That may well be, but on the other hand I'm sure we are all familiar with examples of theologians who are well past the Theology 101 and yet still manage to say incredibly stupid things.
Now, at this point it may be worth considering that one of the possible reasons Dicky's argument would be laughed out of a Theology 101 is because a 101 class is where the fundamental axioms are established, and anything that contradicts said axioms must be eliminated for progress to continue.
The argument is actually not a bad one, IMO. It's not complete in every detail, but as far as it goes it's pretty good. It's a response to the common theological assertion that "The universe is improbable, ergo God." It points out that God is at least as improbable if assessed according to our normal notions of probability. The theologian will say that God is outside the universe and therefore outside of our notions of probability, which as far as we know only apply within this universe. Whoopee. So what? All that is really saying is that theologians don't know how the unvierse originated, since they have no actual evidence for God. You might as well just say that "The origin of the universe is a result of things that happened outside of it, and that these things are not bound by our usual notions of cause and effect" and be done with it. Chucking a completely hypothetical and totally unproven conscious deity into the mix adds nothing whatsoever to the explanation. It's just a pointless extra step that is pulled straight out of a theologian's arse.
I think the following passage from this article (
http://www.firstthings.com/article/2010/04/believe-it-or-not) is the best articulation of why the infinite regress problem is so feeble:
"Thus, the New Atheists’ favorite argument turns out to be just a version of the old argument from infinite regress: If you try to explain the existence of the universe by asserting God created it, you have solved nothing because then you are obliged to say where God came from, and so on ad infinitum, one turtle after another, all the way down. This is a line of attack with a long pedigree, admittedly. John Stuart Mill learned it at his father’s knee. Bertrand Russell thought it more than sufficient to put paid to the whole God issue once and for all. Dennett thinks it as unanswerable today as when Hume first advanced it—although, as a professed admirer of Hume, he might have noticed that Hume quite explicitly treats it as a formidable objection only to the God of Deism, not to the God of “traditional metaphysics.” In truth, though, there could hardly be a weaker argument. To use a feeble analogy, it is rather like asserting that it is inadequate to say that light is the cause of illumination because one is then obliged to say what it is that illuminates the light, and so on ad infinitum.
The most venerable metaphysical claims about God do not simply shift priority from one kind of thing (say, a teacup or the universe) to another thing that just happens to be much bigger and come much earlier (some discrete, very large gentleman who preexists teacups and universes alike). These claims start, rather, from the fairly elementary observation that nothing contingent, composite, finite, temporal, complex, and mutable can account for its own existence, and that even an infinite series of such things can never be the source or ground of its own being, but must depend on some source of actuality beyond itself. Thus, abstracting from the universal conditions of contingency, one very well may (and perhaps must) conclude that all things are sustained in being by an absolute plenitude of actuality, whose very essence is being as such: not a “supreme being,” not another thing within or alongside the universe, but the infinite act of being itself, the one eternal and transcendent source of all existence and knowledge, in which all finite being participates."
Topic: Atheist Censorship