First Dawkins, now Dennett

While I find the religious worldview shared by Joseph Bottum, Stephen Barr, and others at the religious journal First Things rationally indefensible, I find the worldview of Richard Dawkins equally indefensible, if not moreso. Another widely-known intellectual who, in broad terms, agrees with Richard Dawkins is Daniel Dennett. See here and here for details about Dennett's attitude toward religion. I share Dennett's attitude in one sense: I think religion is nonsense. But the similarity pretty much ends there.

Dawkins and Dennett seem to believe that science somehow "disproves" religion. This is incorrect. Science presupposes that supernatural explanations explain nothing. It presupposes a basic view of existence in which "God did it" or "a miracle occurs" is another way of saying "I don't know why something happened, but it is so impressive that the usual tools of the scientist, such as observation, testing, deduction, and the like will all be insufficient to discover the cause." This, of course, is no explanation at all. It is a call for faith. The first questions a scientist would have to ask upon hearing this "explanation" would be: "Who is this 'God' fellow of which you speak? What is His nature? How can I get in contact with Him?" But true scientists will not spend any time contemplating such questions, since no answers to them can possibly exist. That's the whole thing about God: He's supernatural, above and beyond everything we see in the world and everything we know about the world, and as such there can't be any evidence of His existence--it's ultimately a matter of faith, not of reason.

When one tries to "disprove" something for which no evidence can ever be found (i.e., in this case, the non-existence of God), he gives his adversary (i.e., in this case, the religious person opposed to evolution) an opening to multiply arbitrary arguments ad infinitum. If the atheist, in addition to trying to prove God's non-existence, opposes the "speciesist" idea that human beings are more valuable than non-human animals, don't be surprised when a significant fraction of people decide that "God did it" may be as good an explanation for the origin of man as--if not a better one than--evolution by natural selection.