Gairney Bridge

A while back I wrote a post that featured links to two open letters written to the notorious atheist, Richard Dawkins. Along those lines, I came across this video, from James White’s website, where he features a clip from Dawkins and explains the fallacious nature of his attempts at his brand of materialistic reasoning.

In some ways, it is simply amazing that someone as obviously brilliant as Dawkins has to resort to crude ridicule in order mask his poor reasoning and logic in this area. It has been pointed out to him by folks like Alister McGrath (see here and here) that he does not really understand Christianity nor correctly represent it, but this does not detour him. I suppose it is not surprising, since Dawkins declared the following in the February 6, 1999 edition of The Guardian:

I’m like a pit bull terrier being released into the ring, as a spectator sport, to attack religious people.

Pit bulls don’t have to be honest or right or thoughtful, I suppose. They simply have to be vicious.

At any rate, the “celestial teapot” example (along with its more modern incarnations such as the “flying spaghetti monster”) might sound good on the surface, but it is a very weak analogy in the end. Bertrand Russell was the originator of the teapot argument; Joel McDurmon has this to say about the analogy:

[Modern atheists] claim that no one believes in the gods of ancient mythology: all (or most) people are, therefore, ‘atheists’ with regard to these gods. The atheists, including Dawkins, boast that they just go ‘one God further.’ This rhetorical saccharin vaporizes in the boil of real philosophy, and it doesn’t sweeten a thing. It is mere steam from the spout of Russell’s tea pot. It simply places the Christian God in the same category as ‘Zeus, Apollo, Amon Ra, Mithras, Baal, Thor, Wotan, the Golden Calf and the Flying Spaghetti Monster,’ and is thus a categorical and definitional mistake. The object in question requires proof that is commensurate with the nature of the thing in question. Thus the existence of the God of Christianity cannot be determined by gratuitous parallels to material objects like dizzy tea pots or frightening pasta, and, while we do not have time here to line them all up, the Christian God is also qualitatively and categorically different than any of the pagan gods one can list. … It will take more than an attempt to straw-man the definition of God into something farcical and material, and then pretend you’ve ousted God from the universe. We can call this the ’straw-god’ fallacy. The real philosophical challenge is to disprove an all-powerful God Who created the material universe, upholds it, and thus transcends the material universe. Such a God defies any attempt to measure Him by finite standards, or call Him to any finite bar of judgment. For Him to stoop to meet such a standard would be for Him to deny both His Sovereignty and His own existence. The very act of submitting Himself for verification implies that someone else is the ultimate Judge and the ultimate standard. So, I will hear no more about tea pots. I will consider only arguments that tackle the existence of the kind of God who created tea, and the rest of the world for that matter. Once atheists start to become honest about this issue, then the ‘burden of proof’ will be re-established a bit more squarely, and the debate over God will move from the atheist’s comfortable tea-room of materialism, to the transcendental question that it is.

In short, when one makes a claim that the God of Christianity is like the gods of pagan religions (or of the ceramic and noodle variety), he is demonstrating that he really does not know what he is talking about (it would be closer to the truth to say I am just like George Washington or Julius Caesar, since we would at least be, as human beings, ontologically the same). He is making a serious logical and philosophical error in doing so. It might make for good-sounding rhetoric, and there may be times in which is satisfies the masses (to be honest, most people do not want to seriously think these things through in the first place), but it is neither sufficient nor sophisticated argument.