Why does Dawkins think it is wrong to posit that a paragon of 100% morals could theoretically exist?

Question

Let’s move on down Aquinas’s list.
4. The Argument from Degree

We notice that things in the world differ. There are degrees of, say, goodness or perfection. But we judge these degrees only by comparison with a maximum. Humans can be both good and bad, so the maximum goodness cannot rest in us. Therefore there must be some other maximum to set the standard for perfection, and we call that maximum God.

That’s an argument? You might as well say, people vary in smelliness but we can make the comparison only by reference to a perfect maximum of conceivable smelliness. Therefore there must exist a pre-eminently peerless stinker, and we call him God. Or substitute any dimension of comparison you like and derive an equivalently fatuous conclusion.

_{Source: p 102, The God Delusion, By Richard Dawkins (and also LNAT Sample 1, Passage 10)}

About Dawkins's counter-argument, I have two specific questions:

1. What's a "dimension of comparison"? How does it differ from just "a comparison"?

2. I read some counter-arguments and apologetics here, but why does Aquinas's argument fail in general?

3. Why does Dawkins think it is "fatuous" to hypothesize that a paragon of 100% morals could theoretically exist?

Answer 1

Judging Dawkins' argument solely by the quotation above, I would say that Dawkins response is a form of "argument by satire" which is a type of fallacy.

Furthermore, the argument is truncated (whether the truncation is by Dawkins or by OP, I cannot say). The argument could go on to say "we define the maximum amount of smelliness as 'Oscar the Grouch'". Then again, Dawkins, being British, may not be familiar with Oscar.

Some flaws with Aquinas's argument are (these flaws are not explicitly stated by Dawkins in the above quote):

1. Sentence three "But we judge these degrees only by comparison with a maximum." is utterly false. Tallness, for example, is a comparison which is entirely relative, and is not compared to some sort of maximum. There are many comparisons that are not in reference to some theoreical maximum. Given that this premise is wrong, the argument can only stand if one then justifies that "goodness" is measured relative to a maximum. Such a justification is not included in Aquinas's "proof".

2. The argument presumes that goodness is an objective standard. This assumption is directly contrary to reality. There are man competing definitions of what constitutes good versus evil. As another answer pointed out, a woman crusading for women's rights would be considered "doing good" by some people and "doing evil" by others.

3. Even if you did accept the premises of the argument, it is not a proof of the existence of God. We know that Oscar the Grouch is a fictional character, despite the fact that we have defined him to be the quintessential of smelliness. As a mathematician would say "The existence of an infimum of a set does not imply that the infimum is a member of the set." Even if we did accept that "God" is the maximum of goodness, that does not imply that God exists.

My evaluation of Dawkins' argument is that he is so shocked that Aquinas fails to notice this third point that Dawkins forgets to explicitly state it. Or else he thinks it is so obvious that it does not need to be stated.

Answer 2

dimension of comparison = something you can compare things about. i.e., consider two dogs: a toy poodle and a doberman pinscher.

You can compare them in terms of size in which case size is the dimension of comparison. You can compare then in terms of weight in which case weight is the dimension of comparison.

This is not a term of art in philosophy. This is just what the English words mean.

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Regarding the philosophical part, I would strongly recommend against using Dawkins to understand anything in the history of philosophy. He's not knowledgeable about philosophy.

I haven't bothered looking at the link, but Dawkins' understanding on this point is clearly vacuous. Aquinas's choice of goodness is not arbitrary and cannot be replaced by say morbidity or fatness or smelliness. The simple reason is that for Aquinas goodness is a type of transcendental in a way these others things are not. Moreover, it's a transcendental we don't possess to the utmost, so it's somewhat mysterious to him that we think of it.

There may be legitimate questions about this whole idea of transcendentals but all Dawkins does with his writeup as you've quoted him is demonstrate that he doesn't bother trying to understand what he reads.

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For those not in philosophy or analytics who don't know any history, the term transcendental might be unfamiliar as would the reason why such a category would exist.

Historically speaking, both Plato and Aristotle articulate the same set of transcendentals (the good, the true, and the beautiful). For them, these are (to use contemporary language) special types of predicates. Their specific reasons for identifying the three are probably best understood through the true. Looking at it from the true, you need to keep in mind that Aristotle and Plato both believe in essences/forms and that for both specific things implement these essences/forms to a limited degree. (For Aristotle, the essence is in the object and perceived; for Plato, the Form is elsewhere and the thing is an inadequate copy). The true then is the degree to which it emulates the perfect version of itself. For Plato, at least at some points in philosophy, the perfect forms of everything exist. These thinkers also take objective views of the beautiful and the good, which unify the concepts.

Even if you're thinking, the above para sounds dumb, you likely believe in at least one transcendental: existence. Most contemporary thinkers and people think existence is a different type of predicate than say red. There are big differences between a red house vs. a blue house and a red house vs. no house. The concept of existence in the way we think about it was an idea that grew up in the middle ages.

