Relevant but with worrisome passages, for example:

- “That way of putting it, however, simply perpetuates confusion. If space and time are ‘bounded’, then the ‘edge of space’ would not be an ‘edge in space’; a ‘beginning of time’ would not be a ‘beginning in time’.” p82

I wonder if Nicholas Lash missed the point of ‘bounded’ space-time without boundary – as though space-time were mapped to the 2 dimensional surface of a sphere, round and round without ever meeting an edge.

- “He was creating hell for people who ask silly questions like that!” p82

I seem to recall reading that Saint Augustine (having his cake and eating it) said others answer in that way but he wouldn’t.

How did we get from ‘How come that there is something, rather than nothing?’ to “… God creates all things out of nothing: ex nihilo”?

“Everything that God does that is not God, everything that God creates – galaxies and gases, promises and symphonies, bird-life and Milton Keynes – is, from its first instant to its last, out of nothing made.” [p81 "Holiness, Speech and Silence" Nicholas Lash]

Even as description that seems quite strange.

Re: comment #6

> Personally, I accept (1); I am unconvinced so far by any form of (2) in its weaker form (2a), and I reject (2b) …

Well it seems like we can get to (1) simply by definition – ‘God’ as placeholder for “the mystery of how come there is anything instead of nothing”.

No: my comments about ‘God’ as ‘placeholder’ were simply a description of one step in a wider argument. See my comments over on the McCabe post, where I describe again two other steps. In the terms of my comment over on that post, when I say above that I believe in (1), I am very much in ’step 3′ territory. Dawkins, I take it, rejects both step 2 (or is ignorant of its possiblity) and (obviously) step 3.

On your final point, about silence – if you want another bit of relevant reading, I’d recommend Holiness, Speech and Silence by Nicholas Lash – which (as the title suggests) is not wholly in disagreement with your suggestion.

And the expanded typology is here:
http://goringe.net/theology/?p=103#comment-2766

> Personally, I accept (1); I am unconvinced so far by any form of (2) in its weaker form (2a), and I reject (2b) …

Well it seems like we can get to (1) simply by definition – ‘God’ as placeholder for “the mystery of how come there is anything instead of nothing”.

It also seems like having a placeholder “????” for that mystery isn’t a problem for Dawkins, but labelling the placeholder ‘God’ is just a ‘having your cake and eating it’ way of having a ‘god’ while denying it.

> … God cannot literally be described as a designing intelligence; using such language to talk about God is at best analogous.

Given this is true of all the many things that strand of Christian theology seems to say about ‘God’ why would it present any special difficulty?

Dawkins introduces “[t]he power of cranes such as natural selection” as consciousness-raisers” (preface) so how literally should we take “the simple basis for a self-bootstrapping crane”?

> … belief in a mysterious, non-explanatory God actually provides an intellectually powerful way of making sense of the world we live in.

I’m finding it difficult to disagree with – “The mystery which is the answer to the most profound problem of all, the problem of why there is anything at all instead of nothing, this mystery which we label ‘God’, lies far beyond anything we can conceive or put into words. Nobody who talks about God knows what she is talking about; the greatest theologian knows no more of what God is than the smallest child. We are all stretching out to a mystery far beyond our reach, far beyond anything that can be put into our words or our thoughts.” p216

“Praying as we ought” in “God Still Matters”.

I wonder if the most fundamental acknowledgement of that mystery is to respond with silence rather than embellishment.

“The theologians of my Cambridge encounter were /defining/ themselves into an epistemological Safe Zone where rational argument could not reach them because they had /declared by fiat/ that it could not.”

“There must have been a first cause of everything, and we might as well give it the name God. Yes, I said, but it must have been simple and therefore, whatever else we call it, God is not an appropriate name (unless we very explicitly divest it of all the baggage that the word ‘God’ carries in the minds of most religious believers).”

“The God Delusion” Chapter 4, section “An interlude at Cambridge”

Oh! Dawkins seems to be suggesting that in the way simple physical laws play out to myriad effects, a small mystery may have played out to something rather than nothing – a mystery too small to carry all the baggage.

Richard Dawkins’ 2003 Tanner lecture covers some of the same ground as “The God Delusion”, here’s the pdf –

http://www.tannerlectures.utah.edu/lectures/documents/volume25/dawkins_2005.pdf

‘Setting aside questions that science ignores or rejects, like the colour of jealousy or the purpose of the sun, are there any deep and important questions that science cannot answer? Of course there are many that science cannot yet answer. But are there any that science in principle can never answer? Very possibly. We don’t know. An example might be: “Where did the laws and fundamental constants of physics come from?” But if science cannot answer such questions, that emphatically doesn’t mean that any other discipline — for example, religion — can.’ p65

He at least tries to understand the issues that evolution raises for creationists, and at least acknowledges the difficulties raised by claiming ‘it just isn’t science!’

> … God cannot literally be described as a designing intelligence; using such language to talk about God is at best analogous.

Naïve question #4289009 – How can we make a valid argument by analogy when one side of the comparison ‘God’ is incomprehensible? (Don’t we have to show some commonalities to make an analogy?)

Dawkins on mystery: in the ‘Worship of Gaps’ section, Dawkins has a contrast between a scientists approach to what is not yet understood, and the mystics who ‘exult in mystery and want it to stay mysterious.’ This is closely related, as Dawkins goes on, to the creationists love of ‘gaps’ (and refusal to see those gaps as questions to be patiently investigate). A little later, this attitude is described as the desire, when faced with a problem, ‘just [to] give up, and appeal to God’. (There’s also some stuff later on, in the list of potentially successful religious memes – sorry, I don’t have the page references to hand – about religious mysteries, where the appeal to mystery is portrayed as the resignation of reason: ‘Don’t even try to understand…’)

Dawkins on something rather than nothing:
Again, I don’t have page numbers to hand, but there’s a discussion of Dawkins’ attendance of a conference in Cambridge. Dawkins describes the theologians present returning time and time again to the question of why there is something rather than nothing. Any answer to such a question must be ‘the simple basis for a self-bootstrapping crane’. He speculates about where such an explanatory crane might be found, and, whilst it would be unfair to put too much weight on the necessarily speculative suggestions he makes, I think they do show how he takes the question. So he suggests that cosmological inflation might hold the answer, or a many worlds theory, or such like. Those might well have very great explanatory power, but I can’t see that they address the question that the theologians were posing: they don’t seem to me to get at the ‘why anything?’ question (rather than the ‘why this sort of thing?’ question, which is not the same thing). That point doesn’t by itself make the theologians’ attempts to answer that question plausible, of course – but it does suggest to me that Dawkins hasn’t quite grasped what question the theologians were asking (or, to be fair, hasn’t quite grasped the classical version of that question asked by theologians like Thomas Aquinas; the theologians at the conference may have been guilty of all sorts of confusion.)

On that front, Philip Kitcher’s “Living with Darwin: Evolution, Design and the Future of Faith” (OUP 2007) is so much more interesting.

> Dawkins sees reference to ‘mystery’ simply as a hand-waving refusal to think seriously

> Dawkins’ account of the ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ question

What passages in “The God Delusion” are you referring to?