McGrath, Alister - The Dawkins Delusion?
(05 November 07)The Dawkins Delusion?
Alister McGrath with Joanna Collicutt McGrath The Dawkins Delusion?: Atheist fundamentalism and the denial of the divine (SPCK 2007)
A review by Scott McKenzie.
(Reviewed October 2007)
In Edinburgh a couple of weeks ago I picked up a new book by Professor Alister McGrath. I had not seen it in any bookshops in Brisbane, and needing something to read I bought it. It’s quite short (under 80 pages) so it was ideal for reading while travelling.Alister McGrath is in fact a colleague of Richard Dawkins at Oxford as Professor of Historical Theology. Significantly he was a molecular biophysicist, evolutionist and atheist until changing his mind and taking up studies in the history of Christian thought. Now while McGrath and Dawkins talk quite a lot about these matters, without any rancour apparently, McGrath is highly condemnatory in his assessment of The God Delusion.
He first attacks the claim that those who believe in God are delusional, suggesting that equating belief in God with belief in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy as being less based on scholarship and more on propaganda and polemic. And this is a theme running through the book: Dawkins, a renowned experimental scientist, had dropped the high standards of his science for a speculative condemnation of religion lacking in sufficient evidential basis. McGrath makes the point that it is unlikely that the 40% of scientists who do believe in God are delusional.
Dawkins assumes that science will eventually provide explanations for everything but as McGrath points out this is a faith-statement not different in kind from belief in God. Both are equally irrational: it’s OK to hold these beliefs but understand that there is no solid evidence for either. That’s the point about faith, belief without proof, and Dawkins can’t prove that science will answer all our ultimate questions. So is Dawkins being delusional here?
The explanation of Dawkins about the origins of religion also attract McGrath’s attention. He points out firstly that belief in God and religion aren’t the same thing, and that it is our world view (rather than religion) that provides the basis for our actions and beliefs. But of course religion is part of that world view for many people, so it is dangerous to claim too much for the influence of religion in this world view. Dawkins writes quite a complex argument about the evolutionary origins of religion as an ‘accidental by-product’ of human evolution heading somewhere else. McGrath says: no evidence for this, it’s unscientific, and it’s propaganda.
And so it goes on with Dawkins’ claims being addressed, not one by one, but thematically. Overall what the author shows is that Dawkins is presenting just as much as a fundamentalist as do religious fundamentalists, claiming far too much for their positions, going way beyond the evidence. What Dawkins has done is provide an insightful analysis of belief in God, with some errors and exaggerations but many useful speculations, but writes as if what he says is scientific. He overstates his case and many in the scientific community are unhappy about this.
I was interested to see, while watching the 15 hours of presentation of the “Beyond Belief 2006” conference (http://beyondbelief2006.org) how Dawkins was received by the (mostly non-theistic) scientists involved. They were quite a bit dismissive of his contributions. I wondered why, because I had read and been very impressed with The God Delusion. Now I know why. McGrath has shown up the errors and exaggerations in Dawkins’ book, something that many of us would find difficult to do. There are always two sides to a story: we are well advised to seek out both.
