Mr. Tough-Talk Atheist Gets Wishy-Washy

Richard Dawkins, in The God Delusion, goes to some great lengths attacking the notion that agnosticism is a valid intellectual response to the question of God's existence. Agnostics typically say that there is no way to know if God is real, and that the chances of his being real are 50/50. Given the evidence, writes Dawkins, the chances that God is non-existent far outweigh the chances that he exists. And he goes on to ridicule the traditional Deist philosophy that there is a God who designed the universe for a purpose, but has withdrawn from his creation and has let it take its own course. Again, he says, where is the evidence?

My position is, I suppose, a modified Deism: through some undefined act for some unknown purpose, some inconceivable power is responsible for what is; that's all we know for now, but that could change.

No, Dawkins is right to say the idea of God is not a 50/50 proposition--if you define God as an existing supernatural power watching over us and directing our lives. But I think the probability for God's existence is 50 percent when considering the origins of the universe. Either the universe (or multiverse) arose from nothingness, unbidden, or it didn't. That's a coin toss, 50/50.

Strangely, Dawkins lets slip this intellectual inconsistency, found on page 155:

"Time and again, my theologian friends returned to the point that there had to be a reason why there is something rather than nothing. 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.)"
So you see, despite his trouble with semantics over the meaning of "God," Dawkins is an agnostic in the end.