Richard Dawkins: Making Atheism Even Stupider

Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. -- Terry Eagleton

Intellectual Christians are Richard Dawkins' worst nightmare, because they embody everything Dawkins wishes Christianity weren't. -- Me.

I picked up Dawkins' book The God Delusion at Borders expecting to page through some fascinating and enticing reductionistic arguments against the possibility of divine activity in nature and in human experience. Instead, I found myself forcing down my vomit just long enough to finish the second chapter (after which I needed the toilet to purge). My I.Q. must have dropped a good five points, owing to exposure to such low-quality pretentious rubbish. Pass the Bertrand Russell, please! Dawkins' book is so unsophisticated it should replace The Adventures of Taxi Dog on every second grade reading list.

His arguments (if they can even be called such; they're more like polemics) are superficial at best. Over and over again he zeroes in on extremely negative samples of religious activity and pretends that they represent religion in general (see below for a similar error made by Sir Dufus Elton John). For example he discusses "the violation of childhood by religion," and of course only focuses on the dark misdeeds of religious zealots (whose behavior is even criticized by religious people!), and Dawkins completely forgets that, actually, secularism and atheism have been far worse for children as we have seen in the last century under Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and even in the west as pop culture dismisses the emotional damage from early sexual activity and overlooks the destruction of two-parent families. But in order to fake his case Dawkins attacks only the very worst of religion, citing very often the dregs of the theistic barrel, the worst of the faithful, to drive his argument. He can't handle the reality -- the larger, fuller, more beautiful picture of religious thought and life. (I suspect because doing so would ruin his already pathetic book.)

As another example he includes as fodder for his argument is "a letter that so damningly exposes the weakness of the religious mind, it is worth reading twice" (p 16). But it seems like he read it a hundred times... and then somehow thought he'd read a hundred different treatises on theology and devotional material, and deluded himself into thinking he was then literate in religious philosophy. Dawkins' notion of the "religious mind" is in reality only the worst samples of religious thought.

As for the truly intelligent (and even mainstream) religious thinkers, he dare not engage them without extracting only very superficial versions of their arguments and then knocking down those straw men that he has just contrived. Oftentimes his writing dissolves into obnoxious ranting and regurgitations of the same complaints commonly babbled by people who don't understand Christianity. He may focus on a couple important theologians (like Richard Swinburne), but he selects only those against whom he feels the strongest. He barely touches upon the theologians who interact with both science and religion -- such as Alister McGrath and John Polkinghorne (or T.F. Torrence for that matter). He also fails to confront Gerald Schroeder, the Jewish physicist whose book The Science of God was compelling enough even to convince the famous atheist philosopher Antony Flew, who has now adopted a satisfied acknowledgement of God. Dawkins almost completely ignores them. I think I know why. I've read their (extremely insightful and informed) material, and it blows Dawkins' anti-religious prejudice out of the water. Dawkins is incapable of dealing with the progress made by such scientific theologians. This is in part because he severely lacks the credentials to understand the intellectual milieu in which they write. Here's an interesting chart:

Author	Scientific Degree	Credential in Religion
Alister McGrath	D.Phil., Molecular Biophysics (Oxford)	M.A. Theology, first-class Honours (Oxford)
John Polkinghorne	Ph.D., Particle Physics (Cambridge)	Honorary Doctorate, Theology
Gerald Schroeder	Ph.D., Earth Science; Ph.D., Nuclear Physics (both at M.I.T.)	Orthodox Judaism
Richard Dawkins	D.Phil., Zoology (Oxford)

Missing something? It seems to me that McGrath and Polkinghorne are far more informed on the thinking that handles science and religion than is Richard Dawkins. I have friends here at Oxford (e.g. my colleague Adam Chapman) with degrees in physics and in theology, all of whom could thoroughly obliterate Dawkins' naive commentary on religion. So instead of engaging McGrath, Polkinghorne, Torrence, and Schroeder (et al), Dawkins argues mainly against minor, outmoded samples of religious thought. As a result his book is easy to criticize because his arguments are tissue thin and porous.

