Faith In Chance
An Exerpt from Answering the New Atheism: Dawkins Dismantled

Scott Hahn and Benjamin Wiker
From the Mar/Apr 2008 Issue of Lay Witness Magazine

What would be the rational reaction to seeing, in broad daylight, a marble statue of the Virgin Mary suddenly wave at you?

If your response is "a," you would be considered quite normal and rational, but perhaps a bit hasty. If your response is "b," you would be quite normal and rational, but also skeptical enough to allow reason to further investigate. And "c"? You’d be Richard Dawkins—or so it would seem from his arguments.

Why bring up this seemingly absurd scenario? Because the evolutionary biologist and determined atheist himself brought it up first in a previous bestseller, The Blind Watchmaker, and adverts to it once again in his 2006 bestseller, The God Delusion.[1]

With this example, we begin to expose Richard Dawkins’ faith in a particularly strange anti-deity, which for Dawkins functions as his god, the object of his faith, hope, and—dare we say—if not love, considerable devotion. If the reader is to understand Dawkins’ unwavering confidence in the non-existence of God, he must first of all become acquainted with Dawkins’ irrational faith in "chance."

So let us lay aside for the moment the question of whether miracles do in fact happen. Our concern for now is whether Dawkins’ unconquerable faith in the powers of chance is rational. For Dawkins, whatever God could do, chance can do better, and that means that any event, no matter how seemingly miraculous, can be explained as good luck. Before we get to the implications of this line of thought, let’s allow Mr. Dawkins’ inestimable faith in the powers of chance to speak for itself.

In The Blind Watchmaker Dawkins states, "A miracle is something that happens, but which is exceedingly surprising. If a marble statue of the Virgin Mary suddenly waved its hand at us we should treat it as a miracle, because all our experience and knowledge tells us that marble doesn’t behave like that." however, he goes on to assure the reader, science would not judge this occurrence as "utterly impossible," but only "very improbable."[2]

This fundamental confusion of improbability with impossibility runs throughout Dawkins’ work. "Coincidence," Dawkins assures the reader, "means multiplied improbability." That is a fancy way of saying that anything can happen. Since anything is possible, then anything is probable, even if that probability is astronomically small. Back to the waving statue:

"In the case of the marble statue, molecules in solid marble are continuously jostling against one another in random directions. The jostlings of the different molecules cancel one another out, so the whole hand of the statue stays still. But if, by sheer coincidence, all the molecules just happened to move in the same direction at the same moment, the hand would move. If they then all reversed direction at the same moment the hand would move back. In this way it is possible for a marble statue to wave at us. It could happen. The odds against such a coincidence are unimaginably great but they are not incalculably great. A physicist colleague has kindly calculated them for me. The number is so large that the entire age of the universe so far is too short a time to write out all the noughts! It is theoretically possible for a cow to jump over the moon with something like the same improbability. The conclusion to this part of the argument is that we can calculate our way into regions of miraculous improbability far greater than we can imagine as plausible."[3]

We quote this entire paragraph because if we merely reported it, no sane person would believe that Dawkins had written it, or we would be accused of misrepresenting his words or taking them out of context. But there it is, word for word. In stating it this way, Dawkins has gone far beyond the important insight that many things that have an extremely small possibility of happening do have some possibility of happening. For some reason, he wants his reader to assume that what we consider impossible is really only extremely improbable.

The first, most obvious objection to this kind of reasoning is this: What would be impossible if anything—or at least any physical event of the kind described—is possible? And if such impossible things are possible, why isn’t it possible that the waving statue was indeed a miraculous occurrence? Why isn’t the miraculous itself a possibility? The answer is quite simple. Dawkins believes that anything but a miracle is possible, and that leads him to believe that the impossible, not matter how absurd, is possible. The moon, over which the cow really could jump, truly might—just for a few moments, due to random molecular restructuring—be made of green cheese. (Green cheese, by the way, is not green. It is "green" in the sense of being unripe, that is, not yet aged. So, not to misrepresent things, one would have to figure the probabilities of the molecules of the moon jostling into the position of unripe cheese, which might be slightly better than green-colored cheese.)

