Bantam Press £20 pp406

Not long before he died, Graham Greene told me in an interview of his nagging doubts about God, sin, angels and Satan. When I asked him why he continued to regard himself as a Catholic, he replied: “Because I’ve reached a stage where I doubt my doubt.”

Richard Dawkins, Charles Simonyi professor of the understanding of science at Oxford, appears equally haunted by religion, but doubt is not an option. It is his conviction that faith has been the principal source of violence and suffering throughout history. The world, in his view, would be a lot better off without it. That is the theme of The God Delusion — one which could not be more apt for our time — and he pulls out all the stops to demonstrate the force of his thesis in this passionate new book.

He begins by questioning the respect that religionists demand for their faith: “Many people have noted the contrast between the hysterical hurt professed by Muslims and the readiness with which Arab media publish stereotypical anti-Jewish cartoons.” Dawkins, I’m sure, knows that two wrongs don’t make a right, but we’ll return to this question of respect.

He next explores monotheism (which he thinks has no theological superiority over polytheism, as both are absurd); then proceeds to demolish the proofs of Thomas Aquinas for the existence of God. One by one he knocks down appeals for the existence of God like so many wobbly skittles: religious experience, the authenticity of sacred scripture, the supposed “authority” of scientists who appear to find no contradiction in God-talk and their science.

Dawkins then challenges the God of the Gaps — the idea that there are bits missing in scientific theories that might adequately be filled by a creator. Next on to the “Darwinian Imperative”, the explanation for life on this planet, the existence of human beings, and the phenomena of human behaviour, including religion itself, our consciousness and our ability to wonder whence we came. Against this background he eloquently and soundly puts paid to the arguments of the creationists who would introduce the finger of God into the science of evolution.

So far, no surprises. The truly controversial thrust comes in a chapter titled: “How moderation in faith fosters fanaticism”. Here Dawkins abandons what I took to be his principal target, religious fundamentalism, to indict religion even in its most moderate forms. “What is so hard for us to understand,” he writes of suicide bombers, “is that...these people actually believe what they say they believe. The take-home message is that we should blame religion itself, not religious extremism — as though that were some kind of terrible perversion for real decent religion.” But the notion that faith is a kind of on-off, all- or-nothing switch is surely fallacious. Most religionists, and perhaps many agnostics and atheists, struggle, like Graham Greene, with their convictions throughout a lifetime. Yet given his starkly simplistic version of the act of faith, Dawkins sees no point in discussing the critical borders where religion morphs from benign phenomenon into malefic basket case.

This is a pity, since his entire thesis becomes a counsel of despair rather than a quest for solutions. It is not surprising that Dawkins fails to grasp the complexity of belief, still less the operation of religious imagination, since there is hardly a serious work of philosophy of religion cited in his extensive bibliography, save for Richard Swinburne — himself an oddity among orthodox theologians. In parallel with Dawkins’s notion of faith, which appears to be sourced mainly from Voltaire’s knockabout Philosophical Dictionary, there is a remarkable absence of social and political realism; it gives the impression of a voice crying in a wilderness of his own making.

In his Theory of Justice, John Rawls (a crucial omission in the bibliography) made a telling distinction between two paths to the “good society”. One allows individuals and groups to select their own beliefs and values (within the law); the other insists that beliefs and values should be imposed top down. The former, Rawls defines as a pluralist society; the latter, as a fundamentalist or totalitarian one.

It is in the context of these choices that Dawkins betrays his political eccentricity if not naivety. He insists, for example, that the “secularism” of the founding fathers of America was a bid to weaken the hold of religious belief, whereas the genius of the American constitution was precisely the creation of a protective secularism, a separation of church and state, which made religious pluralism possible without conflict. The importance of understanding this could not be more urgent than in our own day, when George W Bush is bent on infecting the religious neutrality of American state secularism with evangelical convictions. Which brings us full circle to the issue of respect. The founding fathers’ remarkable experiment in pluralism was based on respect, not mere toleration, for those with whom we disagree. If there is a dangerous delusion in the world, it is not so much moderate religion, as Dawkins would have it, but fundamentalism in all its forms — ideological, scientific and religious — as the imposition of dogma that brooks neither doubt nor respect for disagreement.

The best that can be said for Dawkins’s lively and highly readable new book is that it leaves abundant room for further exploration and insight.

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