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Continuing my evaluation of Richard  Dawkins’  The God Delusion, I come now to the crux of his argument in the first few chapters. He argues that the question of the existence of God need not be left unanswered by science. To be honest I think most of his argument here is negative. He suggests that religious people or theists in general don’t give positive arguments for the existence of God, but simply say “you can’t disprove it, so it may be true.”. This is entirely not the case, though I’ll deal with that later. He, I think rightly, suggests that the burden of proof is on theists to give reason to believe in the existence of God. If not we could simply say “the boogeyman exists, and you can’t prove otherwise” or like argument for anything we want. He suggests that theists have relied solely on this kind of negative argumentation to prove their point, which is entirely false, a fact he hypocritically admits in the very next chapter when he deals with the proofs for the existence of God. He’s right that the burden of proof by default lies in the proponent of an idea, but once the proponent has provided reasons for their supposition they, it is up to the opponent of the proposition to address those reasons. Dawkins in this part doesn’t mention this, and argues based on the false assumption that no arguments for the existence of God have been given. He suggests that when scientists say that the questions of God are outside the realm of science by nature, the scientists are just ‘being nice’ and they shouldn’t give so much credence to theistic ideas.
The deceptive thing about his argument here is that he mixes up bits of truth and good method(ie. Burden of proof) with false assumptions that can be very convincing if one doesn’t have at least a basic understanding of logic and argumentation. I’ll address his “refutations” of the proofs for the existence of God next time.