Richard Dawkins Answers His Critics

Dawkins was not able to attend Reason Rally but he did send a video. Here it is. In it Dawkins answers his critics (from 3:45 to 5:10), who said he was ignorant for not knowing God is a simple being. What he meant was not something metaphysical. He was asking about the mind of God, that is, how and where does God get all of his knowledge? It's utterly incomprehensible to the point of refutation to believe God has always held true and utterly comprehensive propositional knowledge about everything, even of himself. I still cannot understand how this God chose his nature, or how the trinity came to be joined at the hip. Imagining just one eternal being who knows everything that can be known is incomprehensible on its own, but now there are three such divine beings who have this knowledge and have never disagreed within the Godhead. It's clear obfuscationist philosophers are making shit up as they go to save their Christian faith from refutation, since the only basis for believing this crap are some ancient pre-scientific writings. [Transcript of this part of his speech is below].

The effrontery of it is beyond astounding. This supposedly simple god had to know how to set the nuclear force 10 to the 39 times stronger than gravity. He had to calculate with similar exactitude the requisite values of half-a-dozen critical numbers – the fundamental constants of physics. Do you, with your prodigiously complex brain, understand quantum mechanics? I don’t! Yet god, that paragon of ultimate pure simplicity, not only understands it, but invented it. Plus special and general relativity, plus the Higg’s boson, and dark matter. Finally, the icing on the cake, on top of being the ultimate mathematics and physics genius; the “simple” god has enough bandwidth to listen to the prayers of billions of people simultaneously in all the world’s languages. He hears their confessed sins and decides which should be forgiven. He weighs out which cancer patients shall recover, which earthquake victims shall be spared; even who shall win a tennis match or a parking space. God may be almighty, all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving. But one thing he cannot be, if he is even to minimally meet his job description, is all-simple. The statistical argument against the divine designer remains intact, and inescapably devastating.

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How do you like him now?