Listened to Richard Dawkins in interview with Terry Gross on NPR this week. I had read ‘the God Delusion’ earlier, so I was already familiar with his arguments against the existence of God, which appear a bit shallow to me. It goes something like this:
Sounds logical, right?
But wait…
If you’d analyze the mechanical and bio-chemical infrastructure of me and my dog, would there be much of a difference? Don’t cows have 4 stomachs, which one could argue makes them more complex than us 2-leggers. Yet, as a whole, I would argue, we humans are a lot more complex than any of our animal friends. The difference is in our minds.
Biologists might argue that our brains are bigger and thus more evolved than those of the animals, which explains our greater mental abilities. Maybe so, but the complexity of our minds does not grow through evolution, but through learning and experience. Our minds are very simple when we are born, and we are capable like no other animal to learn and expand our minds. As a side effect, we have the longest childhood of any species by far. And somewhere in that time, we develop the capability to think original, or at least independent, thought. Since God would be more like the mind than like the body, the need for God’s complexity certainly does not disprove his existence, even if the complexity of life is likely explained through natural selection.
In his book, Dawkins tells us he is a monoist, i.e., he believes brain and spirit are one. Do monoists believe that once science has figured out how the brain works, you could build a Hal-like (2001: a Space Odyssey) material thing that litterally would have a mind of its own? As a computer programmer, I certainly cannot believe that. But like Dawkins, I have a very hard time believing what I cannot see.