Why There Almost Certainly Is a God: Doubting Dawkins [Paperback]

Keith Ward (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 2009

Pronounced atheist Richard Dawkins has claimed that no theologian has ever produced a satisfactory response to his arguments that there most likely is not a God. In this open-minded and innovative philosophical challenge, theologian David Ward addresses Dawkins’s various ideas with sharp, clear arguments. He points out that when Dawkins—a scientist—enters the world of philosophy and religion, his passion often leads his argumentation to descend into stereotyping, pastiche, and mockery. Stimulating and thought-provoking, this study both locates the flaws in Dawkins's arguments and makes a perfectly rational case for the existence of God.

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About the Author

Keith Ward is an Anglican priest and joint president of the World Congress of Faiths. He is the author of more than 20 books, including The Big Questions in Science and Religion, Divine Action, Is Religion Dangerous?, and What the Bible Really Teaches.

Product Details

• Paperback: 160 pages
• Publisher: Lion UK (April 1, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0745953301
• ISBN-13: 978-0745953304
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 0.3 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #724,325 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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36 of 42 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars What a difficult problem! But it won't go away ..., September 20, 2009

By 

WB, Zeno - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Why There Almost Certainly Is a God: Doubting Dawkins (Paperback)

In what follows I'll try to give an account of the book itself, without trying to defend a particular viewpoint. I treat it as a response to Dawkin's "The God delusion".

STRONG POINTS

(1) The tone is wonderfully civil. It's a BIG relief to know that (at least outwardly) corteous and restrained people still exist in this world of shrill, disingenuous and venomous polemics. I honestly don't understand where "Hande Z" could have found the person he attacks so much in the first four, ad hominem, paragraphs of his one-star review.
(2) Ward is honest. He makes clear at the outset the difference between "scientific" and "personal" explanations.
(3) He draws attention to the fact that the several versions of basic reality postulated by physics are as difficult and incomprehensible to us as the concept of God, and perhaps even more so. He also points out that it would be absurd to deny the status of rationally accessible reality to non-mathemathizable fields of human knowledge such as history (and by implication therefore to the IDEA of God). He invokes the right kind of Design Argument, not the God-of-the-gaps one.
(4) He carefully explains in clear and accessible modern language Aquinas' five arguments for the existence of God, while at the same time giving also their original scholastic formulation. He has however an easier time stating the first three than the last two (which are of a "personal" nature).
(5) He neither seems to be swayed by personal prejudices, nor, with a single exception, to be a biblical literalist by any standards (though I'm aware that to some/many people this will seem a minus rather than a plus). In pages 63 to 66 of the PB edition he offers a remarkably frank account of the evolution of the concept of God in the Old Testament.
(6) Overall, the whole book is clearly, if not outstandingly, written, with just two grammatical mistakes (something that is alas nowadays very common and particularly annoys me), and gives an impression of plain sincerity, so difficult to achieve in a field (theology) so slippery and so conductive to pompous and vacuous statements.


WEAKNESSES

(1) In attacking the materialistic outlook because of its inability to define matter, I think he misses its point (as I think does Dawkins, although for another reason), which is simply to assert the metaphysical proposition that the only valid way to study the phenomenic world is by using the scientific method -something admittedly difficult to define- and public evidence as far as possible or reasonable. I'm not implying that it's a valid viewpoint, but only that if the "scientific world" revealed by the method appears to be almost incomprehensible (or even finally unknowable, as predicted by Fred Hoyle in one of his SF novels) to the human mind, that neither proves nor suggests that there must perforce be other independent realms of reality (whatever THIS word may mean!).
(2) His efforts to be persuasive notwithstanding, the book shows the strain of trying to conflate an eternal Creator (which from the arguments he gives seems a very plausible assumption) with a personal, compassionate and supremely merciful God. Again, that's not to say that such an Entity doesn't exist, only that the evidence he gives for it, however morally impressive-sounding, is ... purely personal.
(3) In chapter 7 he cites personal religious experience as a pointer to God's existence. That's perfectly valid, but he doesn't refer to the unitive experience, common to all cultures and religions and unmistakeable universal in character, which is undoubtedly the strongest indication of the existence of another state of consciousness in which the Absolute (whatever THAT may be!) is clearly perceived. Perhaps because it's difficult to reconcile with the idea of a personal God? But Meister Eckart, Jacob Böhme, San Juan de la Cruz, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Aquinas himself, etc., all had them and were able (some with some effort) to reconcile them with their Christian faith. By excluding such experiences, he renders that chapter the weakest of the book.
(4) He sidesteps a little when discussing the issue of God's complexity.
(5) In contrast to the rest of the book, the section of Ch. 1 titled "Can we establish by science that God exists?" is (for me) either incoherent or superfluous, and contains besides a sentence that runs counter to the "rational" viewpoint expounded everywhere else in the book. Ward writes: "There are even very good reasons why God might not be a subject to scientific experiments. The Bible says 'Do not put the Lord your God to the test' (Luke 4:12). That seems to rule out experimenting on God. And that seems right, since we would not even experiment on our friends and loved ones, to find out, for example, if they really loved us". But this, if I don't misunderstand what Ward is implying, takes us back the the "credo ut intelligam" of St. Augustine and St. Anselm, a position that Ward is trying to avoid in the rest of the book! Although, to be fair, he says a number of times that this or that argument will only convince someone if he/she already believes. And so we are back to Aquinas' Summa Theologiae. Nothing new under the sun, therefore.

