Why There Almost Certainly Is a God: Doubting Dawkins [Paperback]

I bought this book as a recommendation from a religious friend on the basis that it might convince me to believe in god. (A big ask!) Anyway it failed on the basis you already have to believe in the supernatural to get on board with what the author is saying. He starts on quite firm ground but then suspends all rationality and ends up making huge untestable claims.

Once again a big fail on proving anything except wish thinking!

With such a preponderance of books attacking Dawkins tending to uncritically recommend each other, it is hard to choose which makes the best case for theism to read as a foil to Dawkins. While the evangelism of John Lennox (or even the heartfelt sermonizing of David Robertson) might appeal more to committed Christians (and atheists playing "spot the special pleading"), this book comes closer to addressing Dawkins directly. More challenging than McGrath's rushed polemic, Ward describes his underlying position with clarity.

Having written books attacking fundamentalism, Ward shows himself a more reasonable apologist than most with statements such as "The judgment as to whether or not the resurrection happened as recorded in the Bible is likely to depend on whether or not you already believe in God." Unfortunately the same is likely true for the claims of this book. Key claims such as the fundamental validity of personal explanation are justified briefly by (tenuous) analogy, a "most philosophers agree that..." assertion, and the implicit "trust me, I'm a much nicer guy than Dawkins". More space is devoted to Ward's musings on consciousness and quantum mechanics.

The book starts inevitably with praise for Dawkins' previous works followed by castigation of his temerity to comment on faith and a list of historical theist philosophers, with more barbed insults popping up throughout. For a book directly addressing Dawkins, Ward needs understand what he criticizes more carefully. For example he seeks to characterize "the ultimate nature of reality", and assumes Dawkins is attempting to do the same. Ward is brave to tackle Dawkins on evolution, and does make some interesting points on probability and complexity which challenge rather than undermine Dawkins' more accessible writing.

Ultimately, Ward's view of God will be too abstract for many: "Could there be an unembodied mind, a pure Spirit, that has knowledge and awareness? I can see no reason why not." So where's the evidence? Ward has an answer: "So it seems that God does make a difference, but it is not a neutrally testable difference that could be settled by experiment." More work is needed to show that he is describing something more substantial than metaphor - if indeed he is.

The previous book which I read by Keith Ward was both balanced and stimulating. There is very little which I can find to say about this book which is positive. Maybe the only thing to his credit is that he appears to have completely abandoned any attempt to defend the ontological argument.

However, he does attempt to resuscitate the argument from design by renaming it as the 'new argument for design'. The argument from design is unusual in that it can be cast in mathematical terms and be shown to be unsound. Essentially, it reflects a flawed understanding of the relationship between probabilities and their inverses. For anyone interested, there is a good treatment of it in 'Logic: A Very Short Introduction' by Graham Priest.

What Ward seems to be describing as the 'new' design argument involves a dash of fine-tuning with a dash of probabilities. His understanding of probabilities appears to repeat the same misunderstanding which is buried in the more usual formulation of the argument from design. And he does not appear to appreciate that the fine-tuning argument is a powerful argument _against_ the existence of an omnipotent creative deity (who would have no need to 'fine-tune' anything!) The philosopher Gilbert Fulmer has argued that the fine-tuning argument is logically incoherent anyway.

His discussion of consciousness was, in my opinion, little short of an embarrassment. He was dismissive of Daniel Dennett and appears to have little appreciation of how much research has been done in this field. He seems to think that it is a problem which is 'so difficult that no one has any idea how to begin to tackle it, scientifically'. Although it is true to say that it is a difficult problem, and it is very early days, Ward seems to be unaware of the research which has been done by neuroscientists over a period of 60 years or so. There are a number of popular books available on consciousness and there are already valiant attempts to deal with the problem of qualia. ('Seeing Red' by Nicholas Humphrey, for example.)

His conclusion on this is, roughly: we have no evidence for disembodied consciousness but it *might* exist. And then, like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat, he concludes that, if we can imagine this, we can imagine 'God' as the ultimate form of disembodied consciousness.

He discusses cosmology and, for such a short book, I found this section appeared deceptively long. At times, I had to pinch myself as a reminder that this was supposed to be addressing 'The God Delusion'. And reflecting that there are other writers who deal with cosmology in a much more engaging manner.

I awaited, in vain, for the 'clear definitions' and 'sharp arguments'. Coming in at around 143 pages, I was reminded of Woody Allen describing the two ladies discussing the food at a mountain resort. The first lady says, "The food in this place is really terrible." To which her companion replies, "Yes, and such small portions." Well, this more or less sums up my opinion of this book.