Customer Reviews

God Chance and Necessity

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Ward does not go about trying to construct a proof of God in any traditional sense. Instead he looks at the epistemological and ontological positions of the debate. The question of the existence of God relates to the presuppositions a person brings to the question. Nothing better exemplifies that fact than two of the other reviews which apparently read very different books than I did. Despite one reviewer's assertion that this is nothing but warmed up old apologetics and another's that Ward doesn't answer arguments against his positions, neither statement is accurate.

What Ward makes clear is that reductionism as a necessary methodological strategy in science (we must break down complex systems into smaller, simpler observable parts in order to discern how they function) does not mean that reductionism is necessarily an appropriate metaphysical principle. In the case of Dawkins, Ward argues that human beings are very much more than "gene machines". Ward basically illustrates that reductionism as a metaphysical approach is incapable of explaining or understanding the full panoply of human behavior and experience. Simply put, reductionism is insufficient to describe things that are of importance to human beings.

This is not an argument against evolution, which Ward accepts as good science. It is an argument against the polemical assertion that the chance nature of mutation in DNA makes life purposeless as Dawkins asserts. Certainly, if you are a theist, there is no reason to presuppose that God does not create in the universe through the process of evolution. Ward posits chance and necessity as part of a creative dynamic imbued into matter, through which the universe can come into being. Simply because chance plays a role does not mean that there is no meaning. In fact, Dawkins often characterizes himself as a warm, funny person who is not heartless or uncaring, but at the same time postulates a universe that is uncaring and without meaning. Therein lies the tension. To espouse as a metaphysical principle there is no meaning to the universe or us and our hopes and dreams (as Bertrand Russell did before), but to act as if there is.

Ultimately, the final contradiction for the materialist comes in the denial of free will. A reductionist, like Dawkins, has to admit that there is no such thing as free will according to his metaphysical and epistemological approach of reductionism. Dawkins has stated that free will is illusory. Yet, he fills a lot of books and research papers writing as if he has access to a free will that allows him to discern what is true not only about evolution but the ultimate nature of reality. This, of course, is the ultimate failure of reductionism, to argue that there is no such thing as truth, because we are all the results of mechanical processes -- either Laplace's particles in motion, or Dawkins' gene machines. Yet, everything about our everyday lives say that this is not the case. That is the central issue in Ward's book -- the interpretation of chance and necessity in the real world. The metaphysical reductionist is forced into self-contradictory statements -- e.g., I can prove that we don't have free will -- whereas the theist can make statements about the nature of reality that explain a much wider gamut of human experience.

3 star book with 5 star bibliography and intentions.

First, it is a difficult read, deeply philosophic and challenging. I found myself often re-reading and re-analyzing sections. Second, builds up slowly, reaches a peak in chapter 8 with "Brains and Consciousness" although it continues for 2 more rather redundant chapters, despite being a short book of 200 pages.

It is fundamentally a reply to two books: Peter Atkins _Creation Revisited_ and Richard Dawkins _Blind Watchmaker_, first half of the book directed towards Atkins, latter half is contra Dawkins.

The major theme is straightforward:
1-theism is a good explanation of the purpose, function, teleology of the universe as we see it, despite evolutionary denial of purpose in the universe.
2-theism is better than materialism as an explanation for the evolution of life, in particular for the evolution of us: thinking, conscious, believing, moral, responsible.
3-theism is a good answer for conscious of humans, materialism undermines consciousness by making it a random occurence without necessary justification other than the usual evolutionary natural selection mechanism for the differential survival of the survivors.

From the first page:
"To the majority of those who have reflected deeply and written about the origin and nature of the universe, it has seemed that it points beyond itself to a source which is non-physical and of great intelligence and power."
To the last: "but, of course, really to believe in God is to have some experience of a being of transcendent power and value which is life-enhancing and value-transforming, and to trust the testimony of at least some of those who claim such experience to a pre-eminent degree."
the book is written by a deeply thinking, deeply feeling Theistic Christian, who makes no apologies for his faith, but justifies it in logical, reasonable ways. But i see nothing in the book that will convince a naturalistic, materialistic atheist. Maybe such proofs exist, i don't know, but i do know they aren't in this book, despite the author's intentions and best attempt to present them. At best the arguments are carefully reasoned essays that point beyond themselves to the underlying ideas and books for further study on the readers part. Preliminary, exploratory, good beginnings, not final, or conclusive or something to grab and put into someone's hand, unfortunately.

