Dealing with Dawkins
In this third and final installment of “Reader’s Guide to the Origins Debate,” I recommend books which respond to the writings of Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion 1—a harshly worded attack on religion in general and Christianity in particular. I single out Dawkins for consideration because of his notoriety and influence with other militant atheists who contend for the suppression of religion as evil and for the banishment of all religious practice as unnecessary and dangerous. We have seen this before in history, with devastating results.
In writing The Dawkins Delusion? 2, Dawkins’ God 3 and The Twilight of Atheism 4, Alister McGrath, Oxford Professor of Historical Theology and a Ph.D. in biophysics, has done a great service for those wishing to understand who Richard Dawkins is; what the logical flaws, exaggerations, and hyperbole in The God Delusion are; and where Dawkins and his ideas fit in the overall history of atheism. In God’s Undertaker5, Oxford mathematician John C. Lennox has taken up the challenge of answering the underlying agenda of The God Delusion: that science has not only made God unnecessary but also killed and buried Him. In other words, that science has disproved God. Lennox ably shows that rather than pushing God into the dark corners of the universe, as Dawkins and others allege, scientific knowledge increasingly points to the reality of God’s existence and also illumines His handiwork.
Unlike Dawkins, McGrath is knowledgeable in both science and theology; and, as he focuses the microscope of rigorous scholarship on The God Delusion and other works by Dawkins, some surprising results are seen. McGrath reveals Dawkins’ increasing use of inflammatory rhetoric, selective manipulation of facts, intellectual sleight of hand, and shallow theological scholarship. It is clear to McGrath that in The God Delusion, Dawkins has made a transition from scientist to crude antireligious propagandist, where things are so because Dawkins says they are and where logic like “it is either A or B and, since I pronounce B to be utterly stupid, it must be A” is the norm. McGrath also convincingly challenges Dawkins’ claims that science and religion are, and must be, at war and can never be reconciled.
McGrath’s, The Twilight of Atheism is one book I wish had been available when I took Western Civilization in college because it provides an interpretive framework for understanding centuries of French and German philosophy. With this understanding, it is clear that Richard Dawkins is really an 18th century philosopher whose atheism is recycled from d’Holbach, Feuerbach, Hegel, and Marx. There are no new ideas from Dawkins, including the desire to vanquish religion by force if it does not die out on its own. Recall the failed experience of forced atheism during the French and Russian Revolutions, the latter of which led, by some estimates, to 80 – 100 million deaths. And now Dawkins’ militant atheism, buttressed by Darwinism, calls for this same experiment yet again. But “when religion is declared the enemy”, McGrath warns, “the outcome is as inevitable as it is criminal.”4
1 Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006).
2 Alister McGrath and Joanna Collicutt McGrath, The Dawkins Delusion? Atheist Fundamentalism and the Denial of the Divine (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2007).
3 Alister McGrath, Dawkins’ God: Genes, Memes, and the Meaning of Life (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007).
4 Alister McGrath, The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World (New York, NY: Galilee Doubleday, 2006).
5. John C. Lennox, God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? (Oxford, England: Lion Hudson plc, 2007).