by Andres Ruiz

Created on: December 14, 2009

In pages 157-158 is what Dawkins calls ‘The Central Argument of My Book’. In this chapter, Dawkins argues that you cannot infer a designer of the universe based on the complexity of the universe because this would further raise the question of ‘Who Designed The Designer?’ In this article, I aim to show why his argument fails, and thus Dawkins has not been successful in showing why God is a Delusion.

 This argument fails to recognize something that philosophers of science have long known, that in order to recognize that an explanation (x) is the best explanation for any given phenomena, you do not need an explanation of explanation (x).  One brief example is to suppose that archaeologists find arrowheads at a dig. Of course it would be perfectly justified for said archaeologists to infer that these arrowheads were indeed designed, even if we had absolutely no idea of who the people who designed these arrowheads were, where they came from, etc. To sum, you don’t need an explanation of (x) in order to realize that explanation (x) is the best explanation for a given observation. Thus, you don’t need to give a complete account of who the designer is, what his/it’s properties are, or what his nature is in order to recognize that a designer would best explain a certain fact about the universe. If you were to consistently follow Dawkins’ line of reasoning and demand an explanation for every explanation, you would be let with an infinite regress of explanations. In essence, what this would mean is that no explanation in science would ever be sufficient. Evolution may be the best explanation for the diversity of life on Earth, but unless we have an explanation for it, and then an explanation for that, then evolution would be a completely useless theory. Of course none of us believes this. Even if all the quirks of evolution haven’t been fully resolved (that’s where the theory aspect of evolution comes in), it still is perfectly reasonable to accept that Evolution occurred and best explains the fossil record. No meta-theory is needed. What Dawkins proposes would undercut the very foundations of the sciences, it would lead to a radical skepticism that I’m sure he’s not advocating.

So to me at least, it seems that there are two options which seem the most plausible. Either the universe itself is the uncaused self-existent first cause in need of no explanation, or the universe itself needs

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