The eagerly anticipated rebuff to The God Delusion has arrived! Alister McGrath started as a naturalistic sceptic and is now an Oxford theology professor. Having a PhD in molecular biophysics, he genuinely admires Dawkins' intellect and communicative ability. But what does he make of his book?
McGrath laments Dawkins' poor scholarship, pseudoscientific speculation and hostile propaganda against religion. He is also saddened that Dawkins misrepresents religion by: portraying fringe beliefs as mainstream, misquoting sources and replacing evidence with anecdote.
Dawkins seems appalled that any thinking person should remain a theist in the light of modern science. McGrath contrasts him with America's leading evolutionary biologist, Stephen Jay Gould, who was far more conciliatory towards believing scientists:
Either half my colleagues are enormously stupid, or else the science of Darwinism is fully compatible with conventional religious beliefs – and equally compatible with atheism.
Secondly, Dawkins believes that science is the only path to meaningful knowledge. But few would claim that science could ever empirically answer questions such as whether there is a purpose within nature.
Dawkins sees the world divided absolutely between rationalists and the superstitious. Yet no student of the history of science could justify such a position.
He invents obscure concepts such as 'mind viruses' and 'memes', which have no testable models for how they might influence culture. Rather, they are superfluous ideas, and can be dispensed with completely without losing sense of what we observe. Ironically, this is precisely his problem with the idea of God!
Dawkins does not believe in a God who is a 'petty, unjust, unforgiving, control freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynist, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully'. But neither does anyone that McGrath has met!
In fact, Dawkins' ivory tower atheism has blinded him to the realities of 20th century history: 'I don't believe there is an atheist in the world who would bulldoze…York Minster or Notre Dame'. But that is precisely what the communist regimes did to thousands of churches and their clergy in the former Soviet Union.
Most disappointingly, Dawkins distorts Jesus' own teaching, which was radical in its love of outsiders. Jesus' command to love one's neighbour and even one's enemy, shown in the parable of the Good Samaritan, totally contradicts Dawkins' view of Jesus' hostility to outsiders.
Reviewed by:
Alex Bunn
Assistant head of student ministries