This leads to a second point. Quite obviously, Dawkins’ presentation of the miraculous and impossible is only a manifestation of his atheism. What kind of an atheist is he? In The God Delusion, Dawkins classifies himself as a de facto atheist ("I cannot know for certain but I think God is very improbable, and I live my life on the assumption that he is not there").[4] adds, "I am agnostic only to the extent that I am agnostic about fairies at the bottom of the garden."[5]

But here is the problem. Since he has reclassified impossible things to be only highly improbable, it is unclear what the difference would be in his assessment of (1) a waving Virgin Mary statue, (2) a cow suddenly jumping approximately 240,000 miles in the air, calculating its ascent so as to take into account the effect of the earth’s rotation and the drag of the atmosphere (and somehow avoiding combustion by atmospheric friction), () fairies at the bottom of the garden, and (4) the existence of God.

In short, if God is only highly improbable, could existence be any less probable than an event of such mind-numbing improbability that one couldn’t write down the calculated improbability in 1.5 billion years? Given the outrageously enormous improbability, how could one even calculate accurately which was more probable? If the existence of God is at least as probable as the sudden waving of a marble statue, then God causing the miraculous waving of the Virgin Mary statue is at least as probable.

Given what we’ve said, we would like to offer a reformulation of famed atheist philosopher David maxim in regard to the miraculous. Maxim is as follows: "No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavours to establish."[6] In setting out this maxim, was trying to set forth a final refutation of the miraculous in Scripture. Since the miracles in Scripture are only reported to us by other alleged witnesses—that is, we didn’t witness them ourselves—then it is far more likely that the alleged witnesses were liars or fools.

But the case is different with Dawkins because his attempted reformulation of the miraculous as only highly improbable applies directly to those who would witness what certainly appears to be miraculous. Against Dawkins’ attempt to deny the miraculous, we reformulate famous maxim: No event that is more miraculous than the miracle that it seeks to discredit can be used as an explanation to deny that a miracle actually occurred. To any sane person who witnessed a marble statue of the Virgin Mary waving to him (and who then eliminated all possibility of there being some kind of trickery, illusion, or delusion), the possibility that it was indeed miraculous would be less miraculous than the possibility that it was the result of randomly synchronized subatomic jostling.

A sign of the weakness of Dawkins’ position, then, is that he is forced to treat the impossible as possible so that he can eliminate any possibility of the miraculous (which is the only thing that he rules out, a priori, as impossible). "My thesis," he tells readers, is "that events that we commonly call miracles are not supernatural, but are part of a spectrum of more-or-less improbable natural events. A miracle, in other words, if it occurs at all, is a tremendous stroke of luck. Don’t fall neatly into natural events versus miracles. . . . Given infinite time, or infinite opportunities, anything is possible."[7] Anything but the miraculous, that is.

Strictly speaking, however, even the miraculous is possible for Dawkins, but it just cannot really be miraculous. Jesus rising from the dead is possible in just exactly the same way that random jostlings of marble molecules could make a statue wave or a cow jump over the moon. In fact, all the miracles in the and New Testaments could actually have happened just as reported, the only difference being that they were highly improbable molecular events.

Of course, we do not mean that Dawkins himself really thinks that everything—no matter how loony or absurd or truly miraculous—is possible. he is using this type of argument for a purpose. Uses his unbounded faith in chance as a means to establish purely materialistic explanations for events that would seem to any sane person to require a divine explanation, such as the creation of life on earth from non-living material.

Because Dawkins wants to affirm that the "miraculous" does not require a divine explanation, he is willing to affirm that anything is possible so as to allow that chance can provide a materialist explanation of any apparent miracle, such as a waving Virgin Mary statue or the "spontaneous arising" of something equivalent to DNA on our humble planet. In that way, he can dispense with a God who performs miracles and a God in one fell blow.

Is Dawkins’ faith in chance rational? It would be harder to imagine a more fervent but irrational faith in the powers of chance than that of someone who can, with a straight face, speak of the actual possibility of a marble statue waving its hand or a cow jumping over the moon just so he can eliminate all but the slimmest possibility that God exists.

[1] Dawkins, The God Delusion (Mifflin, 2006), pp. 7–74.

[2]Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design (Norton, 1996), p. 159

[3] Ibid., pp. 159–60

[4] Dawkins, The God Delusion, p. 51

[5] Ibid

[6] David An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Indianapolis: 1981), 10, p. 77

[7] Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, p. 139.

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