Richard Dawkins, for all his ability as a scientist, often gets out of his depth when he writes about religion.

Lest people forget that the Oxford Professor is not an expert on theology, here’s an example, taken from the point in The God Delusion where Dawkins is considering two possible explanations of our origins — respectively natural selection and God — and arguing that natural selection is the simpler of the two and therefore the more likely to be true.

There Dawkins suggests that Keith Ward is inconsistent on the question of whether the hypothesis that God exists is a simple hypothesis. In fact, Ward is perfectly consistent, but Dawkins doesn’t have the background knowledge to understand him, despite Ward’s clarity.

First, Dawkins quotes Ward’s God, Chance and Necessity, in which Ward clearly states that the God hypothesis is simple (or “economical”):

“As a matter of fact, the theist would claim that God is a very elegant, economical and fruitful explanation for the existence of the universe.”

Dawkins then quotes John Polkinghorne quoting Ward, with Ward writing of the thought of Thomas Aquinas:

“Its basic error is in supposing that God is logically simple…”

What are we to make of this? Does Ward believe that the God hypothesis is simple or not? Dawkins doesn’t know what to think:

“I am not clear whether Ward really thinks God is simple…”

The reason that Dawkins doesn’t know what to think is that he isn’t familiar with the doctrine of divine simplicity. This doctrine holds (very roughly) that God is logically indivisible, which means not just that God can’t be chopped up into bits but that there is no distinction between any one part of God and any other.

In the passage quoted, Ward rejects Aquinas’s understanding of divine simplicity, as the full quotation makes clear:

“Its basic error is in supposing that God is logically simple — simple not just in the sense that his being is indivisible, but in the much stronger sense that what is true of any part of God is true of the whole. It is quite coherent, however, to suppose that God, while indivisible, is internally complex.”

All that Ward says here is that it is coherent to say both that God is indivisible and that what is true of one part of God is not necessarily true of the whole. He does not deny that the God hypothesis is economical. The passage simply isn’t about whether the God hypothesis is economical. Dawkins, despite his willingness to present himself as one, isn’t an expert on religion, and so he misunderstands Ward, leading to his insinuation that Ward is inconsistent.

Dawkins may be an authority on certain areas of science, but on matters theological he doesn’t really know what he’s talking about.