Dawkins’s Unbelievable Ignorance

Richard Dawkins’s book The God Delusion is a best-seller but it has become so wearing the disguise of an intelligent—capital-R— Reasoned argument that pits science against religion.

In The Dawkins Delusion, Alister McGrath aims to strip away this disguise to show that Dawkins is anything but scientific in his assertion that science equals atheism.

awkins is correctly categorised as fundamentalist, even by many of his scientific colleagues, because he ignores the evidence or twists it to fit his own prejudices against non-atheists.

McGrath, a molecular biophysicist and theologian, is well-placed to take on Dawkins but wary of doing so, because Dawkins’s arguments are at times so ludicrous they are not worthy of scholarly debate.

Still, says McGrath, Dawkins requires a response because the lack of one could give legitimacy to Dawkins’s attitudes, including the arrogance of believing what he is arguing is so self-evident that resistance is useless.

McGrath discusses both Dawkins’s arguments and the way he argues, as Dawkins seems to work under the assumption that his arguments are valid simply because he is a scientist, whereas McGrath argues that Dawkins’s ideas are assertions rather than facts.

Dawkins is not alone in this. His fundamentalist colleague Michel Onfray, in his book The Atheist Manifesto, makes such sweeping proclamations as “monotheism loathes intelligence.” This is about as intelligent as saying that science loathes fun. We can, of course, see the basis for such a flippant assertion but it is a crude stereotype which, if we are going to give it the dignity of close scrutiny (which it doesn’t deserve), doesn’t hold.

In earlier works, Dawkins skilfully negotiated the area known as popular science. But in The God Delusion, he, as theorist Terry Eagleton put it in his scathing review of the book, flails about as he ventures into waters in which he is out of his depth. He bombastically dismisses religion, using dubious evidence such as his own theory of the ‘meme,’ which is by no means wholly embraced by his scientific colleagues (as McGrath says, it is a biological concept misapplied to anthropology).

Dawkins likes to equate God to the tooth fairy, and says that such childish notions should be rejected as we mature and embrace scientific method. But, says McGrath, this idea simply does not fit the evidence of the high percentage of scientists with religious faith. And the fact that some people, McGrath included, are converted from atheism to faith in adulthood.

The way evidence is used is crucial to scientific method and therefore crucial in assessing Dawkins’s arguments.

McGrath points out that people fit evidence to theory because changing our ideals is difficult and Dawkins, while pretending to maintain scientific objectivity, is as biased as the next fundamentalist.

The sad irony of Dawkins’s book is that it is more rant than rational. This is because atheism is on its last legs, according to McGrath and a “whiff of panic is evident.” He is perhaps unduly optimistic here. He has previously written about a perceived decline in atheism (The Twilight of Atheism) and a case can be made for post-modern society again opening the door for belief—but it is surely disturbing that such a bigoted and uninformed tirade as The God Delusion can be so popular. Disturbing but not entirely surprising, because (as McGrath suggests) people have a great capacity to believe what they read if it confirms their sacred prejudices.

Why is there such a flood of angry fundamentalist atheistic material recently? One could argue, contrary to McGrath, that traditional belief is in decline and the whiff of panic can be smelt in some religious circles, and Dawkins and his ilk are responding to the rise in religious fundamentalism.

Although Dawkins targets belief as a cognitive function, his confusion of belief and religion, which McGrath picks him up on, and his antagonisms, may ultimately stem from observations of religion’s influence on behaviour.

When non-believers ask, “Are you religious?” they are generally referring to behaviour, and rigid ritualistic, moral and political behaviour at that.

Dawkins, says McGrath, forgets that the Bible, through Old Testament prophets and Jesus himself, criticises religion when it upholds ritual over love and justice. Too often, Christian leaders act like the Pharisees (telling people what to do from on high) rather than Christ (loving people at their level).

We have a need for ritual, whether it is the Israelites wanting to worship idols or our weekend football matches.

Even the French Revolutionary leaders, when they dethroned the Catholic Church, fell back on highly ritualistic behaviour to show their devotion to Reason. Showing love is a harder task than performing a ritual. Dawkins falls into the same trap, ignoring any evidence that upsets his worship at the altar of atheism.

The protagonist in Marliyn Robinson’s beautiful novel Gileadmuses that we can’t argue for Christianity from a defensive position. McGrath’s book— The Dawkins Delusion—is unlikely to convert many of Dawkins’s hard-line supporters, even though it is a thoroughly sound, invaluable demolition of The God Delusion. But while the atheist ranters rant, and our temptation is to fight fire with fire, our main counterargument is to live and love, quietly and Christlike.

Extract from Signs of the Times, October 2007 .

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