Pearson Edexcel Level 3 Advanced GCE in Religious Studies – Anthology
152everything, without itself requiring or demanding an explanation. The explanatory
buc k stops right there. There is no infinite regress in the quest for explanat ion. If
Dawkins's brash and simplist ic argument s c arried weight , t his great sc ient ific quest
c ould be dismissed wit h a seemingly profound yet in fac t t rivial quest ion: What
explains t he explainer?
Now maybe there is no suc h ultimate theory. Maybe the "theory of everything"
will turn out to be a "theory of nothing." Yet there is no reason to suppose that this
quest is a failure from the outset simply because it represents the termination of an
explanatory proc ess. Yet an analogous quest for an irreduc ible explanat ion lies at
the heart of the sc ientific quest. There is no logic al inc onsistenc y, no c onc eptual
flaw, no self-c ont radic t ion involved.
Dawkins then sets out an argument that makes little sense, either in the brief
and hasty statement offered in T he God Delusion or the more expanded versions he
set out elsewhere. In a somewhat patc hy and derisory ac c ount of the "anthropic
princ iple," Dawkins point s out t he sheer improbabilit y of our exist enc e. Belief in
God, he then argues, represents belief in a being whose existence must be even
mo re c o mp le x—and therefore more improbable. Yet this leap from the recognition
of c omplexit y t o t he assert ion of improbabilit y is highly problemat ic. Why is
somet hing c omplex improbable? A "t heory of everyt hing" may well be more
complex than the lesser theories that it explains—but what has that to do with its
improbabilit y?
But let's pause for a moment. The one inesc apable and highly improbable fac t
about the world is that we, as reflec tive human beings, are in fac t here. Now it is
virt ually impossible t o quant ify how improbable t he exist enc e of humanit y is.
Dawkins himself is c lear, espec ially in Climbing Mount Improbable, that it is very,
very improbable. But we are here. The very fac t that we are puzzling about how we
came to be here is dependent on the fact that we are here and are thus able to
reflect on the likelihood of this actuality. Perhaps we need to appreciate that there
are many things that seem improbable—but improbability does not, and never has,
entailed nonexistenc e. We may be highly improbable—yet we are here. The issue,
then, is not whether God is probable but whether God is actual.
The God of the gaps
In T he God Delusion Dawkins c rit ic izes "t he worship of gaps." T his is a referenc e t o
an approac h to Christian apologetic s that c ame to prominenc e during the
eighteenth and nineteenth c enturies—the so-called God of the gaps approach. In its
simplest form it asserted that there were necessarily "gaps" in a naturalist or
sc ientific understanding of realit y. At c ert ain point s, William Paley's famous Natural
Theology (1801) uses arguments along these lines. It was argued that God needs
to be proposed in order to deal with these gaps in scientific understanding.
It was a foolish move and was inc reasingly abandoned in the twentieth
century. Oxford's first professor of theoretical chemistry, the noted Methodist lay
preac her Charles A. Coulson, damned it with the telling phrase "the God of the
gaps." In its plac e he urged a c omprehensive ac c ount of reality, whic h stressed the
explanatory capacity of the Christian faith as a whole rather than a retreat into
ever-diminishing gaps. Dawkins's c rit ic ism of t hose who "worship t he gaps," despit e