Dawkins has done is to empower (in the jargon of the day) a large group of people who see any discussion of God as some sort of intellectual imposture. They see this for many possible reasons, including the fact that, perhaps most importantly, and in western religions in particular, the concept of God has been used to buttress temporal and political power, and many of the arguments which have been made in favour of the existence or the reality of God, over the past thousand years or so, do function as support for temporal ideologies. The disbelievers see such imposture as an offence against intelligence and common sense, and ‘The God Delusion’ contains the weaponry for combatting the deceit.

Dawkins is not a theologian. But this does not disqualify him from discussing the truth or falsehood of the existence of God, and the arguments which have been created in order to support what is known as ‘rational belief in God’.  I share Dawkins negative view of this unhappy concept, which gives space to credulous patterns of thought. However, Dawkins project would have been better served if he had produced a scholarly discussion of the subject first, before writing the polemic. By publishing only the polemic, he has himself created a space for credulous patterns of thought. Discussion of theological questions is now out of the seminary and the university, and is in the marketplace.

Some time ago, shortly after I published my first book, which discusses the long history of ideas about God and the Divine, I wrote a blog post with a misleading title ‘The Irrationality of Atheism’. The article was actually about the illogical and careless nature of western human thought concerning the Divine. In the ontological argument, as it developed from St. Anselm onwards, the question was almost always couched in terms of Gods existence, and whether or not the existence of God could be understood to serve another of God’s apparently necessary properties: ‘perfection’. I pointed out three things:

 Can God, in any meaningful sense, be said to exist, even if God can be said to have reality? We think of existence as a characteristic of being in space and time.

Secondly, that the ontological argument provides nothing which connects God with the matrix of space and time. This suggests the uncritical acceptance of space and time as something which exists apart from the Divine, and which is perhaps a fatal objection to the ontological argument.

Thirdly, if the nature of what God is includes the generation of the space and time in which we live and think, then intelligent atheism is impossible, since it would necessarily mean the complete denial of human experience.

What I was arguing was that modern atheism is actually dependent for its nature on the ontological argument, and the terms in which it is framed. Meaning that eight hundred years of argument about the nature and existence of God underpins the point of view of those who regard themselves as atheists.

Most of the time this article received little attention. At other times it did get a response – sometimes polite and intelligent, sometimes not. What struck me about the latter instances however, was how little the responders actually knew, as opposed to how much they imagined they knew, about theological questions. They’d read ‘The God Delusion’, and that was enough. The argument made sense to them, and they were as a consequence, militantly in favour in Dawkins point of view.

So much so that it was often clear that they were responding to the provocative title of the article, and had not read the article itself (far less any other article on the web site). There was no need for them to read the article, of course – they knew that, whatever was in it was nonsense, and that I must be confused, or just an attention seeker.

For many, modern atheism is now a belief system, like any other. Just dressed up as absolute unbelief. And Dawkins book is their sacred text. It makes sense. It is logical. It is the final word on the matter.

I found myself being accused of confusing theism and deism, which was a bit puzzling at first. But since the accusers have generally read Dawkins book and very little else, and therefore have no wide knowledge of the history of human thought, they necessarily take their cues from him. And Dawkins does spend a lot of time talking about both. We learn about Dawkins perspective from this, and so can gain an understanding of the limitations of his own argument.

I think of theism and deism as terms for patterns of thought which belong in the early modern period, and which are couched in the kind of discussions contemporary with that time, all the way up to the French revolution, and beyond. But earlier ideas about god can be understood in terms of theism (the word of course is Greek, as is its derivative atheism). But no-one in their right mind would try to equate the theism of Plato with the theism of the early modern period; they just aren’t the same. Plato’s ‘theism’ concerns a God who is wholly transcendent of physical existence, and transcends all sense experience. Theistic belief of later times implies no such thing.

The distinction Dawkins makes in ‘The God Delusion’ between theism and deism is a simple one. Theism is a pattern of belief which enshrines the idea that the Divine is responsive to man, and his rituals of worship and prayer. It is a pattern of belief dependent on the idea that God can act in the world.  By contrast, deism contemplates the idea that a creator God has existence, and necessarily created the world, but that he is not active in the physical world beyond that.

This is the kind of idea which Descartes employed in his description of reality. God was real, but existed in a sphere of his own, and so we could get on with the business of understanding the world in terms of mathematics and physics, without reference to God. The idea was also attractive to the generation of theologians and scholars who came after Newton, who saw the divine hand in the regular clockwork of the heavens, the motions of the planets, and approved of Newton’s use of mathematics to describe the regularity of the cosmos. Their very regularity could be argued to show that God created the physical and sensory world, but did not intervene once the cosmos was in order, and in motion.

In October 2008, Dawkins debated with the mathematician John Lennox at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. The debate had the title ‘Has Science buried God?’, In the debate Dawkins made an interesting statement, which puts him on this theist-deist spectrum, at least in so far as he recognises that the laws of mathematics and physics have to have some origin. He said that, though he would not accept deism, it was possible to make the case for “a deistic god, a sort of god of the physicist…. Who devised the laws of physics, god the mathematician, god who put together the cosmos in the first place and then sat back and watched everything happen” *1. He had however no notion that a similar case could be made for a theistic god.

So, if Dawkins is not in fact a deist, where does he think the laws of mathematics and physics come from? What is the origin of the inverse square law, and the law of gravity? He clearly accepts mathematical order in physical reality, since you cannot understand or do science if you don’t.  So it seems as though Dawkins objections to deism are irrational, and that he is a deist masquerading as the high-priest of atheism.

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1.    *1. Dawkins view of at least the possibility of a mathematically inclined god, who defined the rules, and set everything in motion, would have made perfect sense to the Stoics, including the Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius, who understood the world principally in terms of the power of Necessity (anangke). The world was in motion according to a predetermined pattern, against which man’s powers were feeble in the extreme. We could change certain things here and there, but we had to accept the implacable force of Necessity.