Why There Almost Certainly Is a God: Doubting Dawkins

by Keith Ward

Richard Dawkins claimed that 'no theologian has ever produced a satisfactory response to his arguments'. Well-known broadcaster and author Keith Ward is one of Britain's foremost philosopher-theologians. This is his response. Ward welcomes all comers into philosophy's world of clear definitions, sharp arguments, and diverse conclusions. But when Dawkins enters this world, his passion tends to get the better of him, and he descends into stereotyping, pastiche, and mockery. In this stimulating and thought-provoking philosophical challenge, Ward demonstrates not only how Dawkins' arguments are flawed, but that a perfectly rational case can be made that there, almost certainly, is a God.

Genres: Philosophy, Religion, Nonfiction, Theology, Science, Christian, Christianity

160 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2008

About the author

Keith Ward was formerly the Regius Professor of Divinity and Head of the Faculty of Theology at the University of Oxford. A priest of the Church of England and Canon of Christ Church, Oxford, he holds Doctor of Divinity degrees from Cambridge and Oxford Universities. He has lectured at the universities of Glasgow, St. Andrew's and Cambridge.

Reviews

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a response to Richard Dawkins' ' The God delusion' which I found quite helpful. Ward is a philospher and theologian who, in fact, Dawkins misquotes a couple of times in his book. It is quite interesting to see a rigourous mind at work and although his grasp of the philosphical niceties is far and beyond mine he does express himself clearly and concisely. His humour and ribbing of Dawkins' approach is far more respectful and open than that of his opponent but he still manages to make his points well. In gently pointing out that in Dawkins dismissing in three pages the work of centuries with his pronouncement of Acquinas' proofs of God as vacuous Dawkins himself is perhaps being a little lazy and failing to actually understand to what the proofs refer is a clever piece of analysis. He is genuinely explorative and seems quite able to handle the fact that perfectly intelligent and morally upright men and women do not share his point of view, this is something Richard Dawkins singularly failed to do. His over-riding point is an obvious one; if you dwell in a universe in which you refuse to contemplate the possibility that there might be a God, however you may envisage that, then no amount of arguing is going to make a difference. However, if your mindset is such that you are open or at least not totally closed to discovering hints or glimpses of such a possibility then this book could be for you. It is a rational, analytic approach to the God hypothesis.Enjoyable, amusing in parts and, as with Dawkins' own book, i found it thought provoking.

[William · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reading this book I was reminded of the line in Frasier where his production assistant Ros calls him "the dumbest smart guy I ever met".

Reverend Professor Keith Ward is an Oxford lecturer in philosophy, logic and (ahem) theology with a career spanning decades, and yet he begins by claiming that consciousness is an irreducible feature of reality, and bases much of his subsequent reasoning on this claim. Now to most people, or non-philosophers at least, it is evident that consciousness can be reduced by sleep, medication, injury or afternoon meetings, and "semi-conscious" is a useful term describing a frequently observed state. I am sure that animals such as my adorable cat experience their own existence richly, but they do seem to have a less acute sense than we do of their own personal circumstances, of history, of what is likely to happen next and much else. They can't generally follow TV shows, play video games, take philosophy courses, or in my cat's case, use catflaps. This reduction in consciousness becomes more marked as you go down the scale from chimp to cat (no disrespect) to ant to amoeba. Of course we can't measure this directly or explain the precise brain mechanisms, which lends consciousness a certain mystery and allows philosophers to speculate about what it all means, but to say that it is irreducible is fairly obviously wrong.

Update: Chris pointed out (comment 7 below) that Ward may be using the word 'irreducible' in a philosophical sense of a basic feature of reality, rather than simply 'incapable of being reduced'. While this would allow semi-consciousness to make sense, I am still not sure what it means as a claim about our natural universe. We thought the universe was made of matter, energy and forces - which are reducible, if you will, to energy - but in fact it is made of energy *and consciousness*. Did they both arise from the Big Bang? Does consciousness really not require energy? Can such a fundamental building block of reality really be discovered only by philosophers with no formal training in physics or neurology, armed with little more than a pipe and an armchair?

Update again: Chris has left the building, leaving only gaps from which we can deduce his existence.

