PROFESSOR DAWKINS: Replies that the question of whether God exists is one of the most important that we have to answer, and states that he thinks it is a scientific question. His answer is no, God does not exist in science.

COLLINS: Responds that God's existence is either true or not, but doubts that the tools of science can provide the answer. He says God cannot be completely contained within nature, and therefore is outside of science.

Colligion: We can see that whole matter in a different way, and perhaps we should. Where is the data that supports an existence for any of the gods, including the one Christians have given the name, God? Does anyone have a tangible description of whatever it is that has been given that name? How does one know firsthand the nature of a God that has only been described in prehistory? This is an interesting question because, even if that god exists, descriptions of that existence have been extensively modified with the progression of time.

Looking back at history, and facts gathered in the present, anything that could be imagined could be named a god. If it could be imagined that something exists beyond our wholesale ability to imagine, what makes that so special? Originally female, now described as a male, it appears the best way to describe God's gender is to simply refer to it as 'It'. Islanders have named airplanes gods and developed rituals to bring them back. What makes you think primitive mankind would behave differently in another time or place? God is outside of science only because, no matter what science discovers, mankind can imagine God to be other than that, a hypothesis that the dearth of facts supports.

Beyond that, the facts of the material world indicate it was built up from the microscopic realms, not down from some overweening superlative realm. That points us in a direction opposite an imaginary supernatural realm which, if it exists, is meaningless to us without something tangible coming from it. It appears to boil down to this: The question should be about whether God is in illusion or a delusion, not about whether it exists.

TIME: asks Professor Dawkins if he thinks Darwin's theory of evolution does more than simply contradict the Genesis story?

PROFESSOR DAWKINS: answers Yes. The argument from design was the most powerful argument for God's existence from the physical world, that living things are so beautiful and elegant and apparently purposeful, they could only have been made by an intelligent designer. He goes on to say Darwin's explanation was simpler, of a gradual, incremental improvement toward more adaptive perfection. Each step, he goes on, is not too improbable but accumulated over millions of years.

COLLINS: says he doesn't see how that is incompatible with God's having designed it.

Colligion: First, we still have not settled upon an existence for God. That, as Professor Dawkins said at the start, is the primary question. Where are the accumulated facts to support any accounting different from that of Darwin and evolution? Without facts, you have no case.

TIME: Wants to know when it would have occurred, if God designed the material world.

COLLINS: responds that God is outside of nature and so also outside of space and time. He claims that, at the moment of the creation of the universe, God could also have activated evolution and known how it would turn out. The idea, he says, becomes entirely acceptable that he could both foresee the future and also give us spirit and free will.

PROFESSOR DAWKINS: thinks that is a cop-out, that it would be odd that he should choose to wait 10 billion years before life got started and another 4 billion years for humans.

Colligion: It would be odd, from my point of view, to think two trained scientists could be talking about something as though they had assumed it exists without yet ever any evidence to verify their assumptions. 

COLLINS: Wants to know who we are to say that God's methods are odd, and goes on to tell Professor Dawkins he does not think it is God's purpose to make his intentions obvious.

Colligion: Apologia has the role in religion of not only explaining the unaccountable, but also to continuously try gaining the upper hand in any kind of discussion. Who, beyond other people, has placed anyone in the role accredited to God, but for those who took it onto themselves? To say what is or is not the intention of this mysterious entity seems a bit precocious no matter whose words are being used. Where are any facts to support those who claim to know the purpose of what still amounts to an imaginary being, no matter what view they support?

TIME: tells Collins that his books suggest that if the six or more characteristics of our universe had varied at all life would have been impossible and requests him to provide an example.

COLLINS: claims that if the gravitational constant were off by one part in a hundred million million, the expansion of the universe would not have occurred in the fashion necessary for life. It is very difficult to adopt the view that this was just chance. But design becomes a plausible explanation.

PROFESSOR DAWKINS: responds that God must have been a divine knob twiddler, that, because something is vastly improbable, we need a God to explain it, but that God himself would be even more improbable. Physicists say that these six constants are not free to vary.  The multiverse way says that maybe the universe is one of a very large number of universes. If the vast majority will not contain life because of constants, the odds mount that a tiny minority of universes will have the right fine-tuning.

Colligion: If Mister Collins is correct, and the constant varied by whatever amount, it would simply mean we would not be here to discuss anything. All we can get from that statement is that, if true, it did not vary, at least in any way important to us.

