richard_dawkins_-_the_god_delusion

150 '1 H K G O 1) I) F I. U S I O X
existence of the universe. It is economical because it
attributes the existence and nature of absolutely everything
in the universe to just one being, an ultimate cause
which assigns a reason for the existence of everything,
including itself. It is elegant because from one key idea -
the idea of the most perfect possible being - the whole
nature of God and the existence of the universe can be
intelligibly explicated.
Like Swinburne, Ward mistakes what it means to explain something,
and he also seems not to understand what it means to say of
something that it is simple. I am not clear whether Ward really
thinks God is simple, or whether the above passage represented a
temporary 'for the sake of argument' exercise. Sir John
Polkinghorne, in Science and Christian Belief, quotes Ward's earlier
criticism of the thought of Thomas Aquinas: 'Its basic error is in
supposing that God is logically simple - simple not just in the sense
that his being is indivisible, but in the much stronger sense that
what is true of any part of God is true of the whole. It is quite
coherent, however, to suppose that God, while indivisible, is internally
complex.' Ward gets it right here. Indeed, the biologist Julian
Huxley, in 1912, defined complexity in terms of 'heterogeneity of
parts', by which he meant a particular kind of functional
indivisibility. 71
Elsewhere, Ward gives evidence of the difficulty the theological
mind has in grasping where the complexity of life comes from. He
quotes another theologian-scientist, the biochemist Arthur
Peacocke (the third member of my trio of British religious
scientists), as postulating the existence in living matter of a
'propensity for increased complexity'. Ward characterizes this as
'some inherent weighting of evolutionary change which favours
complexity'. He goes on to suggest that such a bias 'might be some
weighting of the mutational process, to ensure that more complex
mutations occurred'. Ward is sceptical of this, as well he should be.
The evolutionary drive towards complexity comes, in those lineages
where it comes at all, not from any inherent propensity for
increased complexity, and not from biased mutation. It comes from
natural selection: the process which, as far as we know, is the only