Ward also jumps straight from the animal brain to his vision of a disembodied supreme consciousness with little more than a cheerful "why not?" Well, we may not be able to understand brains and consciousness fully (and we may never do so) but we can confidently say that every consciousness we have ever encountered has been associated with a physical brain, so the idea that there might be a huge consciousness that doesn't need one is rather a leap, to say the least. Where would it store information without cells? How would it recall it without connections? Anyone familiar with Laurence M Krauss' The Physics of Star Trek will recall that the Transporter is far-fetched because (amongst other reasons) the information storage requirements are so astronomical, not to mention in breach of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. The mind of God would suffer the same practical difficulties, with further problems from the laws of relativity and thermodynamics. And while we're at it, the idea that when setting the parameters for the Big Bang, God could predict specific events later on is hard to swallow on several levels. Is Ward not familiar with chaos theory? You can't just set off a complex iterative process and accurately predict what it's going to do, at least not without knowing the starting values to an infinite degree of accuracy (Heisenberg problems again) and having infinite processing capability. And if God just set it off in the right general direction and then gave things a nudge here and there to keep them on track, how is that possible, especially for a disembodied being?

Many people born from the late 20th century onwards won't have too much difficulty in visualising software states that exist in memory at a level above hardware, foreground and background processes coordinating to produce them, and the idea that it can all end when powered down if not saved to persistent storage in a way that can be recovered later. However, the great majority of philosophers who have ever lived did not have the advantage of that model in front of them, and as a result they have tended to be rather mystical about consciousness (is a thought a real thing, is my mental commentary actually me, and so on) but surely it's time we moved on. It's like a software state, Aristotle, get over it. I felt that the great thinkers of the past, for all their brilliant insights into meaning and existence, had left Ward somewhat ill-equipped to speculate about neuroscience.

And then there is his requirement for a "personal explanation" as an element in any explanation of the cosmos. Despite claiming to come from a "world of clear definitions, sharp arguments and diverse conclusions", Ward is never quite able to articulate what he means by this, but it seems to refer to something teleological (that is, the explanation of phenomena by the purpose they serve rather than by postulated causes - apparently popular amongst theologians) in which things have to fit into a lovely story. He is not satisfied with a merely factual account of how things might have come to be as they are, but seems additionally to want to fit them into some sort of fable in which there is a point at the end, to which they were drawn all along. At least I think that's what he's talking about - it's a bafflingly backwards way of looking at things and, I can't help thinking, worryingly indicative of some sort of mental condition. ("What is the point of wasps?" my wasp-averse friend asked recently in a moment of exasperation during a picnic. Well, because there is an environmental niche for them, because they can live and reproduce, because they are good enough at surviving not to all die at once but not so good that they wreck their entire environment like humans, because life will find a way - hasn't she seen Jurassic Park for heaven's sake? I think she knew all this and was not really expecting a Wardian personal explanation about wasps being there to teach us about life or remind us to close jam jars or something, but that seems to be how Ward wants us to think about the cosmos.) For a lecturer in logic and philosophy to be so fundamentally confused about causality and (in Dawkins' words) what it means to explain something is frankly worrying.

The trouble with Dawkins, apparently, is that he is a Materialist. Materialism is a school of philosophical thought with a substantial Wikipedia entry in which reality is seen as arising from matter - common sense to most of us in the 21st century you might think, although as Ward points out, many, indeed most, philosophers of the past held various more mystical and to us far-fetched views, and indeed matter itself is not straightforward when you start thinking about quantum physics and string theory, so Ward remains unconvinced by Materialism. Once again I felt that with all due respect to Plato we need to get real now that we know more about our physical universe. The discovery of n-dimensional Hilbert space and the rest of it does not make it the slightest bit more likely that we are living in a supreme being's virtual reality construct like the unwitting citizens of The Matrix, which in the end seems to be the view of existence that Ward considers "almost certain". Anyone skimming this book and awarding it a bunch of stars because he seems like a smart guy arguing rationally for God should be aware of what they are signing up to.

Ward's discussion of multiverse theory and the convenient basic settings that provide a universe capable of supporting philosophers (number of spacial dimensions, Planck's constant and so on) is also frustrating. If they were different we wouldn't be here. So what? Perhaps they can't be different. Perhaps if they were different for a new universe it would immediately vanish in a puff of logic. Perhaps this happens all the time. Perhaps there are or have been many universes - either through quantum event proliferation or multiple Big Bang events - and we could only exist in some of them. In Ward's backwards way of looking at things our ability to exist in this particular universe suggests that it was configured with us in mind. That is nonsense as a moment's thought will tell you, and yet Ward contrives to get a whole chapter out of it.