Now: In spite of Newton's premises otherwise, no data has been provided to show that the universe is the same from edge to edge, and that variations within it make things impossible one place that become probable elsewhere, especially when those variations need only to be very minute. Pictures of various features show a tremendous lack of uniformity, and even hint that the universe is a work in progress, that new ones may be being born within it right now. Where are the signs that it is a one-time, one-place deal? With what material facts does that get supported?

COLLINS: responds to Professor Dawkins that a theoretical resolution is unlikely, either there are parallel universes out there we can't observe, or you have to say there was a plan. He finds the argument of the existence of a God more compelling than all these multiverses. Occam says you should choose the explanation that is most simple and straightforward—leads me more to believe in God than in the multiverse, which seems a stretch of the imagination.

Colligion: The fact of the matter is, that is not what Ockham said. In its original form, Occam's Razor said, "Do not multiply entities unnecessarily."Adding entities is what both views does, and is what William of Ockham warned against.

An example: On September 5, 2006, Nature Reviews Microbiology, one of the leading journals in its field, released "From The Origin of Species to the origin of bacterial flagella" in advance online publication form. The article, by Mark J. Pallen of the University of Birmingham and Nicholas J. Matzke of NCSE, reviews the evidence for the evolution of the bacterial flagellum — which proponents of "intelligent design" notoriously adduce as a clear example of a designed rather than evolved structure. A quote from that: "…one is faced with two options: either there were thousands or even millions of individual creation events, which strains Occam's razor to breaking point, or one has to accept that all the highly diverse contemporary flagellar systems have evolved from a common ancestor."

Now, that being the case in the smallest realms of existence, multiply that up to the macro and cosmic. We acknowledge that there are bacteria that exist, and they are numerous. We have examples to look at. We acknowledge there are worlds that exist and, even though not identical, they are numerous. We also have examples of them. We know there are galaxies that exist and that, even though not identical, they are numerous, and we can point to examples in the night sky. We know a universe exists by the same methods and perceptions that we know all the rest. By what perverse standard should we decree that as the stopping point for all the material accretion we can observe in the skies at night?

We can guess there are other universes without seeing them, because we can see one of them. It provides us with an example. Where is the example of a God, the entity you have posited without a precedent to demonstrate its probability?

PROFESSOR DAWKINS: says there may be things far grander and more incomprehensible than we can possibly imagine, but what he can't understand is why Collins invokes improbability, will not admit that he's shooting himself in the foot by "magicking into existence the word 'God'."

COLLINS: claims God is not improbable, that he has no need of a creation story for himself but is the answer to all of those "How must it have come to be" questions.

PROFESSOR DAWKINS: thinks that's the mother and father of all cop-outs, and insists that it's an honest scientific quest to discover where this apparent improbability comes from. He complains that Collins says, "Well, God did it. And God needs no explanation because God is outside all this."  "Scientists don't do that," he says. "Scientists say, "We're working on it [and] struggling to understand."

Colligion: Whether God is improbable or not to someone does not woo it into existence. No one has yet shown how being "outside" renders something intangible, or being of a "supernature" renders something inaccessible. By all the accounts given, the ability to walk among men requires a link that should be discoverable. The religious have had millenniums to provide us with that. The amount of their evidence should, by now, fill a vast hall but, should one be built to hold it, it would be filled only with hollow echoes.

COLLINS: says that science should continue to see whether we can find evidence for multiverses, but objects to the assumption that anything that might be outside of nature gets ruled out. That's an impoverished view, he says, of the kinds of questions we humans can ask, such as "Why am I here?", "What happens after we die?", "Is there a God?" Refusing to acknowledge their appropriateness leads to a zero probability of God. If your mind is open about whether God might exist, he claims, some aspects of the universe are consistent with that conclusion.

Colligion: Does the acclaimed magnificence of a view enhance its rectitude? As before, why is something assumed to be "outside of nature" also assumed to be intangible? Why is it an assumption at all for something not observable and testable to be discredited? There is nothing to assume about that, nor any facts to make assumptions about. If we are talking factual matters, where are your facts to support that? If we are talking semantics —rationalizing— what are the facts that make it important to do so? That needs to be dealt with before accurate answers can be provided for any other questions.

PROFESSOR DAWKINS: says we should say we are profoundly ignorant of these matters and need to work on them, but that to suddenly say the answer is God seems to close off the discussion.

TIME: Could the answer be God?

PROFESSOR DAWKINS: says there could be something beyond our present understanding.

COLLINS: That's God.

