richard_dawkins_-_the_god_delusion

58 THE GOD DELUSION
like agnosticism of the permanent and irrevocable kind, full-blown
PAP. It implies that science cannot even make probability judgements
on the question. This remarkably widespread fallacy - many
repeat it like a mantra but few of them, I suspect, have thought it
through - embodies what I refer to as 'the poverty of agnosticism'.
Gould, by the way, was not an impartial agnostic but strongly
inclined towards de facto atheism. On what basis did he make that
judgement, if there is nothing to be said about whether God exists?
The God Hypothesis suggests that the reality we inhabit also
contains a supernatural agent who designed the universe and - at
least in many versions of the hypothesis - maintains it and even
intervenes in it with miracles, which are temporary violations of his
own otherwise grandly immutable laws. Richard Swinburne, one of
Britain's leading theologians, is surprisingly clear on the matter in
his book 7s There a God?:
What the theist claims about God is that he does have a
power to create, conserve, or annihilate anything, big or
small. And he can also make objects move or do anything
else ... He can make the planets move in the way that
Kepler discovered that they move, or make gunpowder
explode when we set a match to it; or he can make planets
move in quite different ways, and chemical substances
explode or not explode under quite different conditions
from those which now govern their behaviour. God is not
limited by the laws of nature; he makes them and he can
change or suspend them - if he chooses.
Just too easy, isn't it! Whatever else this is, it is very far from
NOMA. And whatever else they may say, those scientists who subscribe
to the 'separate magisteria' school of thought should concede
that a universe with a supernaturally intelligent creator is a very
different kind of universe from one without. The difference
between the two hypothetical universes could hardly be more
fundamental in principle, even if it is not easy to test in practice.
And it undermines the complacently seductive dictum that science
must be completely silent about religion's central existence claim.
The presence or absence of a creative super-intelligence is