All in all, two stars for being not quite as inane as John F. Haught's embarrassing God and the New Atheism: A Critical Response to Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens, and better written (by a proper philosopher), but in the end it is still irresponsible silly drivel from a fantasist who should really know better. It's all very well setting out to prove the existence of an invisible supreme being and his Matrix-like reality construct through logic alone as some sort of fun intellectual challenge for a wet Tuesday, but the trouble is that many people really do think there is one (a real one that is, not a Karen Armstrong-style symbolic focus for their spiritual life), and this serious problem for humanity needs more constructive input than Ward's cheery jaunt through neo-platonism.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having just completed Keith Ward's "The Big Questions of Science and Religion", and deeply impressed by its depth and eloquence, I purchased his recent book "Why There Almost Certainly Is a God: Doubting Dawkins". I was not disappointed.

In this book, Ward responds to several recent works, written by scientists and scholars, that blast religious belief as hopelessly deluded and out-of-date in a scientific age. Primary on his list is "The God Delusion", written by prominent British biologist Richard Dawkins. Ward responds to this foray with this very well researched and reasoned book, which in my view is clearly the best response to Dawkins and others currently available.

As Ward explains, "Whether he likes philosophy or not, Dawkins is doing philosophy in Chapters 2 and 4 of The God Delusion. He has come into my world, ... I want to challenge his arguments, to show that they are not at all strong, and to show that there are much stronger arguments in favour of believing in a God -- in fact, that it is almost certain that there is a God."

Ward concludes his methodical destruction of Dawkins' scholarship with an eloquent appeal for peace in the "war" between science and religion:

"Those who believe in God for good reasons will be those who believe that the universe is rational and intelligible, and who are concerned for the trustworthiness of human reason. ... They will be lovers of truth and beauty, and they may even feel themselves to be --and may in truth be, as far as human ever can -- beloved of God and sharers in divine immortality. This is the life above all others that humans should live. For if theists are right, it is in the contemplation of truth, beauty and goodness, both in themselves and in all their manifold finite forms, that humanity finds its highest fulfilment and happiness. And that will be humanity's highest truth -- a life fulfilled in the knowledge and love of the supremely beautiful and good reality that theists call God."

[Lesli · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'm 9% of the way through this book, and already, I'm breathless at the utter lack of logic. His foundational argument seems to be: Just because we've never seen a superintelligent consciousness that exists without a physical structure doesn't mean that such a thing can't or doesn't exist. Waving your hands and saying, "Why not?" isn't much of an argument. Maybe it will improve. I chose this because I thought an Oxford scholar would have better arguments than the undereducated, creationist Evangelicals on this side of the Atlantic. Guess not.

[Chris Naylor · Rating 1 out of 5]

In the title of this book, Keith Ward makes a very large claim: that 'there almost certainly is a God'. Ward quotes, with approval, Richard Dawkins' explanation of what this means: 'there exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us.' The alternative view, he says, is the view of Dawkins that 'any creative intelligence, of sufficient complexity to design anything, comes into existence only as the end product of an extended process of gradual evolution.'

Ward's book is presented as a reply to Dawkins. In this review, I shall take no interest in either defending or attacking Dawkins; I shall only be interested in whether Ward's arguments are strong enough to justify the large claim that he makes in his title.

Chapter 1
In chapter 1, Ward notes that few philosophers have been materialists. This observation is presumably meant to count against materialism, but of course it does not, since most philosophers lived before science made the kind of discoveries about the universe that it has made in recent decades, and so their opinions about the nature and origins of the universe (the only form of existence for which we have any evidence) are of little importance. The only reliable information we have about the nature and origins of the universe comes from science. This is because only science meets the following criteria:
- it is conducted publicly, and is therefore accessible by everyone, so that no-one has to believe any of its claims without seeing the evidence for them
- it is testable, i.e. public tests can be carried out to check the assertions it makes
- the tests can be done over and over again without limit, i.e. they are indefinitely repeatable
- it makes no preliminary assumptions about what will be discovered
- it allows for conjectures, hypotheses and theories to be created and tested without limiting these in some non-rational way, e.g. by appealing to the supposed authority of some old book or someone's supposed personal revelation.

People often claim to have supernaturally revealed information, either written down in old books such as the Bible or in personal inner experiences, but such information is ONLY acceptable as evidence if what it claims is possible according to science. The weird and wonderful claims made in old books (such as that God became human and later rose from the dead) are so outlandish that they would need really solid scientific evidence to back them up before it would be rational to think that they were true, and for most of these claims there is no such evidence; while the explanation for personal inner experiences that is most consistent with what we know of the world from science is simply that the experiencer was in an unusual state of mind. Neither of these kinds of information by themselves can get anywhere near to meeting the rigorous criteria for reliability that is required for scientific evidence, which is why neither of them is worth anything as evidence on its own. Consequently, such information should only be treated seriously when it agrees with what we know from science. And in cases where science has yet to offer us any explanation because it has not yet managed to get the data on which to build a theory (which is the case, for example, with the possible causes of the Big Bang), the only rational course of action is to reserve judgment on whether the non-scientific information is reliable until we do have scientific evidence against which to judge it.

