In an article today on The Huffington Post's blog, Richard Dawkins repeats an argument that he presents briefly in his new book, The God Delusion, an argument which he uses to justify his position on the existence of God. He writes, "We cannot, of course, disprove God, just as we can't disprove Thor, fairies, leprechauns and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. But, like those other fantasies that we can't disprove, we can say that God is very very improbable."

I am reading his new book and, as of the middle of chapter 2, I can affirm that he is doing a fine job arguing against religion and for atheism to a lay audience. I rushed to get this book and I am glad I did, not only because I got the last copy within miles of downtown San Francisco, but, mostly, because of this book's importance and timely arrival.

As the quote above shows, Dawkins' atheism is a soft sort of atheism. On a seven-step scale or "spectrum of probabilities" that starts at category 1 with hard theism and ends at category 7 with hard atheism, he places himself "in category 6, but leaning towards 7." (p. 51)

Why is Dawkins not a 7? Dawkins refuses to be a 7 for the reason he indicates in the initial quote above, namely, that he believes God's existence cannot be conclusively determined as true or false. He believes that the question is a scientific one, within the realm of natural discovery, but that not all of the evidence is in.

I openly admit without any hesitation that I neither am, nor have been, a professor at Oxford University. I also admit that I am not the originator of the wildly popular term "meme" that we see so much today in psychology and sociology. I might as well admit as well that I do not write nearly as compellingly as Dawkins.

I am also not British. Does my lack of any of these qualifications preclude my ability to spot a glaring flaw in Dawkins' argument? Well, unless you need to suck up to Dawkins for some reason or have a masochistic bent towards committing the fallacy of appeal to authority, the answer is no.

I spot one or two flaws in Dawkins' argument above. First, he does not define God. How does one argue for or against the existence of an undefined anything? Jesus asked Peter in Matthew 16:15, "Who do you say that I am?" In the same vein, who does Dawkins say is God?

If Dawkins relies solely on the Bible for his definition, then I see a second flaw in his argument. For, his argument relies on the assumption that any concept is amenable to probabilistic reasoning. Yet, as is commonly argued in the hard atheist community, no internally contradictory concept has the remotest possibility of attaining ontological status. In other words, an internal contradiction is an ontological nullifier.

God as defined in the Bible is a patchwork of irreconcilable qualities. Some are internally irreconcilable and some are jointly so. Internally irreconcilable qualities include omnipotence and omnipresence. For instance, omnipotence is the state of having all power. Power is an abstract concept meaning the ability to act. In other words, power is freedom to achieve the realization of a desire. Yet, one who has all power has no desire. Desire implies weakness.

My favorite set of jointly irreconcilable qualities in God are mercy and justice. If God is merciful, then he gives us a break for doing bad things, while if he is just, then he does not. Either he gives us what we deserve or less than we deserve. There can be no in-between.

If, in the service of truth, we want to put all cards on the table, then for Dawkins to be right that the God of the Bible might exist, it must be the case that God is not defined such that the very consideration of probability remains off the table. Yet, clearly, this is not the case, suggesting that God plays neither dice, nor cards.

Therefore, if Dawkins is arguing against belief in the aforementioned deity, and I assume he must be given his justifiably impassioned tirade against organized religion together with the absence of a single organized religion based on the deistic, pantheistic, or panentheistic deities held to exist by heroes like Albert Einstein and Thomas Jefferson, then his argument is flawed and his only logical choice is to either revert to a theistic faith or reject a priori the possibility of God's existence. I suspect he would do the latter if he gave it more thought.