As far as I can tell from the quote, Dawkins knows none of this and raises an ignorant critique.

Answer 3

Dawkins is using the concept of smelliness for laughs, but the serious point that he's making is that we are capable of judging smelliness without a supremum of smelliness. The same goes for elevation: we do not need an "Absolute Up", like some sort of absolute zero, to make height comparisons. Humans are perfectly capable of making relative judgements of mundane qualities of things: why should it be any different with 'transcendental' qualities?

One may add that goodness, like smelliness, is not a standard that everyone agrees on. Is a campaigner for women's reproductive rights doing good work, or evil work? There are a number of evangelicals in the U.S. who have a different opinion to me: just as they might disagree with me over whether a blue cheese is smelly. If we do not even agree on what good or evil are, on what basis can one justify even the existence of an absolute scale, to have a maximum? But if judgements are relative, and informed by personal and cultural priorities, the mystery of disagreement goes away.

Answer 4

In my opinion this isn't actually a philosophical problem.

What Dawkins is attempting to point out is that the fact that any two elements are comparable doesn't mean there are absolute maximums or minimums.

A less contentious example is the set of integers. Sure, it is the case that 2 is greater than 1 in the usual metric, but that doesn't magically imply that there is a greatest integer (in fact, there are elementary proofs that there is not).

Answer 5

The reason why it seems so strange is that both argumentations are built on fundamentally different axioms and if Aquinas would live he would also vigorously deny Dawkins's premises. Because Dawkins & Co. have nothing than contempt for religious argumentations, the argumentation of Dawkins & Co. does not consider the metaphysical premises, on which Aquinas's assumptions are based, and which (metaphysical premises) could be taken as granted during the time Aquinas wrote his Summa.

Aquinas was firmly standing on Aristotle's philosophy and was therefore considered untouchable during the time Aquinas's Summa were created. Now that we have a much better overview over the severe errors Aristotle introduced, we can take many of his propositions much more critically.

Aristotle remarked that there are words for individuals: "moon","Aristotle","Mount Everest";
words which are generic: "cat","dog","rock";
and adjectives like "good","red","beautiful", etc. The adjectives he called universals. He asked why such words exists (the problem is called problem of universals). Why do people use such words if there are essentially only individuals? Every cat, dog, human, rock, whatever you find in nature, is inimitable. Aristotle believed that real things are representations or approximations of universals and we are only able to use generic terms
because universals are real existing ideas and independent from their representations,
and because we judge the likeness of a real thing with its universal.

Example: A cat may be a house-cat, a ozelot, a puma, a lion, a tiger. Let's say we learn a new language and he tell us the word "sotehu". He points to the different cats and we understand that he wants to tell us that "sotehu" means cattiness despite their completely different color, fur, stance and size.

It is a straightforward reason to assume: if this is true, we automatically understand if we will find the perfect representation of a universal. If you do not know this (as Dawkins demonstrated) you find this irritating from a modern perspective.

Worse, Dawkins demonstrated with his "rebuttal" that he understood the meaning of the argument. Yes, "stinking" is a universal which is fulfilled by representations of a sweaty foot, limburger and rotten fish. So there may exist a perfect stinking entity and no, it is not God, but more something likely to be encountered in the seven circles of hell. Dawkins launched a bad counterargument.

Wittgenstein and others have attacked Aristotle and the idea of universals and the idea that language tells us facts above the world mercilessly and in my opinion convincingly. So no counterarguments needed, Aquinas did not survive the test of time.

Some problems that seem evident for a "prove of God" were not apparent for Aquinas. The "unmoved mover" and "the first cause" cause either an infinite regress (Who moved God ? Wo created God ?) or a violation of the premises (Everything has to move/be created). The reason is that Aquinas made a whole book of special pleading for God's uniqueness (which are also conclusions from this proves and yes, for modern minds it is begging the question).

God is eternal, unchangeable and the only instance where essence and itself is equal. He cannot be defined but contains every positive universal aspect (truth, goodness, omnipotent and omniscient), etc. As special pleading is allowed in case of God, the arguments did not sound bad in former times. In essence the Summa Theologiae is not philosophical, but a defense of the catholic belief based on Aristotle.

Your question is if the argument has any validity. Now, it is not a proof for God, but what about the idea of a maximum itself ? In fact the idea of perfection pervades still the modern era. People gets irritated if, e.g., a justice would say: "Ok, we as judges and prosecutors do a 9-5 job. We are trying to do a good job, but shit happens time from time." Or if a doctor would say:"You know, human rights has this idea of equality. But right now I have the president on the other table, he is rich, he is powerful and he has a broken hand. You on the other hand are a jobless, broken white trailer trash who was unfortunately hit by a bullet. So I ask you to bleed quietly until I have fixed the president's hand." It may be the whole truth, but people do not accept that.