Ward observes that ideas about the material universe have changed considerably, and notes that, instead of matter consisting simply of hard lumps as Democritus thought, physics has now identified a complex array of entities such as multiple dimensions, probability waves in Hilbert space, and so on. This again is presumably intended to count against materialism, but again, it has no force; the fact that ideas about the constitution of the material world have changed, far from counting against materialism, actually shows that progress has been made in understanding how the world works.

Commenting on the complex array of objects and entities discovered by science, Ward infers that 'materialism no longer has the alleged benefit of being the simplest explanation of the world.' This is confused thinking, for three reasons. Firstly, insofar as simplicity matters at all, it is the simplicity of the deep underlying principles that counts, not the simplicity or otherwise of the intermediate entities and processes: Darwinian evolution is a relatively simple mechanism, but it produces a vast complexity of types of adaptive behaviour. Secondly, it is in any case irrational to presume that reality will turn out to be simple; the only way to find out if it is simple or complex is to study it. Thirdly, when Ward says that materialism is not the simplest explanation of the world, he is evidently starting to manoeuvre us towards the view that the God hypothesis is a simpler explanation. This is absurd: it took the human brain, the most complex known object in the universe, to write Beethoven's 9th Symphony, and the task of designing a universe is vastly more complex than that, so only something more complex than Beethoven's brain could have designed the universe. There can be nothing simple about God, and consequently there is nothing simple about the God hypothesis - it requires the existence of something more complex than the human brain, so complex in fact that it is entirely beyond our power to imagine it.

Ward next moves on to talk about consciousness. He notes that 'the problem of consciousness is so difficult that no-one has any idea of how to begin to tackle it, scientifically.' It is, he says, 'the problem of how conscious states - thoughts, feelings, sensations and perceptions - can arise from complex physical brain-states... we do not know the sorts of connections that conscious states... have with brain-states.'

Ward is making a serious blunder here. He refers to Daniel Dennett's attempt in Consciousness Explained to show that conscious states are "'nothing more than' brain-states and brain-behaviour', and objects to this on the grounds that 'you could very easily have brain-states and behaviour without any conscious states at all.' Now Ward cannot have it both ways. If it is true, as he claims, that 'we do not know the sort of connections that conscious states... have with brain-states', then he is in no position to also hold that 'you could very easily have brain-states and behaviour without any conscious states at all', for the obvious reason that the connection between the two (which we do not currently understand) might very well rule this out - that is, if and when we finally do understand the connection between conscious states and brain states, we may find that the connection is such that the former cannot occur without the latter. Ward is making the same sort of blunder that might have been made by someone in ancient times, before it was known that the Morning Star and the Evening Star were the same object (i.e. the planet Venus), who said, 'we don't understand the connection between the Morning Star and the Evening Star, but you could easily have the Morning Star without the Evening Star.' Since they are the same object, this situation, which no doubt would have seemed possible to someone in those times, is in fact impossible. When Ward says 'you could very easily have brain-states and behaviour without conscious states', all he is actually entitled to say is that as far as we know you could easily have the former without the latter. The distinction between what could be the case and what as far as we know could be the case is an important one, and it is rather shocking that a philosopher of Ward's standing does not seem to be aware of it.

Now of course, Ward's real interest is not in brain states without conscious states, but the reverse - conscious states without brain states. He needs this to be possible because he conceives of God as being conscious without being material, and therefore not having a brain. So he needs it to be possible for there to be unembodied consciousnesses. He objects to Dawkins saying that "consciousness 'comes into existence ONLY as the end product' of a long physical process," and says that 'there might be a consciousness that came into existence in some other way.' And here again, he is making the same mistake as before: just because as far as we know there might be a consciousness that does not come into existence as the end product of a long physical process, it does not follow that there actually could be such a consciousness. Both Dawkins and Ward here are making claims that our lack of knowledge renders unjustifiable. The real position is this: all the consciousnesses of which we are aware came into existence as the result of a long physical process (i.e. evolution), but we don't know exactly how this works, and until either we do understand how it works or we discover a consciousness that did not come into existence as the result of evolution, we have no grounds for asserting either that such a consciousness is possible, or that it is not possible. Thus we do not know, at present, whether unembodied consciousnesses are possible, and since God is supposed to be an unembodied consciousness, we do not know whether God is possible.

