Book Review, 19 October 2006
Reviewed by John Cottingham

Flawed case for the prosecution

The God Delusion
Richard Dawkins
Bantam Press, £20
Tablet bookshop price £18 Tel 01420 592974

Though not exactly "the book of the movie", this latest offering from the Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, and self-appointed scourge of religious faith, is reminiscent, in tone and content, of the two-part television documentary The Root of All Evil?, which he presented on British television for Channel 4 earlier this year. The book begins with a magnanimous concession: Dawkins is prepared to allow that "religion is not the root of all evil". But it is still, we quickly learn, a Very Bad Thing.

Exasperation is the dominant note: it irritates our author beyond endurance that religion is so often given a respectful hearing. And theology infuriates him even more. He quotes, with almost apoplectic fury, the deferential comment of an astronomer acquaintance who, when asked about the origins of the cosmos, remarked, "Now we move beyond the realm of science, [and] I have to hand over to our good friend the chaplain." "Why the chaplain?", thunders Dawkins. "Why not the gardener or the chef?"

The reason for all this bile is territorial. Dawkins sees the advocates of religious belief as trespassing on the proper province of science, but without the relevant expertise or evidence. They persist in putting forward an extremely improbable hypothesis, "the God hypothesis", as Dawkins calls it, in a futile attempt to explain matters (such as the origin of life) which science can explain much better.

 Yet, of course, it is far from that simple. The fundamentalists, whom Dawkins prefers to use as easy target practice, may denounce the theory of evolution, and uphold Genesis as a better school textbook than The Origin of Species, but there is a long tradition of religious thought, going right back to Augustine, that looks to many key texts in the Bible not for literal, factual truth, but for spiritual inspiration.

Religious believers do, of course, have views about the nature of the mysterious cosmos we inhabit, but they do not, by and large, impudently aspire to the role of amateur scientist. "Come to me", says Jesus in Matthew's gospel, "and I will give you rest." He does not say, "Come to me and I will offer you some plausible hypotheses concerning the origins of physical and biological phenomena."

Although religion is not quasi-science or science manqué (as Dawkins often seems to suppose), no religion worth its salt can afford to sacrifice reason or rationality - something Pope Benedict underlined in his recent Regensburg lecture. Truth is by its nature a seamless web; so although the truths of faith may not be demonstrable by reason, they cannot, and must not, be inconsistent with the truths that reason does establish. Because of this, religious believers should never resist having their views and arguments carefully scrutinised by scientists (or indeed experts from any other discipline).

Unfortunately, however, Dawkins seems more interested in polemics than in careful scrutiny of arguments. His discussions of the traditional proofs for God's existence are lamentably scrappy: the first three of Aquinas' Five Ways, for example, are dismissed en bloc in two pages whose cavalier abruptness will be embarrassing even to Dawkins' most ardent fans; and the ontological argument, whose logic has fascinated atheist philosophers as eminent as Bertrand Russell, is shrugged off as "infantile ... logomachist trickery". Whether these various traditional arguments are valid or not is beside the point. The point is that Dawkins' blatant failure to give them a decent hearing hardly serves the cause of the impartial scientific fairness that he professes to uphold. 

There is a marked change of gear when the book moves on to the realm of biology, and the problem of explaining "how the complex, improbable appearance of design in the universe arises". Borrowing some terminology from his fellow-atheist Daniel Dennett, Dawkins argues that to posit a cosmic Designer is a "skyhook" - a supernatural pseudo-solution that merely postpones the question of where the designer came from. What is needed instead of the skyhook is a "crane" - a mechanism that can yield complex phenomena from very simple basic principles. And Darwinian evolution by random mutation and natural selection fits the bill admirably. Here Dawkins manages to convey, by the use of vivid detail, how remarkable are the achievements of modern evolutionary theory.

But his conclusion - that these achievements show that "there almost certainly is no God" - appears to be a bizarre non sequitur. In fairness, however, he does go on to admit, albeit with remarkable insouciance, that we "don't yet" have an intellectually satisfying "crane" in physics and cosmology - one that would presumably explain how the universe itself came into existence out of nothing.

Dawkins ends the book by venturing into the domain of ethics. Much of his discussion here is, I regret to say, simply a travesty of proper philosophical debate. In his defence of abortion, for example, he proceeds by summarily dividing the protagonists into religious "absolutists" on the one hand, and secular consequentialists on the other. Predictably, the latter camp is declared the winner; but the argument is vitiated by the apparent assumption that consequentialism is the only candidate for an enlightened rational theory of ethics - never mind that some of the most distinguished thinkers of the twentieth century, including atheists such as Bernard Williams, have rejected consequentialism as deeply flawed; and never mind whether there are important alternative theories of morality (including secular ones) that merit serious discussion. Irrespective of what view one takes on the morality of abortion, no one who is interested in this vital issue will be helped by Dawkins' caricature arguments.

Despite the hyped-up praise on the dustjacket ("my favourite book of all time"; "a heroic and life-changing book"), this is a deeply disappointing effort, when compared, for example, with Dawkins' brilliant earlier work, The Selfish Gene. Some of the earlier energy and ebullience remains, but the book is too hectoring, too insistent, too one-sided, and too irritable to change the views, let alone the life, of any fair-minded reader.

Science is beyond dispute one of the finest achievements of the human intellect, and there are few more important challenges than exploring its relationship to religion. It is to be hoped that some future holder of Oxford's Chair for the Public Understanding of Science will take up the challenge in a calmer and more careful frame of mind.

Back to homepage

© The Tablet Publishing Company