Matthew's Journal

I read Dawkin's The God Delusion a while ago, and my own comments on that have been sitting on the "TODO" list for a while now. In the mean time, one of atreic's cow-orkers loaned her a couple of little books on the subject, the first of which is by Alister McGrath...

The aim of this book seems to be largely to burn down some of Dawkin's straw men. McGrath takes four of Dawkins' main themes and tries to show that in constructing them Dawkins falls victim to his own cognitive bias and in doing so falls far short of the scientific method he is so keen to espouse, whilst caricaturing religious beliefs grossly in support of his argument. This isn't generally all that difficult - Dawkins' book is a vitriolic, polemic rant, and its author doesn't really try to pretend otherwise. I'm not sure it's all that interesting, either. Is anyone really pretending The God Delusion is a serious attempt to persuade religious people to abandon their beliefs?

What I would have liked to see more of was McGrath trying to counter Dawkins points with a positive argument for the religious point of view; why does McGrath believe in God? There's a tendency to say "Dawkins has oversimplified - it's more complex than that", which I think leaves McGrath open to a charge of obfuscation in places. For example: in discussing whether there are questions that science cannot answer, McGrath says:

Yet most importantly, there are many question that, by their very nature, must be recognised to lie beyong the legitimate scope of the scientific method, as this is normally understood. For example: Is there purpose within nature? Dawkins regards this as a spurious non-question. Yet this is hardly an illegitimate question for human beings to ask, or to hope to have answered. Bennett and Hacker poitn out that the natural sciences are not in a position to comment upon this, if their methods are applied legitimately.

That's very unsatisfactory. The author should have addressed *why* science can't answer this question - the case is far from obvious, it seems to me.

Nonetheless, this book has its good points. It gives a couple of the most egregious of Dawkins' theological errors, without turning into a hugely tedious list of them; why we should care about Dawkins' theological illiteracy is addressed, too, rather than being treated as self-evident (as some of Dawkins' critics have). I think McGrath picks some of Dawkins' more important points to pick apart, too, which helps making this book short but relevent, rather than appearing merely pedantic. It is also clearly-written and jargon-free, whilst mostly avoiding the angry tone it so deplores in Dawkins' book.

In summary, this is a generally clear and concise work which might help puncture some of the ego and arguments behind The God Delusion; that it fails to provide a comprehensive case for religious belief at the same time is substantially a product of its otherwise-commendable brevity.