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One Complaint about Richard Dawkins

My biggest complaint about Richard Dawkins is that he is one of these modern skeptics who believes that certainty is not possible to humanity. He holds the strange position that unless one is omniscient, then one cannot be "absolutely certain" about anything.

Dawkins provides us with the example of seeing color to illustrate his point. In The God Delusion he writes:

An example might be that philosophical chestnut, the question whether you see red as I do. Maybe your red is my green, or something completely different from any colour that I can imagine. Philosophers cite this question as one that can never be answered, no matter what new evidence might one day become available. (p.47-48)

Dawkins goes on to outline seven different judgments about the existence of God, which fall along a gradient from certainty that God does exist (1) to certainty that he does not (7). Dawkins describes himself as a 6 because God's existence is "undisprovable."

Dawkins even says that he's a 6 about the existence of fairies in his garden. Telling.

The color example is invalid and I'll explain why.

"The perception of green is evoked by light having a spectrum dominated by energy with a wavelength of roughly 520–570 nm." Wikipedia.

"Red is any of a number of similar colors evoked by light consisting predominantly of the longest wavelengths of light discernible by the human eye, in the wavelength range of roughly 625–750 nm." Also Wikipedia.

Regardless of your ability to perceive it, if a bit of light has a wavelength of 550nm, then it is green. If it has a wavelength of 650nm, then it is red. If it has a wavelength of 900nm, then it is neither red nor green. This is because "green" and "red" describe light at their respective ranges of wavelength.

There are methods of measuring the wavelength of light which do not involve using your eyes.

When you perceive a certain color, cells in your eye are stimulated which send a signal to your brain which your brain then interprets as being a certain color. Your eyes or brain (or both) may be broken, however, and you may come to the conclusion that light of one wavelength is actually of a different wavelength.

Given sufficient knowledge and understanding of human eyes and brains, we could scan you and tell you how you perceive color. We can't stop you from lying, but we could see how things are.

Thus, we could, in fact, tell whether or not the red you perceive is the red I perceive. All facts of existence are this way. Anything you want to discover about reality is actually discoverable.

I stress "about reality" in the sentence above, because if something is not a part of reality, which is to say that it doesn't exist, then there isn't anything for you to discover about it.

In science, it is appropriate to describe conclusions using probability. "We are X% sure that Y is the case." This is because we are looking at reality and we are aware of the fact that we lack additional, relevant information. Additional experiments with predicted outcomes add to the probability that something is the case.

At some point, with sufficient information gathering, we become certain of the conclusion because there is no evidence to the contrary and no niggling doubts about it. Saying that you aren't omniscient is not a doubt, but a fact that isn't really relevant to the description of your newly established knowledge.

When all the evidence supports a given conclusion, that is certainty. Assertions to the contrary which are unsupported by any evidence are not knowledge and should be regarded as arbitrary. Similarly, if there is no evidence for a particular conclusion and no evidence against it, it is also regarded as arbitrary. You, literally, know nothing with regard to that particular statement.

Dawkins cites an example given by Bertrand Russel in which it is suggested that there is a teapot orbiting the sun somewhere between Earth and Mars and it is too small to be seen by our most powerful telescopes. That suggestion is arbitrary, but Dawkins regards it as having some probability by the mere fact that it is possible. There is absolutely no evidence to support such a claim. It has no probability.

The term "possible" is not properly applied to things for which there is supporting evidence. It only describes things that do not contradict our understanding of reality. For example, it is possible that there is a teapot orbiting the sun between Mars and Earth. We have absolutely no reason to think that there is, but if there were, it would not make us question our sanity or anything in particular about the rest of reality. (Hang onto that thought because I'm coming back to it.)

Some people, like Richard Dawkins probably, think that "certainty" means that you know everything and therefore know that a particular statement is false. They are usually only willing to apply certainty to things like math. 2 + 2 is CERTAINLY 4.

But what if I had two apples and then I got two more apples? Is there any doubt that I would have four apples at the end?

But if the only situations in which "certainty" is possible are cases where we know everything means that the term "certain" is rendered utterly useless and ridiculous. Given that we don't know everything, might we not discover a case in which two apples plus two more apples results in some amount other than four? How do you know it won't? You don't know everything. So, certainty doesn't even apply to math.

All of our knowledge and learning is derived from reality including math and all the branches of science. This also means that all of our knowledge, including mathematical proofs, is interrelated. It also builds upon itself.

If you discover something that contradicts your previous knowledge, then all the conclusions you drew based on the thing you just disproved would be called into question. This actually happens in science from time to time. The more fundamental a premise that is contradicted by newer evidence, the more revolutionary the new discovery is.

If someone discovered some evidence that contradicted some obscure notion in quantum physics, some people might be upset, but daily life would probably continue unfazed. If someone discovered that 1 + 2 = 4, all hell would break loose. Actually, I think we'd all be dead. That's how crazy that is.

With certainty, I can tell you that no one will ever discover that 1 + 2 = 4.

This is also the case with God. There is no evidence for the existence of God and for that reason alone, you might be an atheist (lack a belief in God) or call yourself an agnostic (claim no knowledge of God). But I don't stop there.

God cannot exist any more than someone might uncover an ancient tablet somewhere that proves that 1 + 2 = 4.

Either a thing exists or it doesn't. But when people talk about the supernatural, they're talking about something other than existing or not existing. They hope to create a third case, some sort of mysterious higher plane than mere existence. They don't stop to ponder the logical problem with something existing that isn't a part of the set of things that exist.

I would never ask a scientist to do some research into all the cases where 1 + 2 = 4 and I would never ask a scientist to write about the biology of Richard Dawkins garden fairies. They do not and cannot exist.

But Richard Dawkins leaves the door open to the theists suggesting that evidence for these things, including God, is possible even if improbable. A commentor recently made a remark to that effect, to which I responded:

I do want to point out that impossibility does preclude improbability; impossibility describes absolute improbability, actually, so to suggest that the impossible is probable at all is to contradict the first premise that something is impossible.