Book review: The God Delusion (Richard Dawkins)

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Richard Dawkins

THE GOD DELUSION

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Book review by Anthony Campbell. The review is licensed under a
Creative Commons License.
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Richard Dawkins has written much against religion in the past, so
it is no surprise that he has now produced a full-length book on
the subject. Its avowed aim is to persuade believers and even
agnostics to change their minds and become frank atheists. It is
concerned exclusively with the "Abrahamic" religions, Judaism,
Islam and Christianity, but especially Christianity. It is, of
course, a polemical work, and this is stated at the outset. "I
shall not go out of my way to offend, but nor shall I don kid
gloves to handle religion any more gently than I would handle
anything else." This is probably something of an under-statement.
The book will doubtless offend some readers, but, like everything
else that Dawkins writes, it scores highly for readability, verve
and wit.

There are ten chapters. The first four consider the case for God
and seek to show why it is invalid; the remaining six look at
various aspects of religion in the context of God's
non-existence. One might say that the first part of the book is
concerned with "pure" religion, the second with "applied"
religion.

Dawkins treats the existence of God as a scientific question.
Significantly, his second chapter is called "The God
Hypothesis". The existence of God is "a scientific hypothesis
about the universe, which should be analysed as sceptically as
any other." This reminds me of the way physicists once
approached the question of the luminiferous ether: something
amenable to testing by observation or experiment.

Claims that God communicates with human beings, Dawkins says,
are certainly testable empirically. He has no patience with
those, such as the late Stephen J.Gould, who say that science
and religion occupy different realms or "magisteria" and are not
in competition with each other. For Dawkins, they emphatically
are. He acknowledges that the existence of God can never be
finally disproved, but he finds it to be so overwhelmingly
unlikely that for all practical purposes it can be discounted.

Theologians, of course, don't accept this evidence-based way of
looking at the matter, as Dawkins discovered when he took part,
somewhat against his better judgement, in a conference organized
by the Templeton Foundation. There were objections to his
approach to the subject. "Who was I to say that rational
argument was the only admissible kind of argument? There are
other ways of knowing besides the scientific, and it is one of
these other ways of knowing that must be deployed to know God."
I think we touch on the crux of the matter at this point.
Religious believers do say this, but it is not an argument that
Dawkins accepts. There can be no meeting of minds here.

Chapter 4, "Why there almost certainly is no God", contains
Dawkins's central argument and his main conclusions are
tabulated at the end. One might have expected to find a lot
about the problem of evil at this point, but it gets only a
passing mention. This is because the presence of evil in the
world argues only against the existence of a good God, but
Dawkins wishes to discount all possible views of God, including
the idea that he stands aloof from his creation and is not
directly responsible for what happens (a "deistic" as opposed to
a "theistic" God).

Arguments for a deistic type of God centre on the question of
design. In earlier times it was the striking appearance of
design in animals and plants that attracted most attention.
Since Darwin, we have known that the presence of complexity in
the biological realm no longer requires a Designer to explain
it. The same is not (yet) true of physics and cosmology. If the
"settings" of some of the laws and constants of physics were
only slightly different from what they are, the universe would
have developed quite differently and life would have been
impossible. There is no obvious explanation for this state of
affairs. To some, this implies there must be a God who set
things up just so.

Various ways round this impasse have been suggested by
physicists who want to avoid the God hypothesis, but all of them
demand rather sweeping and ad hoc assumptions. Dawkins does not
despair of the possibility that a naturalistic explanation for
the settings will be found, but in the meantime he advances an
argument which he thinks makes the God hypothesis useless as an
explanation.

In outline, he says that because the universe is very complex,
any Designer would have to be equally complex. But this merely
shifts the problem back a stage. If God is complex, how did his
complexity arise? Who made God? Alternatively, if you say that
God was just there, with all his complexity, why not say that
the universe was just there? Why bring God into it? This
concludes his review of the arguments for God's existence.

In the chapters that follow, Dawkins considers other matters,
including the charge often levelled against him, that he is
unnecessarily hostile to religion. His case here has been made
easier in recent years by the appearance of ever-increasing
numbers of zealots prepared to commit mass murder in the name of
religion, confident that, if they blow themselve up along with
their victims, they will be immediately translated to paradise.
The dangers of religious absolutism get a chapter to themselves.

