Alister McGrath with Joanna Collicutt McGrath
THE DAWKINS DELUSION?
Atheist fundamentalism and the denial of the divine
96pp. SPCK. £7.99.
978 0 281 05927 0
US: IVP Books. $16. 978 0 8308 3446 4.
Alister McGrath and Richard Dawkins both hold doctorates in the life sciences
and both are professors at Oxford. In 2004, McGrath, an atheist turned
Christian, wrote a study of the work of Dawkins, a Christian turned atheist.
Entitled Dawkins' God: Genes, memes and the meaning of life, it combined a
respectful account of Dawkins's scientific work with a critique of the
atheism which has been the background of his writing ever since The Selfish
Gene (1976).
Recently, Dawkins published The God Delusion (reviewed in the TLS, January
19). As McGrath says, this book marks a significant departure. Dawkins is no
longer an atheist whose main aim is to make evolutionary biology accessible
to the general public: he is now a preacher whose mission is to convert
religious readers to atheism. The book has a strident and aggressive tone,
and a cavalier attitude to evidence that tells against its thesis that
religion is the root of all evil. This has provoked McGrath to write a short
volume exposing its flaws. The Dawkins Delusion? is credited to both Alister
McGrath and his wife Joanna Collicutt McGrath, who is a lecturer in
psychology of religion at Heythrop College, London. But the extent of her
contribution is not made clear, and the book is written in the first person
singular "for historical and stylistic reasons". This makes it
difficult to interpret the autobiographical statements. In this review I
shall follow the authors' convention and refer to "McGrath" in the
masculine singular.
McGrath says that he is completely baffled by the hostility that Dawkins now
displays to religion. But surely two recent phenomena explain the heightened
shrillness of Dawkins's atheism. The first is the rise of Christian
fundamentalism in the United States, which endangers the teaching of
evolutionary science in schools. The second is the rise of Islamic
fundamentalism which has spawned extremist groups of people willing to
murder thousands of innocent people even at the cost of their own lives. Of
course McGrath is no less horrified than Dawkins by these two developments.
But he regards them as largely irrelevant to the evaluation of religion.
There can be atheist fundamentalists as well as religious ones, and Dawkins,
he claims, shows every sign of being one. Moreover, atheism as well as
religion has given rise to massacres, and true religion, as exemplified by
Jesus of Nazareth, is hostile to violence.
These points are fairly taken, but I do not think McGrath does justice to the
way in which religion, if it does not originate evil, gives it greater
power. Those who believe that they have a direct revelation from God regard
their sacred texts as trumping whatever science may discover. Those who
believe that they are acting out God's will are not going to be deterred by
any secular moralizing about just and unjust wars. But of course McGrath is
right that religion "transcendentalises" good as well as evil. He
adds that much of Dawkins's book is a confused and misleading account of
other people's areas of specialization. He has in mind particuarly Dawkins's
ventures into historical theology, which is McGrath's own field. Oddly
enough, it was precisely in this area that it seemed to me that Dawkins was
often the more accurate of the two debaters. Let me give you a few
instances.
McGrath criticizes Dawkins's treatment of St Thomas Aquinas's Five Ways.
Dawkins denies that these constitute sound proofs for the existence of God.
McGrath agrees that they do not, but maintains that they were never meant to
do so. They presuppose faith, he claims, and simply exhibit its coherence
with our experience of the world. He is surely in error here. In the Summa
Theologiae Aquinas states flatly that God's existence "can be proved in
five ways", and in the Summa contra Gentiles he says that proofs of
this kind can convince infidels.
"Contrary to what Dawkins assumes", McGrath tells us, "orthodox
Christianity understands Jesus to have been fully human and not omniscient."
No doubt some present day Christians in good standing deny that Jesus was
omniscient, but throughout most Christian centuries it has been taught that
Jesus was not only fully human but also fully divine, with all the
attributes of divinity. Here it is Dawkins, not McGrath, who is the closer
to orthodox Christianity.
These are minor points, though they illustrate that McGrath can be as unfair
to Dawkins as Dawkins can be to Christians. A much more serious issue in the
debate between the two writers is the nature of faith.McGrath complains that
Dawkins makes no distinction between religion and belief in God, seeing the
two of them as two sides of the same coin. In fact, McGrath says, there is a
critical distinction between the two. There can be religion without belief
in God and there can be belief in God without religious behaviour. Buddhists
are cited to illustrate the first case and, less plausibly, Evangelicals are
held to illustrate the second. Dawkins's failure to make the distinction, we
are told, leads him to ignore important religious phenomena such as the
emotions McGrath calls "hot cognitions" – to which Dawkins would
no doubt reply that feelings are no reliable guide to truth.