Ward now offers us the 'God hypothesis', which is that 'there is a consciousness that does not come into being at the end of a long physical process.... It has always existed and always will.' He poses the question: 'Could there be an unembodied mind, a pure Spirit, that has knowledge and awareness?' and answers his own question by saying, 'I can see no reason why not. The God hypothesis has at least as much plausibility as the materialist hypothesis. Both are hard to imagine, but neither seems to be incoherent or self-contradictory. Either might be true.'

Here Ward is in effect asserting that if the proposition 'X exists' does not contain an incoherence or self-contradiction, then it is possible for the proposition to be true. This is certainly not the case. The proposition 'an object as large and massive as our Moon exists in our universe between the Earth and the Moon' is neither incoherent nor self-contradictory, but it is impossible for it to be true, because if it were true, the gravitational attraction of such an object would make both the Earth and the Moon behave quite differently from the way they actually do behave. Lack of incoherence and self-contradiction in an existential proposition are therefore not sufficient conditions for the proposition to be possibly true.

What has gone wrong here? I think what has gone wrong is that Ward, being a philosopher rather than a scientist, has allowed himself to say something very silly about existential propositions that a scientist would know better than to say. An existential proposition has no chance of being true if its being true would violate actual constraints, such as the physical laws obtaining in the part of reality in which the existence is supposed to occur. This brings us back to the fact that we simply do not know whether an unembodied consciousness is possible, i.e. we do not know what actual constraints there may be on the existence of a conscious mind. This is an empirical question which can only be settled, if at all, by empirical research, and not by appeal to non-empirical concepts such as incoherence and self-contradiction.

Ward's next claim is that 'the existence of consciousness refutes radical materialism, the theory that nothing exists except physical things in space and time.' I disagree. All the empirical evidence we have gathered so far indicates that it is brains that have conscious experience; and there is nothing in this evidence to indicate that this conscious experience constitutes or requires some additional kind of existence over and above the physical existence of the brains. Conscious experiences present to us as events in the life of a brain, not as non-physical objects or even non-physical properties added on to the brain. What distinguishes these events from the events that happen to other physical objects than brains is that, since brains are conscious (some of the time), they have a component that is missing in events that happen to non-conscious objects, namely how the event appears to the conscious brain itself. But this 'appearing to the brain' can obviously only occur within the brain, and not in some hypothetical additional entity mysteriously attached to the brain, because if it occurred within some other object than the brain, the brain would not be aware of it. So the empirical evidence regarding consciousness supports the view that only physical things exist - the view that Ward labels 'radical materialism.' Of course, the same evidence is also consistent with the view that, in addition to the physical things of which we are aware, there may be other non-physical things of which we are not at present aware. The point is, though, that conscious experience does not provide evidence for the existence of any such non-physical things.

At the end of this section, Ward refers to the advances made in understanding how the brain works, and to the fact that some scientists speak of brains as 'information-processing systems', analogous to computers. He goes on to says this:

Despite the psychological impact of these discoveries, they do not change the basic insight of most classical philosophers that consciousness, intellectual understanding and morally responsible action are important and irreducible properties of the real world.

In fact the evidence strongly suggests that at least two of the three features he mentions are not irreducible. We know that intellectual understanding and the attitudes that lead to morally responsible action develop slowly through childhood, may not develop properly if the child's brain fails to develop normally, e.g. because of genetic defects, and can be significantly impaired later in life if the brain suffers damage through illness or injury. The logical inference is that these features, far from being irreducible, can be present to some degree but not fully. This in turn suggests that they are built from components in the brain that have to be fully in place and working properly for the features to be fully present. The classical philosophers were therefore wrong about these two features.

The third feature Ward mentions is consciousness itself. It is certainly arguable that when we have apparently reduced consciousness, e.g. when we are drugged or half-asleep, it is not consciousness itself that is reduced, but rather what we are conscious of. I think it is plausible to hold that consciousness is binary - either it is switched on or it is switched off. In that sense, consciousness is irreducible. However, it does not follow that consciousness is in any sense immaterial. Consciousness may be an emergent but entirely physical property that appears only when a physical brain is in a certain state. We have no evidence that it is anything else. It may surprise us that a physical system should be capable of producing the inner experiences that we associate with consciousness - experiences of such things as the colour red, the smell of onions, and feelings of pain or hunger - but the fact that we are surprised by this is a fact about us, not a fact about the world around us. Relativity and quantum theory surprise most people when they learn about them, but that doesn't mean that they are false or that some facts that would surprise us less underlie them. The fact, surprising or not, is that according to all the evidence we have, consciousness is entirely a construction of the brain. Of course, as I noted earlier, we don't know how the brain manages to create experiences of the colour red, the smell of onions, and so on, but the inference from 'we don't understand how this can happen' to 'this can't happen' is obviously not a valid inference.

