… a poor hermeneuticist. Let me leave it at that, since I’m about to revise my Secular Web review of his book, and Keith Augustine (the SecWeb library editor) thinks being important is polite.
What prompted this post is seeing how, in his essay for the anthology God is Great, God is Good, Craig that this statement from Dawkins’ position on the cosmological argument can be summarized by saying “Dawkins doesn’t dispute that the argument proves the existence of an uncaused, beginningless, changeless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless and unimaginably powerful personal Creator of the universe.” This is based on the following passage from The God Delusion, which Craig quotes:
Even if we allow the dubious luxury of arbitrarily conjuring up a terminator to an infinite regress and giving it a name, there is absolutely no reason to endow that terminator with any of the properties normally ascribed to God: omnipotence, omniscience, goodness, creativity of design, to say nothing of such human attributes as listening to prayers, forgiving sins and reading innermost thoughts.
Dawkins “doesn’t dispute” that the cosmological argument proves a “personal Creator of the universe” insofar as he doesn’t explicitly mention it in his list of properties normally ascribed to God, but obviously it’s in the general category, and Dawkins would have listed it if he thought anyone would have made much of it. I won’t say any more–I don’t want to be impolite.
I’m afraid your complaint against Dr Craig carries no weight at all. Indeed, Dawkins has nothing to say about the Kalam Argument. He never explicitly states the premisses. All he does is give a general summary based on Acquinas.
Dawkins, as the world’s leading atheist, owes us a sound refutation of the argument. He never argues that things can come into existence uncaused or that the universe never began to exist (he positively affirms it). All he does is accuse the argument’s proponents of “assuming God is immune to the regress”. This shows that he hasn’t even done his homework. The conclusion follows logically and necessarily from the premisses (also remember that Dawkins, as a materialist, must offer his own termination to the regress, which would be even more arbitrary given the latest scientific evidence – so he self contradicts).
So, Dawkins’ response to the KCA is merely “well… you can’t prove it isn’t just deism”! Of course, the KCA doesn’t try to! If the argument is sound, then atheism and materialism is already blown out of the water.
Dawkins has let the Brights down badly with his sheer lack of intellectual engagement with the contemporary arguments from cosmology. His refusal to debate Dr Craig does him no favours either (especially given the blatant weakness of his “rebuttals” to arguments made centuries ago – with, at the time of writing TGD, zero knowledge of such modern apologists).
“Dawkins has nothing to say about the Kalam Argument.”
Except Craig interpreted Dawkins as addressing kalam. Itself a goofy interpretive move that I chose to ignore.
“Dawkins, as the world’s leading atheist, owes us a sound refutation of the argument.”
Does he? Honestly, I think the kalam argument is only marginally better than the silliest cosmological arguments offered by popular apologists. The “Big Bang proves God” half of the argument really isn’t an improvement at all, since it still requires a double standard for judging the God hypothesis vs. other hypotheses. (Before you insist “that isn’t true because Dr. Craig says it isn’t,” read my review of Reasonable Faith, it’ll become pretty clear.)
“He never argues that things can come into existence uncaused or that the universe never began to exist (he positively affirms it). All he does is accuse the argument’s proponents of ‘assuming God is immune to the regress’. This shows that he hasn’t even done his homework. The conclusion follows logically and necessarily from the premisses.”
But the premises you just stated don’t entail that God exists, they just entail the universe has a cause. Craig himself knows you need more arguments to show the cause is God. If Craig is going to insist on reading Dawkins as objecting to kalam, the quote from Dawkins above obviously should be read as an objection to that step.
“So, Dawkins’ response to the KCA is merely ‘well… you can’t prove it isn’t just deism’!”
That’s not what Dawkins said. A deistic god still has to have some of the properties traditionally ascribed to God, and Dawkins says there’s no good reason to think a cause of the universe would have to have any of the properties traditionally ascribed to God. You’re just repeating Craig’s mistake.