But that said, the author puts his finger on a critical issue, that materialists like Atkins and Dawkins refuse to admit. Chapter 8, pg 147, "The mystery is how it comes about that the construction of brains, of complicated collections of purely physical particles, gives rise to something apparently non-physical: thoughts, feelings, dreams, images and intentions.' That materialist with a purely randomness underlying evolution end up denying the purposefulness of their own brains, of their own actions. This chapter is the key one in the book, the moral arguments that follow in the next two chapters are basically repetitions of the same ideas in different domains. His arguments are basically sound and derived from Scriptural foundations, yet for some reason the arguments do not appear to deflect the critical judgements of materialism in a significant way. But rather seem more like broad statements than actual 'battle-tested' formulations directed at the metaphysics of materialism. However i believe that the author has insights that i would like to follow up and i will read another newer book to see if he engages stronger, with more details than does this one.

Worth the time, if you are philosophically inclined. Not a book to recommend lightly to anyone, the topic is important and i will continue to look at this author and like books. Not to be discouraged, it is not a simple nor straightforward issue, this collision of two competing world and life views: modern evolutionary materialistic naturalistic atheism and traditional Scriptural Theistic Christianity.

"The publisher is out of stock," reads the sad little note at the top of this page. That's a shame, because every reader of Richard Dawkins's _The Blind Watchmaker_ ought to read this trenchant reply.

Ward also takes on a few other thinkers (e.g. Peter Atkins) but most of his fire is concentrated on Dawkins. Ward is pretty generous with Dawkins (repeatedly, for example, complimenting him on his writing style) and is certainly no enemy of evolutionary theory. But Ward rightly notes that Dawkins pretty much hasn't got a clue what religion and religious philosophy are about, seems to be hostile to both, and in fact provides evidence himself that the emergence of life via evolutionary processes should be seen as the result of intelligent design (to borrow a useful term from William Dembski).

Warning: not _all_ of Ward's arguments are sound. (At one point, for example, he argues that because there are so many more possible _complex_ explanations than _simple_ ones, the probability of a complex explanation far outweighs that of a simple one and therefore God is a more probable explanation than anything simpler. This isn't correct; the probability of a _particular_ complex explanation is smaller than the probability of just _any_ old complex explanation.)

But many, even most, of his critiques hit their targets. Hey, publisher -- can we get this item back in stock, please?

Contrary to the misunderstandings of some of the earlier reviewers, this book is not really an apologia for theism. Nor is it in any way, shape or form an attack on science as such. One can only speculate how such misunderstandings can come about when the intentions of the author are so clearly stated.

Obviously, those reviews completely miss the purpose of this book, which is clearly stated by Ward himself:

"The view I shall take is that, on most issues, there are no conflicts (between science and religion) and that the success of scientific investigation corroborates theism, rather than the reverse" (p.12 - my addition).


This intention provides a starting point that can be illuminated with the following analogy (mine, not the author's).

If we want to go fishing in a lake with the intention of actually catching fish, we pre-suppose in some sense that there are fish to be caught. Otherwise, we are wasting our time.

Likewise, if we want to examine the universe with the intention of finding some orderly explanation for its operation, we pre-suppose in some sense that the explanation we ultimately arrive at will, in fact, be orderly. Otherwise, we would again be wasting our time.

Beginning with this common-sense starting point, Ward wants to draw out the implications of that pre-supposition. He chooses to base his program on the naturalistic arguments of two prominent British scientists, Richard Dawkins and Peter Atkins, both of whom are clearly in the reductive materialist camp. But he wishes to nuance the very observations that are used by them to actually support his starting point - rather than, as they do, to support the materialist view.

In a way such a program can be considered a rebuttal of the arguments supporting reductive materialism. The idea, however, is not merely to show where those specific arguments break down, but to use the observations that they are based on to go in a different direction.