What I have written in the last few paragraphs may sound like materialism, and so it is. For all we know (there is that all-important caveat again), new evidence could appear at any time that we are something more than just physical; but it would be irrational to presume that such evidence will appear. There is currently no evidence for the existence of an immaterial consciousness, a soul, a spirit, or any other of the weird ontological paraphernalia beloved of religious people. The evidence that we have appears to point to brains being entirely physical, and consciousness being an emergent and entirely physical property of brains. Nevertheless, I am not a materialist. Nor am I an idealist, as Ward claims to be (though he doesn't tell us what kind of idealist he is: Berkeleian? Kantian?). I am actually a mysterian, for the simple reason that, as Hume pointed out, we do not have introspective access to whatever it is that is having the conscious experiences, so we don't know what kind of thing it is.

In his next section, Ward seeks to defend his idealism. He says, quite correctly, that a statement such as 'If the brain is impaired, our mental processes are impaired' is 'a causal statement, not a statement that reduces conscious states to nothing but physical states.' Well and good, and if he left it there, and if he merely inferred from this that for all we know conscious states might not be reducible to brain states, he would have me on his side (not that I imagine he would care very much whether I am on his side or not). However, he doesn't leave it there. He moves on, and presents us with what he considers to be an alternative to the scientific explanation of events in the world, namely 'personal explanation', which he says 'explains some of the things that people do in terms of knowledge, desire, intention and enjoyment'. And he claims that personal explanation of this sort is 'not reducible or translatable into scientific explanation'.

How could he possibly know this? Has he studied the human brain in such depth and detail that he can show that, whenever we know something, or desire something, or intend something, or enjoy something, this knowing or desiring or intending or enjoying is not fully explained and accounted for by what is physically happening in our brains at the time? I'm going to stick my neck out here and say that I think he probably hasn't. In fact I doubt if anyone has. The last estimate I heard was that the human brain was only somewhere between 5% and 10% understood. I expect this percentage is rising all the time, but I doubt if it has yet reached 100%, or got anywhere near it.

[review continued in 1st comment]

[Chas Bayfield · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow, this is certainly the heaviest book I've ever read, and makes The God Delusion seem light. Ward is never going to hit the bestsellers list but his book is a measured debunking of the first four chapters of Dawkins' book. Ward starts from a position of strength - he is a professor of Philospohy rather than biology and argues that theology and philosophy are close cousins and that there are philosophical reasons why their might be a God. Ward's style is in stark contrast to Dawkins - he is generous towards atheists where Dawkins swaggers round like a gang leader in a playground. One of Ward's arguments is that in a multiverse, where every possible random configuration of universe could exist, who is to say that there might be a universe that contains a God? There is also the big question of what created the Big Bang, which science has yet to tell us. Having read Ward's book, I am more inclined to feel that atheists are as anti knowledge as those they despise on the fundamental religiuos extremes. They have closed their minds to the possibility that science might prove them wrong, and seem hell bent on fighting religious extremists whose medieval beliefs are not shared by millions who claim to have a faith.

[Ben · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author, by his own account, intends this book to be a direct rebuttal to Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion. The first problem is that this book was, for me, a lot less interesting to read. As a work of philosophy by a philosopher, I found it very often either boring or so tricky to work out that reading became a chore, and more than once, both. The style of the writing aside, in this not-even-amateur-philosopher's opinion Ward does make a few points to which I would be interested in Dawkins response. But much more often I found Ward making logical moves that seemed simply illogical to me, or at least that did not follow from the previously given information. And in some places he simply throws out statements offhand that, to me, require some serious explanation (e.g. where he claims that Christian society has always been a firm supported of science and the expansion of knowledge). Whether my uncertainty or need of an explanation are due to a fault on his part or simply my own sluggish brain, I may never know. But of the fact that this is a less-than-thoroughly convincing reply to Dawkins' bestseller, I am fairly sure.

