Richard Dawkins Falls into the Partition Fallacy

Of all the so-called "New Atheists" the one I have the most respect for is Richard Dawkins. Harris and Hitchens have their moments as well, but Dawkins is brilliant in his field of study, like him or not it's only fair to admit that. Which made me all the more surprised when I heard an answer he gave to a challenge from a caller on a call-in radio show. The question was concerning ethics and his answer was well within the framework of sociobiological behavior. This was not surprising given his expertise. However, when defending Atheism one needs to know how to supply a good philosophical answer to philosophical questions. That's not to say that he could never use his own views to defend his position but one should never present a rebutting defeater before an undercutting defeater (a defeater is what it sounds like: a sufficient response to give good cause to reject an argument or position. Undercutting defeaters attack the presupposition upon which the argument rests and rebutting defeaters deal with the superstructure). Despite how brilliant he is, he leaves much lacking in this area.

Like most atheistic scientists of our age he simply does not have the goods to defend Atheism philosophically, nor does he demonstrate that he thinks that he needs to. Of the "New Atheists" Hitchens (some may say Dennet) probably does this the best despite how rhetorically laden his arguments are. You will find none of these "New Atheists" positing the Law of Identity as the axiomatic principle of the universe (Rand). No "New Atheist" will present a posteriori inductive logic to suggest a vicious infinite regress applied to theistic causality (Russell). These Atheists were the big guns and they were philosophers. Their arguments were so well thought out you have to describe them with vocabulary packed with meaning to even come close to summarizing what they actually meant, otherwise your stuck with inaccurate, moronic versions of their arguments like "who created God?" (truncated version of Russell who's real version can give nightmares) or "Everybody's selfish and that's where your god came from: yourself" (troglodytic hunch back version of Rand who's real version is brilliant). You would have considered it your lucky day to catch them in the philosophical error Dawkins made. It was like he just had a biologically based argument and ran through a proverbial wall leaving a Dawkins shaped hole behind him. And yet, the caller nor the host could challenge him, they just bought his assumptions and ran with them. There is a reason why the Rands, Russells, and Nietzsches labored over their arguments: the subject requires it. And yet, the most popular Atheists are the ones that can package their arguments in a nifty sound bite to feed to the masses to throw in the face of Christians who, sadly, don't know what to do with it. The Atheist can pat themselves on the back as being smarter and go on his or her way wondering why the Christian doesn't change their mind when they can't answer the tough question of who created God. Perhaps the Christian doesn't change their mind because the fallacy of the assumptions bleed through implicitly like a picture game where there are two pictures and one has slight differences for the observer to point out: a quick glance won't make the difference clear but the errors are there one just needs to take the time to find them.

Okay, I'm done teasing you, now to Dawkin's error. To understand the problem with what he said you must first know some things about ethics. What is the goal of ethics? When we talk about ethics are we trying to find the best ways to catalog activity that falls under the branch of ethics philosophically or is there more going on? What one hopes to accomplish with ethics is not just lists of behavior but also one hopes to learn a proper way to behave. There is no partition between behavior, knowledge and authority to have a viable ethical system, anything short of this is to be in error. The goal of ethics is to describe as well as prescribe behavior, and in order for there to be prescription there must be authority. If there is no force to ethics then how one ought to act is irrelevant if there is no authority then there is no enforcement of the "ought." And if ethics cannot tell one how to behave then I ask why we engage in the study of ethics at all. Let me give an example, the argument for emotive ethics is that our feelings tell us what is bad, but we OUGHT to follow those feelings. The utilitarian version of ethics will describe the best outcome for any number of reasons (the most popular being for the most people, think Spock "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few"), but it will also point out that we ought to behave a certain way to achieve that result. Pragmatic ethics will tell us what works is what is ethical, but it will say that we need to do what works in order to actually be moral. What is the force behind these oughts? Some say a good functioning society while others would say personal pleasure, etc. We could systematically defuse any of these systems but that would be chasing too long of a rabbit hole (but it is tempting). For the purposes of this post I am simply establishing that ethics requires a telos or an outcome, a behavior, a prescription. If you went to the doctor and he said that you had a fatal illness, but offered no solution, just a diagnosis, you would not think him to be much of a doctor. To go a step further, if he described the treatment needed but could not apply it you still would not think of him to be much of a doctor. The same is true of all ethical systems they are nothing if they only describe they must prescribe or they are not ethics, they would only be facts.

So, Dawkins is taking phone calls and someone brings up a point now made popular by the movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. The long and short of the argument is that if man is an evolved being he is no more or less animalistic than what is observed in nature. Atheism must then support, or at the very least, allow, some form of racism; for nature benefits those who want to survive. If there is a weaker species then one should be racist. Being against racism is arbitrary in a system where behavior is informed by natural selection. But perhaps its more than merely arbitrary, perhaps if one does not act out in suppressing the weaker then the weaker cries "racism" to overcome the stronger. If the stronger bend the weaker have now become the stronger, the king of the jungle does not fight back and allows rats to overcome his prowess as the lion. The error comes in Dawkin's response where he says that all humans come from a common ancestry therefor we OUGHT to not be racist. Did you catch that? Let me ask you a question, why OUGHT we not be racist given Dawkin's DESCRIPTION of a monolithic genealogy? Because he says so? Because that's really cool? Where is the force that's going to prescribe that I not be a racist? When did we find out that racism was wrong, after the Human Genome Project? Are we going to have a special force that fights hate crimes with a double helix for their symbol? Let us pretend that I was a committed Nietzschean Atheist. It would entail that I believe that racism is a guiding principle for making the world a better place. Along comes Richard Dawkins who says that I come from the same ancestry as my enemy whom I believe to be inferior. Let us go further and say I believe Dawkins, but I start thinking teleologically (outcome and purpose) and I say that we may come from common ancestry but we are not going toward common conclusions and along the path of history some of us have gotten weaker therefore they should be illuminated for the sake of better conclusions. What will Dawkins do? Continue to PRESCRIBE common ancestry? Common ancestry is a description and nothing more. In an Atheistic system nature is our example for ethics and all the illusions of progress won't change that. There can be no prescriptions with force in any Atheistic ethical system. All the ethical descriptions in the world doesn't amount to one prescription and all the descriptions that Atheism has conjured cannot satisfy the prescriptions that the study of ethics logically demands. This is what I have named The Partition Fallacy and it is replete throughout atheistic writings on ethics (including the Utilitarian, Pragmatic, Subjective, Emotive and the Neo-Categorical Imperative). Dawkins is not alone.

Dawkins is the most accomplished and most brilliant of the "New Atheists" but the area he needs to be the strongest in is the area he lacks the most. In this regard he is way behind the discarded atheists of the past. Perhaps it does not matter because they also never overcame the Partition Fallacy.