PROFESSOR DAWKINS: Agrees, but with the stipulation that it could be any of a billion Gods, a God of the Martians, or of the inhabitants of Alpha Centauri. The chance of its being a particular God is vanishingly small and that the onus is on Collins to demonstrate why he thinks so.

Colligion: Actually, no factual materials exist to support any of that, but  Professor Dawkins is correct about the onus to provide evidence being upon the claimant. Without that, he has no case beyond hearsay—anecdotal stories passed down from a primitive past and given sanctity by people whose livelihoods depend upon their continuing acceptance, according to whatever evidence has ever been gathered. They ought to be required to recuse themselves from any part in this because of their conflict of interest. That those witnesses fervently —ferociously!— disagree with one another casts even further doubt upon his case.

TIME: asks Dr. Collins if the Resurrection doesn't, along with the virgin birth and lesser miracles, fatally undermine the scientific method?

COLLINS: says if you're willing to acknowledge a God outside of nature, there's nothing inconsistent with God choosing to invade the natural world. If God made the natural laws, why could he not violate them? If Christ was also divine, his Resurrection is not in itself a great logical leap.

Colligion: Absence of verifiable facts equals absence of truth. How is it that saying a God could exist outside of nature could make it true. Would we not have to demonstrate how that is true before we can begin to think of extending the same status to any other individuals? That a God exists is the basic premise of your religion, an unestablished premise you keep trying to drag us beyond. How can any of the rest of it be found true until that matter is first finalized?

The "God outside of nature" line sounds like you have relegated it to a station of banishment. In what manner could something "outside of nature" have any effect upon nature without being in some way accessible to it? If the "outside of nature" being is not accessible to human perceptions, then by what method was it discovered in the first place? Can we assume you have some verifiable facts at your disposal that you are refusing to share? You surely don't expect people to take your word for something so astounding that we should be laughing at it in any other case?

TIME: Doesn't the very notion of miracles throw off science?

COLLINS: disagrees and says one place where science and faith could touch each other is in the investigation of supposedly miraculous events.

PROFESSOR DAWKINS: says the word miracle slams the door in the face of constructive investigation. He gives the example of a radio seeming like a miracle to a medieval peasant and says all kinds of things may happen which we by the lights of today's science would classify as miracles just as medieval science might a Boeing 747. Once you buy into the position of faith, like Francis with "from the perspective of a believer" you find yourself losing all of your natural skepticism and your really scientific credibility.

Colligion: One can be a believer, apparently, without any reliable evidence.

COLLINS: states he actually agrees with the first part of Professor Dawkins' response but would challenge that his scientific instincts are any less rigorous than Professor Dawkins', the difference being that his presumption of the possibility of God and supernatural is not zero, while Professor Dawkins' is.

Colligion: Once one adopts and displays a tendency to assume something as true with no evidence and no verification, it is his own credentials he is putting on the line. In the God business, a majority vote is what people count on for acceptance of their continued veracity. This puts "truth" up as a matter of preference, and not as a matter of facts. Science is hardly a democratic process.

A colligious approach to the God question requires that it remain a matter of either apathy or silent interest for so long as nothing gets presented to show any answers about it are true. To utter statements about it as though it were confirmed and factual goes outside the rigors of science, where anyone can say anything and the most that will happen to him is that he will get inquired of him, "What denomination teaches that?" That is not science, and to claim otherwise is wrong.

TIME: mentions that Collins has described morality as not only a gift from God but a signpost that he exists.

COLLINS: replies about sociobiology or evolutionary psychology as relating to the origins of our moral sense and the idea of altruism, as relevant to behavioral adaptations for the preservation of our genes. He wonders why an individual would risk his own DNA doing something selfless to help somebody. Our own family members share our DNA, or help someone else who might help us later, but the most generous manifestations of altruism,  are not based on kin selection or reciprocity. Oskar Schindler risking his life to save more than a thousand Jews from the gas chambers is the opposite of saving his genes. These qualities may come from God, he claims, since justice and morality are two of the attributes most readily identified with God.

Colligion: Here's an interesting question: Why do the religious spend so much time on sex, naturism, hedonism, nudism or porn, when the average atheist shows little interest? Let me offer an answer: those subjects, in themselves, actually have very little to do with morality as it is defined by the average dictionary, as it is defined according to human interests rather than religious interests. People interested in facts are not interested in emotionally charged, emotionally contrived "revealed" credos. People interested in getting their jollies will be.

