Matthew's Journal

So, the other response to The God Delusion that atreic has on loan from a cow-orker.

One of the main premises of this little book is that precious few of the arguments marshalled in The God Delusion actually address the existence or otherwise of God. It starts by dividing Dawkins' work up into 63 arguments or assertions, and claiming that only 8 of those are actually arguments against the existence of God. The meat of this book deals with those 8 arguments in turn.

Before Wilson gets into that, though, there are a couple of diversions. Firstly, he takes issue with Dawkins categorising most believers as either hard-line fundamentalists or woolly liberals who aren't really religious at all. The author is an Evangelical Christian, and so claims that Dawkins has excluded the middle here. In a moment of unintentional irony, he claims that this middle should solely be filled by evangelical Christians. He then parodies Dawkins' selection from the "366 reasons why God exists" in amusing style, including:

Argument from the Ultimate Boeing 747: Given the non-existence and non-eternity of God, it is extremely unlikely that a God would have suddently appeared from nowhere. A 'multiverse' is a simpler option. Therefore God does not exist.

All very entertaining, but I did wonder that if one is going to complain about the tone of Dawkins' polemic, shouldn't one be scrupulously polite in response?

The three large remaining sections deal with Anti-supernaturalism, Scripture, and the Improbability of God in turn. An underlying theme is, I think, that Dawkins' arguments often assume their conclusions, or at least rely on a worldview that is no more substantiated than the theistic one that so irks Dawkins. The arguments are clearly presented, and generally pretty sound. He points out that the multiple universes hypothesis isn't all that convincing itself, although I think he and Dawkins are talking past each other as to whether positing the existence of an eternal creator is an issue of complexity or not.

I had some issues with the arguments Wilson advances, though. Having demonstrated that Dawkins' ignorance of theology, philsophy, sociology, et al weakens his arguments substantially in places, it is unwise of Wilson to attempt to tackle in passing issue of irreducible complexity and evolution. He's not a biologist, and it shows. In the middle of a very good chapter on scripture (which deals with much of Dawkin's argument against the New Testament concisely, and with clarity), he asserts that Christians[1] are Christians primarily because they are convinced by the historical evidence for the resurrection. I'm not sure this is true; I suspect many people believe because of some experience of the divine, or for some other reason, rather than that they have been convinced by pages of argument about the historical events of 30AD or so. He is right, however, that a discussion of the arguments around the resurrection of Christs body (or some other hypothesis for the empty tomb) is a notable omission from Dawkins' book.

[1]Well, evangelicals, but he is claiming elsewhere that most Christians are evangelicals

I think if you are already a Christian (particularly if you have evangelical sympathies), you may find this more satisfying that McGrath's work. The latter is more thoughtful in tone, and relies on scripture less, so would probably appeal more to a more neutral reader (if any of those exist on this topic!).