[Nazri Awang · Rating 4 out of 5]

Refuting Dawkin's philosophical arguments in "The God Delusion". Highly engaging, easy language. :)

[Virtuella · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting in some ways, and he makes a plausible cause for saying that belief in God is not unreasonable, though the God he speaks of is very bland and dry. AT points he resorts to mere assertions that are no more convincing that Dawkins' own. My own takedown of Dawkins would look quite different: A) That Dawkins doesn’t have a clue what he is talking about. His now infamous Kafka tweet is evidence that he does not understand the language of literature, so what chance does he have to understand the largely poetic language of religion? He is so far out of his depth in this area that he doesn’t even realise what the questions even are. What he attacks is a strawman, a mere caricature of religion. B) That it is not religion that has led us to the brink of the abyss, to the terrifying possibility of extinguishing all life on Earth, but rather science hand-in-glove with capitalism, an unholy alliance of hubris and greed. That almost all problems facing humankind at this point in history have been caused by science unmoored from morality. C) That while I, as a Christian, direct my mental energies against injustice, cruelty, violence, environmental destruction, poverty and despair, Dawkins directs his mental energies against people like me.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book is intended as rebuttal to "The God Delusion". Keith Ward is a contemporary at Oxford and is an academic philosopher and theologian. It is a small, densely argued book going from Thomas Aquinas to Immanuel Kant. It is not, as it claims, a rebuttal because the language is far more academic and less popular than the God Delusion, but would be a useful reference for someone in teacher training or Christian ministry trying to write a rebuttal. It seems to me that this was written in a hurry. The references to Charles Darwin and Stephen Hawking seem to be too brief to do justice to the subject; the foundations of Dawkins belief in Desmond Morris and the concept of falsifiability of science in Karl Popper are alluded to, but not referenced. In summary, don't start here, don't finish here but handy along the way.

[Yakubu Mohammed · Rating 4 out of 5]

Professor Keith Ward approached the question of whether or not there's God methodically and philosophically and not from theology. He addressed and refuted Professor Dawkins points in a decent and respectful manner. Although, the book does not give a conclusive evidence for the existence of God, it brought to light the validity of personal explanation which can be used to elucidate ultimate reality.

[Mike Blyth · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book, written in an conversational, low-key and interesting style, attempts to refute the main arguments in Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion and to show that “the God hypothesis” is reasonable, even highly likely, given a couple of basic premises. In the end, Ward makes clear that Dawkins’ conclusions are reasonable given his (Dawkins’) materialistic premises, while “the God hypothesis” is quite reasonable given a different starting point which, in Ward’s view, is better at explaining the universe.

The most important difference between the two viewpoints is that materialism sees everything as derived from physical laws of nature. In this view, consciousness, values, relationships, and other aspects of our personal world are somehow merely results of the physical phenomena and could, in principle, be fully explained by physical laws.

Ward argues that idealism, “in the very broad sense of accepting consciousness or mind as the fundamental character of reality,” is a stronger foundation. His arguments are based partly on the problems of explaining consciousness on the basis of materialism, and partly on the problem that materialism itself is looking more problematic as the very concepts of matter, time, space, and energy have become highly complex.

As I understand it, the barest outline of Ward’s argument has two threads. The first is the one above, that consciousness if fundamental and that personal causation exists alongside material causation. That is, some thing happen because someone, a conscious entity, wants them to happen; our sense that we are agents, capable of doing things, is not just an illusion but real. If this is true, then it is not unreasonable, he argues, that consciousness could exist apart from matter and outside the physical universe.

The second thread argues that if the universe is rational, able to be understood in terms of logic and causation, then it must have a necessary (non-contingent) and eternal cause. This cause is not necessarily conscious—it could be an equation, or the fact that all possible universes must exist—but there must be something that is itself uncaused. I think this what another reviewer says is just the kalam argument.

One of the more interesting aspects of the book for me was the discussion of multiple universes and how they do or don’t solve the problems of ultimate causation and the fine-tuning of our own universe.

I doubt that a truly new argument for the existence or absence of God arises as often as once a century, though I don’t really know since philosophy is not my field. Still, it’s not the novelty of Ward’s arguments that makes the book worth reading, but rather the clarity of the writing and the way the arguments directly speak to those of Dawkins.

[Stephen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book took me several days to read despite the fact it is relatively short at 150 pages. The reason is the content. Here at last is a book that avoids simplistic platitudes and tired old arguments traded by one side or another in religious debates. Instead the author builds a philosophical argument that systematically deconstructs the unchallenged assumptions of Dawkin's materialism, and replaces them with a philosophical framework that is at its core rational and consistent - and that makes God necessary.