What Richard Professor Dawkins showed us was that memes distract us from our genetic instincts, often to the point of perversity. Memes, it turns out, are ideas that people share with one another, sometimes steal from each other. In hindsight it seems misfortunate that he innocently used the word "copy" to describe them, for that led others onto all kinds of goose-chases while demanding to know the whereabouts and nature of all those reified entities that had suddenly gained control over our brains. Why do the religious so hurriedly deny memes existence when they can be observed at work with predictable outcomes, and acclaim existence for a God for unpredictable outcomes that can readily be explained in ways that remain predictable?

Everybody already knows about ideas, what they are, their force for good or ill, and can recognize a good one or a bad one and tell you why. We know we learn ideas from each other, and act according to the pool of them we value. That is all the explanation needed for altruistic anomalies. Religion offers an easy passage of ideas from one generation to the next, and from one person to the next, good and bad. Colligion could also do that, but deals with strictly factual, testable, verifiable materials.

PROFESSOR DAWKINS: offers as an analogy that most people understand that sexual lust has to do with propagating genes. In nature copulation tends to reproduction of more genetic copies. Most modern copulations involve contraception, designed to avoid reproduction. In our prehistoric past, we would have lived in extended families, surrounded by kin, but now we live in big cities, no longer among kin nor people who will ever reciprocate our good deeds. Just as people engaged in sex with contraception are not aware of being motivated by a drive to have babies, it doesn't cross our mind that the reason for do-gooding is based in the fact that our primitive ancestors lived in small groups.

But that seems to me to be a highly plausible account for where the desire for morality, the desire for goodness, comes from.

COLLINS: argues as to how that does not do justice to the sense we all have about the absolutes of good and evil, and that while evolution may explain some features of the moral law, it can't explain why it should have any real significance. If it is solely an evolutionary convenience, he acknowledges, there is really no such thing as good or evil. But there is much more than that, he claims. The moral law is a reason to think of God as plausible—not just a God who sets the universe in motion but a God who cares about human beings. He claims that we seem unique amongst creatures to have this far-developed sense of morality.

What you've said implies that outside of the human mind, tuned by evolutionary processes, good and evil have no meaning. Do you agree with that?

Colligion: Do you offer any factual reasons to disagree?— or that good and evil are absolutes? Plenty of studies have shown other animals to follow coded moral practices, and while they should be common knowledge they are not. Why is that? I have read where it seems normal to forget information that we find disagreeable, and to remember that which we favor. This lets no one off the hook, since it is a human trait. That is why we colligate data, and require verification for our hypotheses. Data we have colligated gathers up into meaning for human beings, as our technological advances adequately demonstrate. Why should data from which we learn morality be any less meaningful?

PROFESSOR DAWKINS: Even the question you're asking has no meaning to me. Good and evil—I don't believe that there is hanging out there, anywhere, something called good and something called evil. I think that there are good things that happen and bad things that happen.

Colligion: The rule that states we get out of life what we put into it is testable, but testable morals get talked about by neither scientists nor religions. It does get talked about by those whose business it is to observe such things and counsel others about successful living, a generally secular term which  leaves the God idea open, but which deals with the nitty gritty of life.

The idea is simple, as good ideas should be. If one engages in theft, one will lead the life of a thief. If one is dishonest, one will lead the life of a liar and cheat. When one observes that to be true, one realizes there are all kinds of choices of lives to be led, and that they derive from our own actions and thoughts. Good becomes whatever makes our lives better, and evil whatever deteriorates from them.

It all boils down to good and evil being the nature of events; like  Professor Dawkins said, good happens and evil happens. When you get right down to basics, all of existence is constituted from events in processes. Everything can be viewed like that, with no exceptions I am aware of. Understood according to that, memes and gods and good and evil are just as real as anything else, but it then becomes their locations and their processes that are of importance. Those which are strictly mental events but do not manifest into reality, the events of reality, or the processes of reality, must be viewed as strictly imaginary. Those which do are real. Is not all of that testable, falsifiable, verifiable?

TIME: wants to know how scientists can respond to a person that argues on the basis of faith or scripture rather than reason.

COLLINS: claims that faith rests squarely upon reason, and so is not its opposite, but includes revelation. Discussions between scientists and believers happen quite readily, but neither scientists nor believers always embody the principles precisely. Scientists can have professional aspirations to cloud their judgment. And the pure truth of faith, which you can think of as clear spiritual water, is poured into rusty vessels called human beings, and so sometimes faith can get distorted as positions are hardened.

