Review: The Dawkins Delusion, by Alister McGrath

• 03 March 2007
• From New Scientist Print Edition. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.
• Bryan Appleyard

Whatever else Richard Dawkins's book The God Delusion may have achieved, it has inspired very grand refutations. Impressive essays by Pulitzer prizewinner Marilynne Robinson, wild man of the academic left Terry Eagleton and leading biologist H. Allen Orr set out to tell Dawkins how wrong he is. Now enter Alister McGrath, professor of historical theology at the University of Oxford.

McGrath's extended essay covers some similar ground to the others, notably in analysing the extent of Dawkins's ignorance of theology. Of course, the point about that attack, from Dawkins' perspective at any rate, is that it is no attack at all. For him, theology is a non-subject about nothing. Why, then, should he trouble himself with investigating further delusions rather than, as he does, concentrating on the central delusion of the existence of God?

All four critics raise a more pointed extension of the charge that Dawkins is unqualified by asking why he should write this book at all. The idea that science necessarily entails an assault on religion has long been rejected by theologians and by scientists such as Stephen Jay Gould and Francis Collins, himself a born-again Christian. In any case, the book would seem unnecessary in a world which should, according to the secularists, be engaged in a long evolutionary movement away from religion. But then, you could argue Dawkins is justified by the rise of both Islamic and Christian fundamentalism, and the general resurgence of religion generally in countries in South America and Asia (not to mention the UK, where highly religious immigrant populations have settled).

“The idea that science entails an assault on religion has long been rejected”

McGrath's book is a fine, dense, yet very clear account, from his particular Christian perspective, of the full case against Dawkins. Crucially, like Collins, he rejects the "God of the gaps" that exists only in the interstices of the unknown, not yet encompassed by science (or perhaps never to be). This is, in any case, a very antique argument, which for unbelievers founders on the words "not yet". The more sophisticated position, most famously argued by the Oxford philosopher Richard Swinburne, is that the very success of science raises a profound and complex question that can be seen to point to the existence of a deity: why is the world explicable at all?

This brings many new factors into the argument and has the clear advantage of making a friend rather than an enemy of science. As the Catholic church in particular makes clear, any investigation of the material world is, to evoke Stephen Hawking's famous pay-off to A Brief History of Time, an investigation of "the mind of God". It is this acceptance of the power of human reason that the present pope, Benedict XVI, suggested so controversially was the crucial difference between Christianity and Islam.

The argument also puts pressure on Dawkins, if not to believe in God, then at least to consider the possibility of the faith-based nature of his own convictions. As Dawkins acknowledges and physicists have shown, the existence of conscious, rational beings is a wildly improbable outcome. To insist that we are simply the products of the workings of, ultimately, physical laws is to avoid the question of the nature and origin of those laws. To say that there is no evidence for God is merely, therefore, an interpretation, justified in one context but quite meaningless in another. Everywhere we look, there is evidence of something, but it is by no means clear that that something is, in fact, nothing. Rather, it seems something of a startling intelligibility.

It is to Dawkins's lasting credit that his book has opened up the true depths of this issue. But, like these distinguished critics, I can't really see what he is so worked up about. Any view that religion is the source of all evil and atheism the origin of none is plainly absurd when confronted with the largely atheist bloodletting of the 20th century. The reality is that all forms of human belief have both good and bad outcomes. The real issue is the nature of belief and how it copes, for good or ill, with what we know and, equally important, with what we don't.

Bryan Appleyard is an author and writer for The Sunday Times, London. His latest book is How to Live Forever or Die Trying,



and his website is at www.bryanappleyard.com

From issue 2593 of New Scientist magazine, 03 March 2007, page 47

reposted from: New Scientist
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