Ward's program is not without real difficulties, however. Perhaps because he is using the arguments of others as a base, he is never as consistent in his philosophical approach as is, for example, Mariano Artigas in The Mind of the Universe. Just to take one aspect of Ward's approach, consider his view of science as a search for a natural order. It is sometimes difficult to grasp if Ward is saying that the order being sought by science is to be found in the scientific explanations as such, or if there is a real order that science `discovers' over time. For a scientist `doing science', it actually doesn't matter. One can `do science' either way. But for Ward and what he is trying to get it, it actually does matter.

So like a plane flying through a thunderstorm, the ride can get very choppy. But ultimately, Ward seems to emerge from the storm going in the direction that he seems to have wanted.

That direction can be called the descriptive model of science. The model goes something like this. It is unquestionably true that science explains natural actions in an orderly fashion. The explanations are what we call the `laws of science'. But the order obtained by those explanations cannot in itself be causative. To put it bluntly, equations and words cannot be the source of any real actions. Therefore, if the natural actions are real (and they are), and if the order is real (and it is), we must seek the real source elsewhere.

Unfortunately, all that Ward's program gets us is that there is an order-producing reality to the universe, and that such a reality is the source of real actions. It doesn't actually tell us what the nature of that reality is.

Ward concludes that the order-producing reality can be identified as the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God, but he doesn't actually provide the ontological necessity that this conclusion requires. To get to that necessity, Ward would have to consider ways of knowing that go beyond the empirical-objective experiences he is limiting himself to. Perhaps that would have made the book much longer than the author wanted, or perhaps the author felt that a sufficiency argument met his stated purpose. Nevertheless, I think that at least some pointers for going further should have been included. So I can only give this book a four star rating.

With that qualification, I do recommend this book as an introduction to those who are confused about the falsity that `doing science' requires a non-theistic worldview.

This book provides the most objective and rational arguments for the existence of God, divorced from personal subjectivism or spiritual experience. From purely scientific, logical grounds Ward illustrates clearly why theism makes a lot more sense than materialism.

I recommend this book as a rational and logical attack against adherents of Richard Dawkins' thesis of the `Blind Watchmaker'.

Keith Ward's "God Chance and Necessity" is extremely accessible to the general reader, much like Richard Dawkins' book, "The Blind Watch Maker". I think he does the public a service by making it so easy to read. Unfortunately, this accessibility is largely gained at the expense of a certain philosophical elegance, if you will. For example, in some contexts he'll use the word "universe" as meaning physical spacetime, and in other contexts he'll use it to mean "everything that exists, including God." Initially, he tells you when he's changing his meaning, but then he later doesn't.

In short, if you are used to the clarity and rigorous approach used by many philosophical authors (e.g., Immanuel Kant, Aristotle, etc.), then you may find Ward's approach a bit less deductive (or even inductive). He is mostly concerned with rebutting Dawkins and Atkins than actually developing an original philosophy.

For instance, he develops many interesting metaphysical ideas (for example, human free will is not incompatible with God's omniscience, since God could conceivably know of every *possible universe* while the future of the *actual universe* was indetermined), but he doesn't lay down a rigorous metaphysical system. I suppose one reason he does this is because he wants to appeal to a wide crowd of religious people who have their own doctrines, and they might feel alienated if Ward was to make truth claims beyond what is universally accepted about how the universe works.

Not clearly a good thing, he often waxes lyrical in poetic tangents that don't do much to help his case, except maybe emotionally or aesthetically. Though, I suppose if intuition and aesthetics are any basis for concluding something about reality, then these tangents aren't entirely wasteful. Oh, and for some reason he frequently employs awkward transitional adverbs to begin sentences like, "In fact, of course, it is true that...," which I found distracting.

I think this book's greatest success is in highlighting the grave limitations of natural selection *alone* to explain intelligent life. He effectively proves that the idea of life existing for the propagation of genes (Cf. Dawkins, "The Selfish Gene") is completely ludicrous (it would be, he points out, like suggesting that the cake exists for the propagation of the recipe; but the recipe does not have intention, and neither does DNA!). Again, these are not couched in philosophical language, and, if you want a more rigorous approach that supports Ward's position, I recommend you see any of John Searle's essays or books about consciousness.

