"Delusions" of Grandeur

Murrough O'Brien's wildly overwritten review ("squirts this sachet of puerile pap"?!?) of Richard Dawkins book "The God Delusion" must at least approach the high-water mark of smugness among reviews of the book. Consider the following counter-argument, which O'Brien apparently thinks is a devastating blow to Dawkins:

[Dawkins] writes: "The designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer." The short response to that is a simple "why?" The long one goes something like this: the question "Who made God?"only makes sense if one assumes that the Divine nature is subject to a kind of inverted evolutionary process by which the complex is preceded by the still more complex, but why on earth should we assume this?

The short response to O'Brien's long response goes something like this: If God Himself doesn't require a designer because He could have arisen without one, then the Universe itself, being far less complex than God, requires a designer even less, making God unnecessary. In other words, the designer hypothesis itself proposes that anything of sufficient complexity must have been designed. If so, then God must have been designed. On the other hand, if God is exempt from the designer hypothesis, then the Universe, being far less complex than God, would be even more exempt.

Not content with merely overlooking the obvious, O'Brien later engages in a bit of special pleading. Okay, make that a lot of special pleading:

Dawkins also can't resist whipping out Russell's Teapot Paradigm. To explain: we cannot definitively prove that a teapot is not at this moment orbiting the earth but the balance of probability weighs against it. For teapot, read (of course) God. Oh dear. The analogy fails spectacularly because it's predicated on the fallacy of "all things being equal", that "all things being equal" we should have no reason to suppose that a God existed. But all things aren't equal: to think otherwise is to indulge in counterfactuality. To put it another way, the "delusion" of God is here opposed by the illusion of a human history devoid of religion. The fact is that a belief in transcendent powers of one sort or another is, so far as we can tell, as old as humanity, and has been upheld by some of its greatest minds. So no, a teapot won't do really. Some otherwise intelligent people seriously believe that the Earl of Oxford wrote the plays of Shakespeare and, were all things equal, they would have a case. But, again, all things that matter remain obstinately unequal: you've got to explain why it isn't Shakespeare before you attempt to prove why it is the earl of Oxford. An old tradition may be false, but in your way it lies.

This might seem like a well thought out response, until one considers that it is apparently only the atheist that bears O'Brien's burden of having to disprove the beliefs of other "traditions". We don't (nor are we likely to ever) hear O'Brien chastise the Christian, for example, for not having disproved Hinduism, Scientology, and all the other incompatible traditions that "lie in the way" before asserting that a monotheistic God exists. If it is not incumbent upon the Christian to do any disproving at all, in the face of so many competing traditions, then why is it a great offense that the atheist fails to do any disproving?

Imagine what it would be like if O'Brien's "disproving argument" was applied outside its usual domain of religious apologetics. Consider for a moment what the list of explanations for infectious disease must have looked like only a few hundred years ago. On that list we'd certainly find such things as demonic possession, witchcraft, the divine will of a variety of Gods, and many other "traditions". Of course, each of these explanations had its strong supporters, and there were undoubtedly some who insisted that anyone who dared to disbelieve in all of these traditions was arrogant, or a fool, or both. As it turns out, none of these explanations was the right one after all. And we owe a tremendous debt to those few who insisted that none of these explanations sufficed, and that there must be some other as-yet-undetermined cause, whatever it may be. We now write the biographies of these people who withheld their belief in the absence of sufficient evidence, while the stories of the well-intentioned but ignorant believers are found in the footnotes.

History is full of such competing traditions that sought to explain chemical reactions, the motions of the planets, sexual reproduction, weather, and on and on. And it was those who refused to accept any of these traditions who finally found the right answer. How far behind would we be today if all of these doubters had been burdened with the task of having to disprove all of these other traditions first?