But if Dawkins fails to make a distinction between religion and belief in God,
both McGrath and Dawkins fail to distinguish between belief in God and
faith. Faith is something more than the mere belief that there is a God: it
is an assent to a purported revelation of God, communicated through a sacred
text or a religions community. It is faith in a creed, not mere belief in
God, that is Dawkins's real target in The God Delusion. It is the
revelations that different religions claim to be communications from God
that give rise to the disputes between them and the evils that Dawkins
denounces.
"What is really pernicious", Dawkins says, "is the practice of
teaching children that faith itself is a virtue. Faith is an evil precisely
because it requires no justification and brooks no argument . . . . Suicide
bombers do what they do because they really believe what they were taught in
their religious schools: that duty to God exceeds all other priorities, and
that martyrdom in his service will be rewarded in the gardens of Paradise." McGrath
objects to Dawkins's account of faith. "It is not a Christian
definition of faith, but one that Dawkins has invented to suit his own
purposes." It is, indeed, too much to say that faith requires no
justification: many religious people offer arguments not just for belief in
God but for their partiuclar creed. It is also excessive to say that faith
brooks no argument, if that means that the faithful are unwilling to offer
responses to criticism. Nonetheless, I think that Dawkins is correct to deny
that faith is a virtue, for the following reason.
The common characteristic of faith in almost all religious traditions is its
irrevocability. A faith that is held tentatively is no true faith. It must
be held with the same degree of certainty as knowledge. In some traditions
the irrevocability of faith is reinforced by the imposition of the death
penalty for apostasy, which is the abandonment of faith. Now the kinds of
arguments that believers offer in support of their religion cannot be
claimed to have anything like the degree of cogency that would rationally
justify the irrevocable commitment of faith. Again, no argument will make a
true believer give up his faith, and this is something that he or she must
be resolved on in advance of hearing any argument.
McGrath will no doubt disown such a view of faith. But once again, Dawkins's
account is closer to traditional Christianity than McGrath's. The idea that
faith is an irrevocable commitment, which goes far beyond any evidence that
could be offered in its support, is explicitly stated by Christian thinkers
as different from each other as Aquinas, Kierkegaard and Newman. It is the
degree of commitment involved in faith, rather than its religious object,
that is really objectionable. Not all fanaticism is religious fanaticism, as
the history of Nazism and Stalinism makes abundantly clear.
McGrath is at his most convincing when he is on Dawkins's home patch. He deals
briskly and effectively with the principal argument offered in The God
Delusion against the existence of God. Dawkins points out the antecedent
improbability of the existence of beings as complex as humans. Belief in
God, he then argues, represents belief in a being whose existence must be
even more complex, and therefore more improbable. But our own existence,
McGrath retorts, shows that something very improbable can happen. The issue
is not whether God is probable, but whether he is actual.
This, in my own view, is a question to which no one has given a convincing
answer, and the appropriate reaction is one of agnosticism. But I do not
agree with Dawkins that all those who believe in God are unreasonable in so
doing. Those who claim to know that there is a God are making a claim that
is not justifed; but so too are those who claim to know there is no God. But
a belief in God, falling short of certainty, is not open to the same
objection. A belief may be reasonable, though false, if held with the
appropriate degree of caution. As Stephen Jay Gould pointed out, if
Darwinism is incompatible with religious belief, then half the world's
scientists are stupid.
The Dawkins Delusion?, sadly, shares some of the vices of The God Delusion,
and is not free from over-hasty argument and rhetorical padding. But it is
hard to dissent from Alister McGrath's conclusion that Richard Dawkins has
no mandate to speak for the scientific community, and that his recent
crusade has done more harm to science than it has to religion. Most people
have a greater intellectual and emotional investment in religion than in
science, and if they are once convinced that they have to choose between
religion and science and cannot have both, it will be science that they will
renounce.
Anthony Kenny has been Master of Balliol, President of the British
Academy and Chairman of the Board of the British Library.
I'd like to commend the author on giving an even handed and interesting account of the two books. It seems very rare for reviewers to try and deal with such matters with the objectivity it often deserves. Though I'm no theologian I am under the impression that despite Aquinas' often confused presentation in 'summa theologica' the five ways are not really intended as a 'proofs' and do intend to offer worldy coherence with a presupposed faith. That said the apologetic aspect is present and is overlooked by McGrath.
I also feel that the understanding of faith is not as well presented as it could. While it is true that a concrete belief in something which is a priori unknowable is problematic, there does come a point when not acting on a belief because you don't know it with enough certainty is almost amoral. The description of faith as 'belief in action' is helpful to understanding how one can hold a belief with that appropriate conviction, without treating it as demonstrably factual.
Stuart, Cambridge,