Philosophia Christi

Volume 11, Issue 1, 2009

Symposium: Did God Mandate Genocide?

Dawkins’s Gambit, Hume’s Aroma, and God’s Simplicity

I examine the central atheistic argument of Richard Dawkins’s book The God Delusion (“Dawkins’s Gambit”) and illustrate its failure. I further show that Dawkins’s Gambit is a fragment of a more comprehensive critique of theism found in David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Among the failings of Dawkins’s Gambit is that it is directed against a version of the God Hypothesis that few traditional monotheists hold. Hume’s critique is more challenging in that it targets versions of the God Hypothesis that are central to tradi­tional monotheism. Theists and atheists should put away The God Delusion and pick up Hume’s Dialogues.