The fact that this book isn't as critically acclaimed or as famous as any of Richard Dawkins' books is injustice in the extreme. Discovering this book is like discovering a pot of gold.

According to the book's introduction, it was written after Ward had a personal debate with Dawkins about the nature of the cosmos, evolution and the natural world. Ward succeeds in highlighting and underlining the blatant fallacies that exist within Dawkins books (especially `The Blind Watchmaker').

Ward illustrates scientifically and objectively, that the notion of inanimate atoms "accidentally" evolving from chaos to to galaxies, and from soup-to-man is a notion of blind dogma and absurdity.

Other books I would recommend which highlight similar issues are 'Darwin's Black Box' written by bio-chemist Michael Behe, and the rather blandly named 'Not By Chance' by Physicist Dr. Lee M. Spetner.

These books illustrate the fallacies and absurdity of natural selection on both theoretical and experimental grounds. Behe also highlights the reason why science never shouts "Eureka!" at such discoveries - namely because the "noble pursuits of science" would simply end up shooting itself in the foot.

Keith Ward argues that for a theory to be rational and explanatory it must rest on Christian theism. Dr. Ward asserts: "A first principle of a truly explanatory theory is that it must retain the full reality of the phenomena it is seeking to explain, and not eliminate it or transfer it into something else. It is exactly that principle that is contravened by materialism." He quotes Dawkins: "Consciousness is the most profound mystery facing modern biology" (Richard Dawkins: "The Selfish Gene"). And Ward adds: "The existence of consciousness is the refutation of materialism" (Keith Ward).

Chapters include:

- The origin of the universe
- Something for nothing
- The metaphysics of theism
- Brains and consciousness
- And much more.

Professor Ward continues: "God is ... the explanatory of the nature of the universe." And Dr. Ward notes: "Materialist beliefs are not based on evidence in the way Newton's laws are based on repeated experiments. They are believed; which tells you what you should be prepared to count as evidence."

Concepts, logic, moral law, love, and mathematical formulas cannot be reduced to mere physical properties. I like how Wilson posits the amusing yet heady illustration concerning the nonsensical notion of physicalism, "If there is no God, then all abstractions are chemical epiphenomena, like swamp gas over fetid water. This means that we have no reason for assigning truth and falsity to the chemical fizz we call reasoning or right and wrong to the irrational reaction we call morality."
Moreover Keith Ward opines: "It is pretty hard to see how ... mechanical interactions can give rise to consciousness."

This volume provides easy-to-understand and powerful arguments for theism concerning many difficult concepts. A good resource for the budding apologist or a interested seeker.

The author does a good job of laying out fundamental philosophical arguments in favor of theism and its non-conflict with real science. The book helps counter the popular anti-Christian ravings of bigoted authors like Dawkins who knowingly uses rhetoric and deception to get his particular world view (sad as it is) accepted by others [misery loves company!]. It was nice to see Dawkins' "memes" concept so nicely trashed in a single paragraph (Chapter 9).

A good read and highly recommended.

The fact that this book isn't as critically acclaimed or as famous as any of Richard Dawkins' books is injustice in the extreme. Discovering this book is like discovering a pot of gold.

According to the book's introduction, it was written after Ward had a personal debate with Dawkins about the nature of the cosmos, evolution and the natural world. Ward succeeds in highlighting and underlining the blatant fallacies that exist within Dawkins books (especially `The Blind Watchmaker').

Ward illustrates scientifically and objectively, that the notion of inanimate atoms "accidentally" evolving from chaos to to galaxies, and from soup-to-man is a notion of blind dogma and absurdity.

Other books I would recommend which highlight similar issues are 'Darwin's Black Box' written by bio-chemist Michael Behe, and the rather blandly named 'Not By Chance' by Physicist Dr. Lee M. Spetner.

These books illustrate the fallacies and absurdity of natural selection and materialism on both theoretical and experimental grounds. Behe also highlights the reason why science never shouts "Eureka!" at such discoveries - namely because the "noble pursuits of science" to discover the material world would end up shooting itself in the foot.

(A quick not to the previous reviewer - going to Church isn't important. Discovering Truth is!