To conclude, Ward succeeds in refuting the obvious misstatements (or fallacies, as you like) contained in "The God delusion", and this in a non-vituperative, not even rancorous, manner.
He doesn't succeed in demonstrating that it's more rational to believe than not to believe, in God. If you believe, perhaps after reading him you'll come away with your faith better founded; if you are an atheist, you can in good conscience continue to be one: Ward will help you not to commit some silly mistakes in arguing your case.
If you already are familiar with the subject, this book is superfluous. If you're new to it, it's valuable.

I use a more consevative criterion of rating than other reviewers. To compare with them, I'd award this book 3 or 3½ stars.

13 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Useful fundamental argument, September 3, 2009

By 

Collin Brendemuehl "CRB" (Ohio, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Why There Almost Certainly Is a God: Doubting Dawkins (Paperback)

The field of Christian apologetics is the accumulation of 2 millennia of methods and approaches. At the earliest stage there were the classic apologists and evidentialists who both saw Jesus and the resurrection and experienced all the events of the era. But as time progressed, as we moved further away from the events, and skepticism rose, it became necessary to build new methods and approaches to answer to the questions.

The most recent serious challenge to Christianity is naturalistic evolution. We are not talking about the principle of evolution, that is, change, but about a presupposition about the nature and character of all that exists. This presupposition sits behind the materialistic framework of Richard Dawkins view of nature, mind, and all of history. His book, The God Delusion, presents to the world his criticism of the existence of God and his reasons why.

In response to Dawkins' claims, Keith Ward as given us Why There Almost Certainly is a God. This book is an excellent introduction to the field of Christian apologetics. Though there are some points where I would differ, that can be set aside just for the sake of his major point. Mr. Ward gives us a practical implementation of the Kalam cosmological argument. Following are some quotes from the book which are of immense value:

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Most philosophers in the world have been in some sense idealists - that is, they have thought the ultimate reality is mind. Theists are philosophers who accept this, but add that the physical world does have its own proper reality, which originates from but is different from God, the ultimate mind. (p. 13)

The world of philosophy, of resolute thought about the ultimate nature of things, is a very varied one, and there is no one philosophical view that has the agreement of all competent philosophers. But in this world there are very few materialists, who think we can know that mind is reducible to electrochemical activity in the brain, or is a surprising and unexpected product of purely material processes.

In the world of modern philosophy, there are idealists, theists, phenomenalists, common sense pragmatists, scientific realists, sceptics, and materialists. These are all going concerns, living philosophical theories of what is ultimately real. This observation does not settle any arguments. But it puts Dawkins' `alternative hypothesis' in perspective. He is setting out to defend a very recent, highly contentious, minority philosophical world-view. (p. 14)

What is the point of being a materialist when we are not sure exactly what matter is? (p. 15)

Dawkins has a lot of fun with `supernatural entities', as he calls them. He says that God might exist outside the universe - `wherever that might be'.

Arguments for God ... are arguments to show that mind is the ultimate reality, and that materialism is a delusion caused by a misuse of modern science. The arguments do not `prove' that there is one extra pseudo-physical thing in or just outside the universe. They provide good reasons for thinking that the ultimate character of the universe is mind, and that matter is the appearance or manifestation or creation of cosmic mind. (p. 20)

There is any number of ways in which the Darwinian process of slow, gradual, cumulative adaptation could fail. This is not an argument for God. But it shows that reliance on the predictability of nature, and on its tendency to produce increasingly complex and adapted organic life-forms, is dependent on a very specific adjustment of physical laws that is itself hugely improbable.

The design argument, in its seventeenth-century form - finding the existence of organic life-forms to be too improbable to have arisen spontaneously by chance - may have been superseded by Darwin. But the design argument still lives, as an argument that the precise structure of laws and constants that seem uniquely fitted to produce life by the process of evolution is hugely improbably. The existence of a designer or creator God would make it much less improbably. That is the New Design Argument, and it is very effective. (p. 39-40)

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One of Christianity's infrequently appropriated but highly effective arguments is one of theism's (it pre-dates Christianity) is DDS, the doctrine of divine simplicity. It is a principle that keeps the doctrine of the Trinity coherent and makes a general understanding of God clear and, of course, simple. You can read it in Aquinas' Summa Theologica and it is only a couple of pages in length.

Ward makes appropriate use of this argument on pages 48-50. Though he does not mention it by name, the principle is clear. He then builds on it when he employs Occam's Razor in this context with the goal of critiquing the unnecessary complexity of Dawkins' materialism.

I would recommend this book for the Christian apologist. If you are not strong in apologetics, first read Five Views on Apologetics and then Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics (third edition). This book provides a useful tool for establishing the necessary existence of God. I will leave it to you to garner more evidence from the last chapters and make full use of it in your work and ministry.

20 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Dawkins Gets Dunked, May 31, 2009

By 

Brett L. Roe (NY, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Why There Almost Certainly Is a God: Doubting Dawkins (Paperback)

With charming wit and a devastatingly sharp intellect, the Christian philosopher Keith Ward systematically eviscerates Richard Dawkins' anti-religious arguments from "The God Delusion." By the end, he reveals most of them to be either logically short-sighted or intellectually dishonest.
Like Ward, I believe that the debate between theism & atheism is far from over, and that there are compelling arguments to be made on both sides. In this short, readable book, Ward doesn't really try to finish off the dispute with any unassailable conclusion (despite the book's title, which is a direct rebuttal of one of Dawkins' chapter headings). Rather, he does an excellent job of raising the discourse out of the dumbed down muddle it's fallen into lately, where the ill-informed & the close-minded on both sides hog the spotlight & posture arrogantly at each other.
Recommended for those who prefer a well-reasoned debate based on facts & logic to impassioned polemics & simplistic conclusions.