Colligion: Faith may rest squarely on reason in the form that rationalization takes, when one gives voice to his own wishful thinking and hopes. Revelation may, without anything more to support it than has been offered, be only the imagination at work. I have shown, in another place, how faith lives in the hope that something cannot be proven real, that if it is ever shown real, faith must die. We have our five senses, plus that of memory, to help us evaluate what is real and workable, and what may work against us, and we use those six senses when we put things to the test. Revelation about religious matters seems to avoid that process, and demand us to apply it no matter what kinds of results occur.

PROFESSOR DAWKINS: For me, moral questions such as stem-cell research turn upon whether suffering is caused. In this case, clearly none is. The embryos have no nervous system. But that's not an issue discussed publicly. The issue is, Are they human? If you are an absolutist moralist, you say, "These cells are human, and therefore they deserve some kind of special moral treatment." Absolutist morality doesn't have to come from religion but usually does. We slaughter nonhuman animals in factory farms, and they do have nervous systems and do suffer. People of faith are not very interested in their suffering.

COLLINS: Do humans have a different moral significance than cows in general?

PROFESSOR DAWKINS: Humans have more moral responsibility perhaps, because they are capable of reasoning.

Colligion: All animals are responsible for themselves inasmuch as they are capable, and that is the gist of it. A cow will feed herself, try to keep warm and free from pain, and finds pleasure in nurturing her young with milk, not in any way different from a human animal. What does moral significance refer to? If it is about the position on the food chain—the relationships of predators to prey—then we do not feed upon ourselves, but do upon the cow. But neither do cows feed upon themselves, nor upon human animals. The chain drops down from us.

I wonder how that topic will work out when artificial androns and cyborgs become common. Will we also use them for food?

TIME: Do the two of you have any concluding thoughts?

COLLINS: says he agrees with Professor Dawkins in practically all of his conclusions about the natural world, but must also also declare himself still able to accept and embrace the possibility that there are answers that science isn't able to provide about the natural world—the questions about why instead of the questions about how. His interest is in the whys, whose answers he feels like he finds in the spiritual realm. He claims that does not compromise his ability to think rigorously as a scientist.

Colligion: It is not obvious how dependable answers are found in the spiritual realm, when that is supposedly inaccessible to us. It would be different if everyone obtained the same answers from there. The supposed answers that have been proclaimed to be of that realm in the past are full of discord, disparities, conflicts that have led humanity to suffer from all kinds of pogroms and wars. There is nothing testable about the most of it, and so it should be assigned to what it is, the imagination at work.

When products of the imagination do work, they become matters for science and technology. The rest, the part that does not work, gets assigned to religion instead of being dumped like it ought to be. Human beings are expected to force it into a function defined by the religion, and to defend it with violence and argument because it cannot be put to any kind of rigorous testing. Possibilities are not probabilities, they are only things for which testing has not been designed. The possible remains improbable until it has passed that.

PROFESSOR DAWKINS: claims his mind is not closed, but open to the range of future possibilities, which one cannot even dream about. He feels skeptical, he says, about any revelations of future science ever turning out to be in support of any of the historical religions. He reminds Collins they had started out talking about the origins of the universe and the physical constants, and that he had provided what he thought were cogent arguments against a supernatural intelligent designer.

He acknowledges his worthy ideas might be refutable—but nevertheless grand and big enough to be worthy of respect, moreso than the Olympian gods or Jesus coming down and dying on the Cross, which he deems parochial. A real God, he predicts, is going to be much bigger and incomprehensible than anything ever proposed by any theologian of any religion.

Colligion: That an idea can be refuted means it is testable, and that testing it would result in facts upon which grander hypotheses can be designed. If we have not the capability to refute it now, but can expect to at some future time, even if that future time might be millenniums away we should not draw anything more than tentative conclusions from it. Skepticism is the proper approach, but skepticism is not the drawing of conclusions, it is the demand for evidence for so long as that is not forthcoming. Tangible facts can only be drawn from tangible evidence accessible to our sensory systems. Apologia remains meaningless and fruitless without that, in spite of our actions and wishful thinking.

What evidence we can find about Jesus is that he is the result of plagiarizing older religions, and that people have died to support and spread that across the world, and that other people have died trying to resist. The facts stand against any likelihood of truth in all that story, and instead tell a story of misery, disease and poverty that arrived with it everywhere it traveled.

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Copyright ©2005 by Lloyd Harrison Whitling. All rights reserved.