Keith Ward is much more honest than certain other writers in this book. His case is convincing, but he draws attention to its limitations - primarily that we must assume the universe is both rational and intelligible. Thus ultimately all he can tell us is "why there almost certainly is a God". But he does exactly that.

The book is heavy going, and will probably only be appreciated fully by readers who know at least some philosophy, some logic and some physics. Ward does his best to put the argument in terms that don't require such a grounding, but the argument relies heavily on the understanding of terms such as necessity, contingency and other such concepts that are the bread and butter of philosophers, but not often discussed over a game of darts in the pub.

But it is quite clear that Keith Ward does something quite remarkable - he pulls the rug from under the assumptions of materialism, and if nothing else, it shows that the arguments of Dawkins et al. cause rather more problems than they resolve. The clear message of this book -whether you accept the hypothesis of God's existence or not - is that belief in God is profoundly a rational belief.

Thoroughly recommended - a book to make you think long and hard whether you agree with it or not.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Keith Ward is one of my all-time favourite theologians. He is entertaining to listen to - full of wit- and his books generally (with the exception of Pascal's Fire) are pacey and a delight to read.

This book is a direct response to Richard Dawkin's The God Delusion. It is one of several books that have emerged from theologians and other Christian thinkers in what has come to be called the "Oxford God Debate".

The book is structured in chapters directly tackling specific chapters in Dawkin's book. It is a short book(155pp)and not overly technical.

Ward's main approach is to tackle Dawkins on metaphysical grounds. He shows how exceptional Dawkins' materialism is in historical terms; and how contestable it is today; both as a metaphysical position and even in terms of science, especially in light of the most recent thinking in physics and cosmology.

Ward's main focus is the question of the reality of consciousness, value and purpose.

The book shows clearly that belief in God is rationally viable.

[Alexandra Marley · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a devout atheist it may come as a surprise that I would give this book the time of day, however, I aim to keep an open and balanced mind and am lead to believe that knowing thine enemy is, well, 'good'. And here is Ward's central thesis, for what is good? And what is god? Ward, an Oxford professor of philosophy and theology, challenges Dawkins' diatribe, 'The God Delusion', with a plethora of mind-boggling theories that require more than the average level of concentration and learning to comprehend. His emphasis on the finiteness of human understanding and knowledge is a powerful argument for the concept of god and, by steering clear of supporting any religion or church, he has provided a sensible and genuinely intellectual response to Dawkins. The integrity of his reasoning rests on the fact that he keeps god a theoretical and abstract concept, and that he has a firm grasp on advanced theoretical physics and quantum mechanics. Certainly not pro-religion, but pro-thinking.

[Mike Richards · Rating 3 out of 5]

After a recent heated discussion a friend asked me if I knew anything about theology. I had to answer that I didn't so decided to swot up. I enjoyed this book and it's well written explanations of the metaphysical arguments for God. The book is interesting and informative and is written a lot more respectfully than the Dawkins book that it counters. However, the presentation of baseless arguments in a pseudo-scientific way (personal explanations!) did make me wince more than once. Ultimately I remain totally unconvinced but I am slightly better educated.

[Edoardo Albert · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent, witheringly witty take down of Dr Dawkins' philosophical pretensions. But reading some of the Goodreads reviews, it seems clear that the two sides are simply talking past each other - one seeing as a knockdown, killer argument something the other barely registers. I'm really at a loss how to get past this - civil conversation and civil society depend on dialogue being possible, but this seems to be getting dangerously close to parallel monologues, hearing only what they want to hear. Any ideas for a way out of this impasse will be received with interest.

[Joel]

I've been sort of tangentially interested in the 'new atheist' thing but have neither time nor energy (nor desire, really) to really dig into it. This book by an Oxford philosopher was on sale for $5 at a discount bookstore so thought I'd take a look.

[Pavel · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not impressed. Without the assumption of substance dualism, all the arguments in the book collapse.

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

A careful and gentle, yet powerful, response to the arguments of Dawkins in The God Delusion.

[Chris Lawrence · Rating 3 out of 5]

At last – a Delusion-basher that is actually worth reading. Please see: Serious about delusion.

[Calum Miller]

Probably the most substantial book refuting Dawkins I've read. Good for a fairly quick read.

[Kath · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sorry, too clever for me.

[Shea · Rating 1 out of 5]

Blah, blah, blah. Ward basis his whole book on the presupposition that God exists. So you h e to believe God exists for him to convince you God exists.

[Dan Johnson · Rating 1 out of 5]

Vapid hand-waving mumbo jumbo at best.