Atheistic Superstition
by David Gordon
Issue 120 - November 19, 2008

Richard Dawkins, the Oxford biologist and prominent atheist, argues in The God Delusion that belief in God is outdated. Before 1859, it was reasonable to think that life on earth had been designed. As Archdeacon William Paley pointed out, the marvelous adaptations that many animals display, such as the way the human eye is intricately constructed to make vision possible, strongly suggest that a creative intelligence has been at work. But, Dawkins maintains, Charles Darwin changed all that. He showed that adaptations could be explained by natural selection. No appeal to an intelligent designer is required. Darwin thus made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.

Professor Edward Feser argues in his brilliant new book The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism ( St. Augustine’s Press, 2008) that Dawkins has it all wrong. God is not a hypothesis, to be replaced if a more satisfactory theory comes up. Quite the contrary, Feser suggests, the existence of God can be proved by rationally compelling arguments. He thinks that not only is Dawkins wrong about this but so are his fellow atheists Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, all three of whom are frequently subject to humorous and telling remarks.

Feser’s is a bold claim indeed, one very much out of philosophical fashion. In mainstream Anglo-American philosophy, the dominant position is that Hume and Kant long ago showed that the theistic proofs do not work. To overturn this verdict is a formidable task, and to accomplish it Feser needs to present a great deal of background material. The principal reason, he holds, that modern philosophers reject the theistic proofs is that, since the Enlightenment, they have accepted a truncated notion of causation. Today, philosophers think of a cause as one event, preceding another in time that brings it about. As an example, if I light a match, these philosophers would take this to mean that the event of striking the match is followed by the event of the fire’s appearance.

This departs from Aristotle’s delineation of four causes, efficient, final, formal, and material. Aristotle’s efficient cause corresponds most closely to the modern view, but even here the resemblance is not very strong. Aristotle thought efficient causation involved a substance rather than an event: I, not the event of striking the match, cause the fire.

To grasp Aristotle’s doctrine of causation, developed and extended by Thomas Aquinas and other scholastics, Feser needs to go back to Plato to explain the famous problem of universals. He argues against the view that universals are merely words or concepts in our minds. Instead, he favors the moderate realism of Aristotle and Aquinas. All this may sound abstract, but it is essential to understanding the way in which Feser thinks that God’s existence can be proved. Readers who are willing to cope with this rather difficult material will gain something else, besides being in a position to understand the theistic proofs. They will learn a great deal about the history of philosophy. I have never seen the topics that Feser discusses presented so clearly. It is an effort well worth the effort.

With this background in place, we can understand why Dawkins’s arguments against God do not work. Dawkins thinks that since Darwin, we do not need God to explain adaptations. But his target is Paley’s argument, and Paley accepted the modern account of causation that leaves out the agent or substance involves in causation that Feser rejects. Paley, just as much as Dawkins, thought of causation as changes in matter bringing about other such changes. The issue between Paley and Dawkins is whether certain of these changes can be explained by natural science. Feser takes no stand on this: he does not claim, like supporters of Intelligent Design, that natural selection cannot fully account for biological change. (He does, though, accept the traditional view that the human soul cannot be explained through naturalistic evolution.) Feser says, on the contrary, that Aquinas’s “design” argument, the fifth way of the Summa Theologica, involves formal and final causation.

Feser has illuminating things to say about the other theistic proofs as well. The famous argument to a First Cause does not, he says, rest on the claim that one cannot have a chain of causation that extends infinitely backward into the past. Instead, cause and effect are simultaneous. Once more, a correct understanding of causation is crucial.

The book is by no means confined to discussing the theistic proofs and the background needed to understand them. Feser is a specialist in the philosophy of mind, and he assails fashionable materialist dogmas in this area. Paul and Patricia Churchland, both influential philosophers of mind, defend the odd view that their subject does not exist. They are “eliminativists”, who think that the existence of beliefs belongs to outdated “folk psychology”. Feser expertly demolishes them and in the process has great fun at their expense.

The Thomistic perspective that Feser defends extends to ethics and political philosophy, and Feser presents the essentials of Thomistic natural law in brief compass. Once more, Aristotle’s four causes are crucial. Human beings have a natural end: to understand what this means, one needs to bring in formal and final causes. Given this natural end, we establish a basis for human rights. Feser’s view of natural law is very much in line with traditional Thomism, and he rejects the influential “new natural law” theory of Germain Grisez and John Finnis.

In defending traditional natural law, he does not hesitate to take a stand on controversial issues. He holds, for example, that the debate over “gay marriage” is misconceived. The issue is not one of conflict between those who think homosexuality wrong, and thus oppose gay marriage, and those inclined to stress liberty or tolerance. Rather, “gay marriage” cannot exist, any more than there can be a round square. Marriage, by its very nature, is a union between a man and a woman. Agree with him or not, anyone who reads The Last Superstition will learn a great deal about philosophy.

David Gordon, Ludwig von Mises Institute