Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
“At this point in the chapter, Dawkins pauses to take a swipe at the concepts of omniscience and omnipotence. Before analyzing Dawkins’s comments, I should reveal that I have no great love for either term. The concepts of omniscience and ominpotence are, from my point of view as a student of the Hebrew Bible, Johnny-come-latelies who have little to do with the biblical portrayal of God…. With that bias out on the table, you will understand why I am not going to try to defend the concepts of omnipotence and omniscience as such against Dawkins’s snarky ‘critique.’
“Neither, however, am I going to affirm that Dawkins has put forward a strong critique of either notion. He hasn’t (at least, not at this point in chapter 3). Dawkins’s entire aside consists of a thin claim that omniscience and omnipotence are mutually incompatible. ‘If God is omniscient, he must already know how he is going to intervene to change the course of history using his omnipotence. But that means he can’t change his mind about his intervention, which means he is not omnipotent’ (2:38:26). That’s the entire substance of Dawkins’s argument against these concepts (at least by this point in chapter 3). It is by no means incumbent upon Dawkins to oppose these concepts at all in order to disprove (or stack up large probabilities against) the God Hypothesis, since the God Hypothesis as Dawkins has stated it does not apply either label, much less both, to the creative intelligence that it does posit. Here again we have a red herring. On the other hand, if Dawkins is going to take swipes at specific theological dogmas, he needs to understand them.
