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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
While Richard Dawkins' polemic against religion scores easy points against Christian fundamentalisms, he supposes his target to be much vaster: “I am not attacking any particular version of God or gods. I am attacking God, all gods”. Given The God Delusion's lack of extended argument, historical ignorance and unfamiliarity with the literature, the praise it has received from some distinguished scientists is troubling.
This essay seeks, first, to examine some of the book's chief weaknesses – its ignorance of the grammar of “God” and of “belief in God”; the crudeness of its account of how texts are best read; its lack of interest in ethics – and, second, to address the question of what it is about the climate of the times that enables so ill‐informed and badly argued a tirade to be widely welcomed by many apparently well‐educated people.
The latter issue is addressed, first, by considering the illusion, unique to the English‐speaking world, that there is some single set of procedures which uniquely qualify as “scientific” and give privileged access to truth; second, by examining historical shifts in the senses of “religion”; thirdly, by locating Dawkins' presuppositions concerning both “science” and “religion”, his paradoxical belief in progress, and the reception which the book has received, in relation to tensions in our culture signalled, fifty years ago, by C. P. Snow.
1 The Sunday Times (24 December 2006), p. 3 of News Review.
2 H. Allen Orr, professor of biology in the University of Rochester, reviewing the book in the New York Review of Books, 11 January 2007.
3 Dawkins, Richard, The God Delusion (London: Bantam Press, 2006), p. 36.Google Scholar
4 Delusion, pp. 77–79.
5 Eagleton, Terry, “Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching”, The London Review of Books, 19 October 2006.Google Scholar
6 Delusion, p. 31.
7 Orr, loc. cit.
8 Delusion, p. 55. In similar vein, the distinguished physicist Stephen Weinberg has written: “I find it disturbing that Thomas Nagel in the New Republic dismisses Dawkins as an “amateur philosopher”, while Terry Eagleton in the London Review of Books sneers at Dawkins for his lack of theological training. Are we to conclude that opinions on matters of philosophy or religion are only to be expressed by experts, not mere scientists or other common folk? It is like saying that only political scientists are justified in expressing views on politics. Eagleton's judgement is particularly inappropriate; it is like saying that no one is entitled to judge the validity of astrology who cannot cast a horoscope” (Stephen Weinberg, reviewing The God Delusion in the TLS, 17 January 2007). However, one does not need to be an “expert” on anything in particular to know that this is a thoroughly bad argument. Casting a horoscope is a practice of some kind, however misguided. Eagleton did not criticize Dawkins for lacking expertise in religious practice – praying, for example. He did criticize him for pontificating about Christian theology (which is a vast body of texts and arguments) while being apparently wholly ignorant of it. Moreover, if someone wishes, not merely to “express views” on politics, but also to denounce, as a bundle of dangerous and irrational nonsense, all political opinions and whatever has been written on political science, then they should first take the elementary precaution of reading the stuff.
9 Delusion, pp. 50, 58–59.
10 “We haven't yet understood the meaning of the word God if we think that God is something to be found, like an HIV vaccine or aliens in space. Another way of saying the same would be to assert that anything that fits neatly into the world can't possibly be the God who created the world. The search for God is not about reason finding an object of study” (Klein, Terrance W., “Adventures in Alterity: Wittgenstein, Aliens, Anselm and Aquinas”, New Blackfriars, January 2007, pp. 73–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar; p. 82). Or, as Hegel remarked nearly two hundred years ago: “God does not offer himself for observation” (Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, I, ed. Hodgson, Peter C. [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984], p. 258Google Scholar).
11 Delusion, p. 199.
12 See Augustine's Commentary on John, xxix (PL, XXXV, 1631). The somewhat free translation is my own: see Lash, Nicholas, Believing Three Ways in One God (London: SCM Press, 1992), p. 20Google Scholar.
13 Delusion, p. 287. For his insistence on the “private” character of religious belief, see also pp. 289, 290.
14 Delusion, p. 199.
15 Delusion, p. 200.
16 Newman, John Henry, The Theological Papers of John Henry Newman on Faith and Certainty, ed. Holmes, J. D. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 102Google Scholar.
17 Delusion, p. 238, my stress.
18 See Barr, James, Fundamentalism (London: SCM Press, 1977)Google Scholar.
19 Delusion, p. 247 (his stress).
20 Delusion, p. 228.
21 Delusion, p. 315.
22 Delusion, p. 252.
23 Delusion, p. 57.
24 Delusion, p. 125.
25 Delusion, p. 149.
26 Delusion, p. 150. For an interesting collection of essays on styles of explanation in the sciences, see Cornwell, John, ed., Explanations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
27 Delusion, p. 347, his stress.
28 See Rudwick, Martin S. J., Bursting the Limits of Time. The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
29 See Collini, Stefan, “Introduction” to Snow, C. P., The Two Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. vii‐viiiGoogle Scholar.
30 Collini, loc. cit. See Lash, Nicholas, “Reason, Fools and Rameau's Nephew”, New Blackfriars (September, 1995), pp. 368–377CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
31 Cited by Collini, op. cit., pp. xi‐xii.
32 See Cavanaugh, William T., “ ‘A fire strong enough to consume the house’: the Wars of Religion and the Rise of the State”, Modern Theology (October, 1995), pp. 397–420CrossRefGoogle Scholar; pp. 403–4. Cavanaugh's remarks on the history of the concept of religion, in this fine essay, draw upon Smith, Wilfred Cantwell, The Meaning and the End of Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1962)Google Scholar.
33 Cavanaugh, art. cit., p. 398.
34 Durkheim, Emile, Suicide. A Study in Sociology, trans. Spaulding, John A. and Simpson, George (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1952), p. 312Google Scholar.
35 Delusion, p. 347.
36 Thus, for example, David Burrell construes “Islam” (“submission”) as a matter of “returning everything to the one from whom we received everything” (personal communication); quite a good description of Jewish and Christian faith as well.
37 Dawkins, Richard, “A reply to Poole”, Science and Christian Belief, Vol. 7, No. 1 (1995), pp. 45–50Google Scholar; p. 46. I am grateful to Professor Paul Black for drawing my attention to this exchange between Richard Dawkins and Michael Poole.
38 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Tractatus Logico‐Philosophicus, trans. Pears, D. F. and McGuiness, B. F. (London: Routledge, Kegan Paul, 1961), 6Google Scholar. 44. L. W. has “mystisch”.
39 Rees, Martin, Our Cosmic Habitat (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2001), cited from Delusion, pp. 55–56.Google Scholar
40 Delusion, p. 286.
41 Delusion, pp. 271, 267.
42 Ruse, Michael, The Evolution‐Creation Struggle (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 80CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the cover of Alister and Joanna Collicutt McGrath's lucid rebuttal, The Dawkins Delusion (London: SPCK, 2007)Google Scholar, Ruse is cited as saying: “The God Delusion makes me embarrassed to be an atheist, and the McGraths show why”.
43 Ibid., p. 4.
44 Ibid., p. 275.
45 Ibid., p. 287.
