The Dawkins Delusion

Recently I finished reading a book entitled “The Dawkin’s Delusion: Atheist Fundamentalism and the Denial of the Divine” by Alister McGrath and Joanna Collicutt McGrath. I found this book while at the library.  I think it is good to read the arguments from the other side.  Even if you know that it’s going to upset you. The book is well written, however, some of the arguments are weak. I will get to that later in this post. For now, I would like to start off with my annoyances with the title of the book.

First off, there is no such thing as “atheist fundamentalism.” Most people understand that fundamentalism is usually used to identify certain religious people, such as a Fundamentalist Christian or Fundamentalist Muslim. They are called fundamentalist because they uphold strict and literal interpretations of their holy books. Atheists or secularists don’t have a holy book, they have the ever expanding collection of science and philosophy books.

Secondly, the denial of the divine.  My initial response to this was how do you deny something you don’t even believe in. I can’t deny the divine because I don’t believe in a divine. I don’t believe in a divine because there isn’t enough evidence to support there being a divine creature or power. I’m not simply refusing to believe in a God. I’m simply following the evidence. The evidence doesn’t point to a supernatural being. I can’t just read a 3000 year old book and take it for truth.  Our knowledge is always changing. What we knew yesterday might be different today. Just like people use to believe the world was flat (some still do to this day), and now we know that the Earth is a not so perfect circle. It was Isaac Newton who suggested that the Earth is an oblate spheroid (a sphere being squashed at it’s poles and swollen at it’s equator). So, back to denying the divine. One simply can’t deny a divine, when they don’t believe in a divine.  To deny something is the act of refusing what is true. A divine can’t be proven nor disproven, therefore how can it be true. For something to be true, mustn’t it be known. For instance, we know that the universe is expanding through empirical evidence of an explosion (the big bang). With peer review we come to know this to be true. A person who doesn’t follow this is denyingwhat is known. To deny something that is divine is impractical because it can’t be proven nor disproven, meaning it is not known. It’s all personal and that can’t be peer reviewed.

In the introduction, McGrath introduces us to Richard Dawkins. Richard Dawkins is of course a biologist, some might call him an Evolutionary Biologist, but a biologist all the same. Dawkins is the author of such books as “The Selfish Gene.” Which McGrath says that Dawkins was a successful and skillful scientific popularizer, before his “God Delusion” book. Today Richard Dawkins is an active member of the atheist community doing speeches and science lectures. There was a certain sentenance that got me a little upset where McGrath says:

How, I wondered, could such a gifted popularizer of the natural sciences, who once had such a passionate concern for the objective analysis of evidence, turn into such an aggressive antireligious propagandist with an apparent disregard for evidence that was not favorable to his case?

Richard Dawkins is an atheist and is rather antireligious, but he is still passionate about evidence. I’m sure Dawkins would argue that, to follow the evidence, would lead you to atheism or non-belief. Of the evidence that we are speaking of is evolution. As for being a propagandist is rather amusing to read. Dawkins is not intentionally wanting to convert people to nonbelief. He would enjoy seeing more people leave religion, but he is not doing it simply to convert.  Dawkins is explaining scientific understanding of the world we live in and how religion might ‘delude’ that fact. In the “God Delusion,” Dawkins explains why people might believe in “God,” through Darwinian evolution. Explaining the processes that it took to get humans to where they are today.

“The Dawkin’s Delusion” is a rather short book, and McGrath states that near the end of the introduction. The primary purpose of his book, supposedly, is to have a critical engagement with the arguments presented in “The God Delusion.” Which oddly enough, I didn’t find very critical. Sometimes McGrath will misquote Dawkins. For example, Dawkins does write in his book that he hopes to see religious people become atheists by the time they put down the book. Which McGrath quotes in “The Dawkins Delusion,” but doesn’t include the next sentence that Dawkins writes which is that he isn’t intentionally converting people. Also McGrath will continually state that a subject is more complex than Dawkins says, yet he doesn’t go into detail of this complexity. There’s also the section where McGrath quotes Dawkins on the complexity of God:

Any God capable of designing anything would have to be complex enough to demand the same kind of explanation in his own right.

Dawkins is saying that in order for there to be a God: Who created God? If we are created by God, who created God, and who created God’s God and so on. McGrath brings up, and misunderstands, Dawkins’s improbability of there being a God. Sure, Dawkins does say that a God would be too complex to possibly exist. However, Dawkins himself has stated that he believes 99.9% that God doesn’t exist, but there is still that .1%. You can’t be 100% sure that God doesn’t exist, because there is no evidence to support or deny there being one. But there is enough evidence that shows that the probability of there being a designer or a God is unlikely. The evidence being science and evolution.

Overall I feel that the book’s title is rather misleading in the fact that there is no fundamental atheists and you can’t deny a divine. Also it is extremely frustrating to read a book that is suppose to critically engage the reader with the arguments of another book yet it doesn’t explain it’s side well. McGrath continually brings up arguments from the “God Delusion” and yet doesn’t go indepth as to why he disagrees with them. That is probably why the book is too short, he doesn’t critically engage the reader with the arguments brought up in Richard Dawkin’s “The God Delusion.” He simply quotes Dawkins, saying that he is wrong and goes on to the next argument. I wouldn’t recommend this book to anybody. You will probably get a headache and put the book down and convert to Atheism. I do have to say that McGrath does write well. It’s just that his arguments toward Dawkins is rather weak and petty.

[This Appeared On Learning Uncensored]