Richard Dawkins versus John Lennox

Richard Dawkins

At the age of fifteen I wrote my first book, with no intention of publishing, just for my personal use. It was a two-volume zoology of invertebrates. I still refer to it, although classifications have changed a lot, with the rise of cladistics and DNA analysis.

In 1977, this time with the intention of sending it to the printer, I wrote another book in English under the title Human cultures and evolution, where I proposed the following:

·         Cultural evolution is equivalent to biological evolution. Many properties are common to both fields. Human civilizations are equivalent to biological species and describe similar life curves. There is a cultural selection, equivalent to and very similar to natural selection, proposed by Darwin to explain the origin of the species.

·         But cultural evolution, which takes place in a different environment, also presents unique properties. For example, it is faster and hybridization is much easier. Furthermore, the concept of truth provides cultural selection with a criterion unknown for genes. A gene may be more useful for the survival of individuals who have it, but it cannot be said to be true. For the survival of a cultural element, this criterion may be essential.

In 1979 my book was published. At that time I did not know of the existence of The selfish gene, the book by Richard Dawkins, published three years earlier, where he raised ideas very similar to mine and gave them a name: Dawkins called memetics the theory that cultural evolution resembles biological evolution, and meme the cultural elements subject to cultural evolution.

But Dawkins does not consider the concept of truth. He takes to its extreme the analogy between the two types of evolution, and argues that only usefulness is important, for a gene or for a meme. In the case of a gene, its usefulness in ensuring the offspring of the individual who has that gene; in the case of a meme, usefulness can be expressed in other ways. As I said in another post on this blog:

A truer theory has, in a certain sense, a greater usefulness, even though established theories may provide greater political or economical advantages than truer theories. Scientists and philosophers have always declared that it is our duty to defend truth against every other kind of benefit. Duty is another concept usually forgotten by Dawkins and other biologists who work on memetics.

In 2008, a debate between Richard Dawkins and John Lennox took place at the Oxford Natural History Museum on the following topic: Has science buried God? Of course, Dawkins was a defender of atheism, while Lennox upheld the Christian position.

John Lennox

Lennox’s arguments were much the same as those I have used here and elsewhere to oppose Dawkins’s atheism. However, there was one argument he did not use, despite Dawkins giving him the opportunity. Dawkins said, more than once, that if God existed, he should be enormously complex. It’s the same argument he made in his book The God Delusion, around his famous parallel, the design of a Boeing-747. This argument can be expressed as follows:

The author of a design must always be more complex than the thing designed.

If God has designed the universe, he must be much more complex than the universe.

The more complex a being is, much less likely is its existence.

Therefore it is highly unlikely that God exists.

To consider this argument, we must start by defining the word complex. What makes a complex being different from a simple being? Obviously, the fact that it is made up of many parts that work in mutual coordination. But that’s where Dawkins’s argument fails, and this is what Lennox should have told him (but didn't):

The first premise applies to material beings. But the God of Christianity is not made of matter, which is just one of the properties of the universe that He has created. Therefore, the second premise is false. Consequently, the entire reasoning fails and becomes a textbook case of the straw man fallacy (or the straw God fallacy, in this case).

As usually happens in these debates, neither of them won the day, although my impression is that Lennox led the debate and Dawkins let himself be carried away (under protest, of course). At one point Dawkins acknowledged that neither he nor Lennox (or anyone) knew anything about scientific questions such as the origin of the universe and the origin of life. In fact, I was surprised when Dawkins, who had dismissed the Christian doctrine on Jesus Christ as insignificant, was asked by Lennox: But if it were true? he replied: If it were true, it would be important. By which he implicitly recognized that truth may be an essential criterion for the survival of memes.

The same post in Spanish

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Manuel Alfonseca