The Dawkins Delusion?

Richard Dawkins preaches that religious belief is a kind of mind virus. One has to wonder therefore where he thinks people tend to catch the Christian variant of this pathogen, because he also asserts that he'd be perfectly happy for people to carry on reading the Bible − for its literary merits of course − even after science has finally cured believers of their residual faith.

The advantage if my logical quibble there with The God Delusion is that it is belief-neutral. The same cannot be said of Alister McGrath's compact counter-polemic, which has much the same sort of mix of affront and dodgy reasoning as its target.

Ironically, Dawkins has of late managed to evolve his own thinking into a "misfiring of something useful", and on balance might be said to have fully deserved this attemped mugging, however bungled it turns out to have been.

For McGrath, Dawkins's bestselling book is part of the Western cultural response to 9-11: religious extremism, especially the Islamic kind, has driven neo-atheists like Dawkins to start digging their trenches rather more publicly, he suggests.

Actually I think it is Christianity that particularly bugs Dawkins, because Islam, in spite of its contemporary association with rag-head toe-rags, had a long and mutually beneficial association with mathematics and science, and along with Judaism still offers up less intense provocation to the rational mind.

When people that I otherwise consider to be mentally competent start trying to tell me that − spiritual yearnings aside − they genuinely believe that a Palestinian Jew who lived 2000 years ago was the son of a virgin and the creator of the universe, the thought that they might be a bit thick after all inevitably crosses my mind!

Dawkins's own position is clear when he mocks the stated belief of the late Pope John Paul II that it was Our Lady of Fatima that preserved him from assassination in 1981. So why should Dawkins − as his critics strongly suggest − brush up on theology in order to address its sophisticated end, when the former leader of the Catholic church can profess this kind of nonsense?

McGrath himself is a lapsed scientist (and atheist) and as such has been going in the opposite direction to Dawkins along the "intellectual superhighway". It must be a while however since he studied molecular biophysics: "How can Dawkins speak of religion as something accidental," he asks "when his understanding of the evolutionary process precludes any theoretical framework that allows him to suggest that some outcomes are 'intentional' and others 'accidental'. Except of course that scientists use adaptive to contrast with accidental, not intentional.

One of his key arguments does merit more consideration: we human beings are capable of great good and great evil and whenever our ideals become transcendentalised (be they religious or secular) we are likely to realise these potentials most fully:

"The simplistic belief that the elimination of religion would lead to the ending of violence, social tension or discrimination is thus sociologically naive. It fails to take account of the way in which human beings create values and norms, and make sense of their identity and their surroundings. If religion were to cease to exist, other social demarcators would emerge as decisive, some of which would become transcendentalised in due course."

McGrath won't acknowledge though that in spite of his excessive claims for the explanative powers of Science, Richard Dawkins is essentially a spokesman for a non-transcendentalised humanist/atheist worldview, one that cannot be usefully compared to the brutal godlessness of Stalin's Russia.

There's a line in Don DeLillo's new novel that I think is very relevant here: religion elevates consciousness in some, reduces it in others. Those whose consciousness has been elevated by their religious belief possibly do have good reason to be miffed by the general tone of The God Delusion, but Professor Dawkins represents a discipline of knowledge acquisition that can really only serve to open up the mind, and frankly I'm with him all the way when he seethes at the prospect of complacent masses whose minds have been stultified by incuriosity and prejudice.

McGrath can tot up the number of scientist-believers all he likes, but it is this special knack for creating new idiots, that sets religion apart from the natural sciences. Scientists are by definition not naturally inclined to ignorance. Religion in contrast preys on those that are.

In Guatemala in particular I regularly come up against people who have been taught to deny themselves the right to think as individuals. Religious belief may not do this to everybody that it touches, but it does it to enough of them to merit the sense of outrage that pervades Dawkins's book.

Perhaps McGrath is right to imply that Dawkins is deluded in stipulating that science is the only reliable tool we possess for understanding the world. There may well be natural limits to what the empirical method can tell us about our cosmological situation, but the gap thus opened up is in a sense antithetical to reliable statements. (And if anything McGrath has made the case for philosophy's role in addressing transcendent questions, as opposed to theology.)

McGrath's most disingenuous remarks turn up towards the conclusion of his tract when he opines that "the phenomenon of religion is a provisional, human institution." It's absolute truth Jim, but not as we know it.