Dawkins' Confused Notion of Explanation

It is tempting sometimes to imagine Richard Dawkins as a sort of Max Bialiystock of the popular science world, with his God Delusion being a sort of literary equivalent of The Producers. I sometimes imagine him, pre-publication, preparing to launch his rant, both irreligious and anti-religious in form, cloaked in the assumption that nobody would take it seriously. Were he ever to have displayed a sense of humour I would be tempted to make this thesis the central argument of this blog. More in keeping with his reverence for the scientific view, and of his own place in the shaping of that view, might be the thought that he offers his views as a sort of Secular Encyclical, albeit one designed to endorse the pre-existing opinions of his readership rather than to offer the consolations of more difficult truths.

Dawkins operates a sort of positivism with respect to theology: not only does he take its claims to be false he also suggests that it is meaningless to think of it as being an academic discipline at all. It is not clear how, even given the former view, one might arrive at the latter one. Is it sufficient that the beliefs suggested by theology are false? If so does it follow that Newtonian physics is meaningless as an academic discipline?

But it’s still Christmas as I write this and so in the spirit of the season (the celebration of which might or might not be meaningless) let us give Dawkins all he wants: let us agree that to meet the central, ahem, “arguments” of God Delusion it will not do to fall back into the idiom of theology. But we don’t need to. An objection to the Dawkins, possibly a fatal one, can be developed using thoughts suggested by that most scientifically sympathetic and materialist-inclined philosopher Donald Davidson (no theologian he!).

Dawkins assimilates all explanation to the scientific. The existence of consciousness is, for him a mere epiphenomenon: a causal product of the elaboration of the evolutionary story. But the existence of consciousness carries with it an alternative, though not competing, form of explanation, the personal explanation. Davidson, who affirms that all mental events are identical with physical events (and who locates the proper sphere of philosophical inquiry in the third-personal, rather than the subjective) nevertheless argues that the mental is anomalous with respect to the physical, and he does this precisely because of the strict (nomological) status of the laws of physics. On this view, a view which owes nothing to theology and everything to the “desert landscapes” of a scientific philosophy, the forms of explanation which make reference to human beliefs and desires etc will never be displaced by science, however developed that science eventually becomes. It is not the case, as Dawkins seems to assume, that theists in formulating the “God hypothesis” are guilty of a thought too far. Rather, the fact of agency and the forms of explanation it furnishes, is immanent in the world, to at least the extent of science. You don’t need to do any “theology” to realise this; just a little philosophy.