The fact that religion in one form or another seems to be pretty
well universal in all human societies continues to puzzle those
who treat it as a natural phenomenon. Dawkins considers various
possible explanations though he is not confident that we yet
have a fully satisfactory theory. As one would expect, he thinks
that the roots of religion must lie in evolution. He suggests
that it would have been advantageous for children to accept
their parents' statements about the natural world as
authoritative and that this acceptance could have become
attached to other statements about the invisible world of
religion. While this may explain how religion is transmitted,
however, it does not seem to explain why such strange beliefs
should have arisen in the first place.

Dawkins is well known for his suggestion that cultural
transmission could be thought of as partly based on memes, by
analogy with genes. Memes duly make their appearance here,
though they do not form a major part of the discussion. I was
glad to see that he notes a resemblance between the evolution of
religion and that of language, something that has long
interested me, although he does not take the idea very far.

Two chapters look at religion in relation to morality. There is
a good discussion of how changes in our collective consciousness
or "zeitgeist" influence our ideas of what is acceptable
behaviour and what is not. The Old Testament, in particular,
contains numerous instances of behaviour that almost everyone
today would regard as morally repugnant, but which were
apparently endorsed or even ordered by God. Such things are
quietly ignored by those who claim to base their morality on the
Bible. Dawkins's demolition of Biblical fundamentalism here
seems to be pretty unanswerable.

Perhaps the part of the book that will most outrage many
adherents of religion is Dawkins's claim that to bring a child
up in a particular belief system is literally a form of child
abuse, which can have worse long-term effects than some kinds of
sexual abuse. He is referring here to "extreme" religious
indoctrination, such as inculcating a terror of hell into young
children. But he regards even milder forms of indoctrination as
illegitimate, and he is predictably appalled by Mr Blair's
support for faith schools, especially those that teach
Creationism. He thanks his own parents for teaching him not so
much what to think as how to think.

If, having been fairly and properly exposed to all the
scientific evidence, [children] grow up and decide that the
Bible is literally true or that the movement of the planets
rules their lives, that is their privilege. The important
point is that it is their privilege to decide what they
shall think, and not their parents' privilege to impose it
by force majeure.

Even Dawkins, however, regrets the present widespread ignorance
of the Bible as a literary source, and he thinks there is a
place for teaching comparative religion in schools.

This book is an eloquent account of religion as seen from the
standpoint of science by an atheist. Whether it will persuade
many theists to change their minds, I rather doubt. As another
scientific critic of religion, Taner Edis, has said:

It is scientific thinking, not religion, which is profoundly
unnatural for us; no matter how science progresses, most of
us will be most comfortable explaining the world through the
actions of personal agents. ... For most people, learning to
go without a God is a costly undertaking for no clear
benefit. The Ghost in the Universe

Religion is consoling for many people because it gives meaning
to their lives. It is hard to live without it, and even Dawkins
can feel something of the force of this. His Oxford college, New
College, was founded in 1379 by William of Wykeham, Bishop of
Winchester, who intended it to serve "as a great chantry to make
intercession for the repose of his soul." There were supposed to
be ten chaplains, three clerks and sixteen choristers, who were
to be kept in place even if there were no longer funds enough
for anything else. Today there is just one chaplain (and a
female one at that), and the erstwhile "torrent of prayers for
Wykeham' soul" has dwindled to a paltry two prayers a year.
Dawkins admits to a certain feeling of guilt about this neglect,
in which New College is not alone.

Hundreds of mediaeval benefactors died trusting that their
heirs, well paid to do so, would pray for them in purgatory.
I can't help wondering what proportion of Europe's mediaeval
treasures of art and architecture started out as
down-payments on eternity, in trusts now betrayed.

Not to mention the music of Bach and Dante's Inferno, both
inspired by religion and dependent on it, at least in part, for
their full meaning. May it be that human beings cannot live
without it, and perhaps cannot live with it either?

19 October 2006
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%T The God Delusion
%A Richard Dawkins
%I Bantam Press
%C London
%D 2006
%G ISBN 0593055489
%P 406 pp
%K religion
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