The God Delusion

As a practically lifelong unbeliever and sceptic, I undertook this book with trepidation, all too familiar with the damage that Richard Dawkins's blinkered logic tends to inflict on the atheist cause.

Ever since I first read The Selfish Gene over a decade ago I have noted his unnerving ability to leave strewn behind his jauntily self-confident prose, the very logical and metaphorical tools that any reasonably intelligent person can pick up and use to expose the weaknesses of his core arguments. And his newest book is no exception.

Of what possible relevance are fairies at the bottom of the garden and rampant spaghetti monsters to what the writer the book is dedicated to famously characterised as "the answer to life the universe and everything"? Dawkins himself notes that people tend to form models of the world they find themselves in, and it is surely far more probable that your average human being will include some sort of God in their personal model than say, Bertrand Russell's intergalactic teapot. Indeed, the gap in question is rather more obviously God-shaped than teapot shaped.

At one point noting that theologians and philosophers tend to inhabit the supposedly narrowing gap beyond the magisterium of empirical investigation, he goes on to rubbish the claims of theology to be any kind of subject at all. Of philosophy we hear no more. Has he granted it its place in the twilight zone by default?

"There is no reason," he says, "to regard God as immune from consideration along the spectrum of probabilities," and then goes on to supply a number of very good reasons in his final chapter covering quantum theory and its counterintuitive assaults on common sense. The ultimate 747 gambit is based on the huge assumption that the probability of supernatural intelligence has to be examined like that of any other chunk of complex matter on the middle-world scale.

The narrowness of Dawkins's own "mental burkha window" is as apparent as ever. He is the epitome of the middle-of-the-road English intellectual, imperiously dismissing the "Franco-phoneyism" of important (if flawed) Gallic thinkers such as Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault. I wonder what Ethiopia's undernourished children would make of his assertion that we have no business complaining about our "time in the sun"; indeed to do so would be a "callous insult" to all those unborn combinations of human DNA.

To the charge that he willfully confuses the issue of the origins of life with the origins of the universe, Dawkins would probably argue in his defence that he is simply responding to the sophistry of his creationist opponents. But the confusion remains, and it muddies his exposition.

But all that said, what would we do without Richard Dawkins? It's clearer than ever that atheism needs a spokesperson in a western society that appears to have lost its connection with the cultural gains of the Enlightenment. And for better or for worse, Dawkins is the man that has stepped up to the podium (or the pulpit!).

Ultimately, I have to say that I have a good deal of sympathy for his conviction that Abrahamic monotheism is the "great unmentionable evil at the centre of our culture, " and I can understand his bitter frustration at "the unparalleled presumption of respect for religion" that seems to be solidifying in the modern West.

The fact that each of the four gospels has a significantly different take on the circumstances of Jesus' birth should, I believe, be something that seriously bothers all believing Christians every time Christmas comes round. The ignorance of scripture amongst most of the self-professed devout Catholics that I have interrogated in Guatemala is also something that regularly astounds me.

But Dawkins never addresses the fact that there is a cultural as well as individual psychological need for the exortations, consolations and inspirations of religion. How would a society that had wholeheartedly accepted both the finality of death and the absence of final justice actually function in practice?

It's clear from looking at the areas of human culture where monotheism itself is absent that it would indeed be possible to eradicate it within the space of several generations. The efforts of the communists to do so in recent history should not be taken to indicate the futility of such a programme, because Marx's own opiate was in many ways a simple substitute. Yet could we really collectively accept that there might be no decisive justice for the downtrodden either in history or the hereafter?

Anyway, the Professor's closed-minded zeal is always stimulating, as is his aforementioned generosity in providing his readers with handy armaments for resisting him as he tries to drag them away from their infantile fantasies. Like his idol Darwin, he aspires to be a burkha-lifter, and does largely succeed, if not always in the ways intended.

One of the book's most impassioned passages concerns our cultural response to the discovery of the frozen corpse of a young Inca princess sacrificed many centuries ago high up in the Andes. It doesn't matter that she herself felt proud to give up her life to the sun god, he pleads, she wasn't in possession of the facts, and the act undoubtedly remains a senseless, cold-hearted murder whatever the local cultural context. Though Dawkins doesn't directly make the connection, the fact that the veil is wholeheartedly supported by many Muslim girls is surely vulnerable to assault from the very same logic.