People fought and died for ideals who do not exist as entities (freedom, equality, privacy, right of property....). If you deny that the argument itself is meritless, you must stick to the viewpoint that striving for a maximum or believing in the existence of a maximum is a stupid thing to think or do. And if it is a stupid thing, your idea of (e.g. "human rights") loses its plausibility. Hard question.

Answer 6

Those who say that Dawkins is not knowledgeable about Philosophy might be missing the point of philosophy. That is, philosophical arguments should stand on their own. You shouldn't need any understanding of the history of Philosophy in order to evaluate an argument. An argument is a set of premises with a conclusion. You can test to make sure that the argument is valid by applying laws of inference. Then you can check to make sure that the premises are true. In the case of Thomas Aquanis' argument for the existence of god, there is no law of inference that allows for this sort of inductive argument. What I mean is that just because you see some gradient of some quality (like goodness) in the natural world, doesn't mean that it keeps going to some absolute maximum. And certainly you can't say that that absolute maximum must exist.

Answer 7

1. What's a dimension of comparison? How does it differ from just 'a comparison'?

"Dimension" here refers to the concept of a scale on which you could order all measurements or the same type (and it is a mathematical concept). In this context, a dimension could be physical sizes arranged on an imaginary axis (measured in meters and sub/supra units or inches or whatever), degree of order in a system (a.k.a. entropy), heat, electrical potential, or anything else that can be measured. "Goodness" can also be seen as a dimension, but (arguably) it cannot be measured accurately/objectively.

2. I read some counterarguments and apologetics here, but why does Aquinas's argument fail in general? If I replace stench by pure moral probity/propriety, for example, then it does make sense to refer to a paragon of 100% morals who could theoretically exist. What's 'fatuous' about this?

I will take it appart line by line:

There are degrees of, say, goodness or perfection. But we judge these degrees only by comparison with a maximum.

This maximum does not exist in nature. It is a theoretical maximum measurement that was imagined by Aquinas (and others like Plato, Aristotle, etc). The only way someone would "judge by comparison with a maximum" is after finding an existing maximum.

Humans can be both good and bad, so the maximum goodness cannot rest in us.

"Good and bad" are often in the eye of the beholder, and they not only change with who is doing the judging, but also with other factors (things that are "good" in Paris may be bad for living in Mumbay and the other way around, and there are things that were good five hundred years ago, that are considered bad now).

Therefore there must be some other maximum to set the standard for perfection, and we call that maximum God.

The idea that whatever Aquinas imagines (like an absolute goodness) must exist is not addressed here (but simply assumed to be so). A definition of God is then made, to match this idealized good-ness.

Answer 8

Aquinas's argument rests on two, perhaps faulty assumptions:

1. No human can achieve "maximum goodness."

2. Maximum goodness, whatever that may mean, must have been achieved by something that we shall call God (with capitalization).

Of course, these are both untestable hypotheses. This is theology after all.

Answer 9

There's another problem with Dawkins' argument. Smelliness requires a physical cause. There is no 'smell' outside of the physical realm of being by definition. If there were no material things that smelled or we had no physical organ for smelling, we would be unable to intellectually posit the concept of smelliness and therefore a 'peerless stinker'. In short, the peerless stinker has to exist in the material realm, and is therefore not God.

But goodness (or justice, love, mercy etc.) does not require material existence. It is because they belong to the metaphysical realm that we move into conceiving of Anselm's `beyond which there is nothing greater' and can attribute this to God.

Answer 10

Terry Eagleton, a literary critic criticises Dawkins on his New Atheism for his lack of sophistication and lack of knowledge of theology and philosophy, in itself and its history.

A lot of what I would say here has already been touched on by Virmaior.

Though you haven't specifically asked to consider this in your question its worth pointing out that the meaning of 'proof' differs a great deal here from the same word used differently but analogously in mathematics; its better understood as 'making plausible' or a 'hymn' in rational or axiomatic form.

Answer 11

Dawkins is being facetious and playing for laughs from his readers by using smelliness as his dimension of comparison.

Aquinas's fourth way, the argument from degree is grounded in the idea that all things have fundamental qualities and these qualities have graduating degrees such that, for example, one poem may be considered more beautiful than another. Aquinas advances the argument that all these qualities have a maximal possible value and these values are contained within or embodied by God.

The problem with this is that while smelliness is not a good example of these transcendental qualities, these transcendental qualities do not have to be universally positive. If Aquinas is correct then God is not only perfectly good, honest, beautiful etc. He is also perfectly Evil, insane, jealous and many other negative traits.

As a perfectly evil being cannot be omnibenevolent, this would seem to turn the Fourth Way into a refutation of the Abrahamic God.

Answer 12

It seems he can be charitably understood to be raising the issue of the ontological and epistemological queerness of putative normative truthmakers to moral facts understood through ethical intuitions and so on, so we should not posit what is prerequisite to such normative truthmakers/moral facts existing.

Answer 13

The Angelic Doctor's argument fails because it makes this leap:

Because we have the concept of Purity, there must exist that which is pure.