Furthermore Dawkins holds a low and utterly uninformed view of theology itself: "I have yet to see any good reason to suppose that theology (as opposed to biblical history, literature, etc.) is a subject at all" (p 57). Time to get reading, Dawkins. There are some incredibly smart and far more widely read scholars who have been scientists and theologians. (I've already proved this point above.) Don't McGrath and Polkinghorne have far better credentials to comment on the relationship between science and religion than does Dawkins, who has formal training only in biology?

Dawkins also embarks on speculation about "the roots of religion" (pp 162-207). I'll save everybody a lot of time with this humble insight: if you look for the origin of religion, you've shot yourself in the foot before you even begin. This is primarily because you've assumed religion is a simple, easily definable, universally scrutable phenomenon. Well it's not. Read E.B. Tylor, Freud, James Frazer, Emile Durkheim, and even recent authors like Pascal Boyer (whom Dawkins cites favorably!) and see each one fail flat in their attempts to identify the original prototype of religion. There is no grand general unified reality about religion, much less about its roots. Fortunately, most scholars are now owning up to this (e.g. Jonathan Z. Smith), though some did even as far back as the 60's (like E.E. Evans-Pritchard and Wilfred Cantwell Smith). You know what this means? Dawkins' thinking is fifty years out of date!

Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist (and indeed a fine one), but in this book he pretends to be a historian -- yet he can't distinguish data and reason from propaganda and conjectural whimsy! He also pretends to be a sociologist, but knows nothing about faith-based communities except trite, superficial, rhetorical complaints made against them. Dawkins should stick with what he knows, rather than run through a laundry list of topics on which he's hardly done any reading (as is evidenced by his reliance on quotations from debates and speeches). Dawkins' earlier books (such as The Blind Watchmaker) were decent because he wrote what he knew and explained concepts such as natural selection extremely well, especially for those untrained in the biological sciences. But his latest churn is a blind drift into uncharted territory about which he has hardly made any effort to navigate responsibly.

I think the most insightful review I have come across is that by Madeleine Bunting, a columnist for The Guardian (one of the UK's most liberal and popular newspapers). She writes:

Behind unsubstantiated assertions, sweeping generalisations and random anecdotal evidence, there's the unmistakable whiff of panic; [atheists] fear religion is on the march again.

There's an aggrieved frustration that they've been short-changed by history; we were supposed to be all atheist rationalists by now. Secularisation was supposed to be an inextricable part of progress. Even more grating, what secularisation there has been is accompanied by the growth of weird irrationalities from crystals to ley lines. As GK Chesterton pointed out, the problem when people don't believe in God is not that they believe nothing, it is that they believe anything.

There's an underlying anxiety that atheist humanism has failed. Over the 20th century, atheist political regimes racked up an appalling (and unmatched) record for violence. Atheist humanism hasn't generated a compelling popular narrative and ethic of what it is to be human and our place in the cosmos; where religion has retreated, the gap has been filled with consumerism, football, Strictly Come Dancing and a mindless absorption in passing desires. Not knowing how to answer the big questions of life, we shelve them - we certainly don't develop the awe towards and reverence for the natural world that Dawkins would want. So the atheist humanists have been betrayed by the irrational, credulous nature of human beings; a misanthropy is increasingly evident in Dawkins's anti-religious polemic and among his many admirers.

This is the only context that can explain Dawkins's programme, a piece of intellectually lazy polemic which is not worthy of a great scientist. He uses his authority as a scientist to claim certainty where he himself knows, all too well, that there is none.

Terry Eagleton has some insightful and incisive remarks for the bumbling atheist:

Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.

Eagleton continues,

Dawkins considers that all faith is blind faith, and that Christian and Muslim children are brought up to believe unquestioningly. Not even the dim-witted clerics who knocked me about at grammar school thought that. For mainstream Christianity, reason, argument and honest doubt have always played an integral role in belief. (Where, given that he invites us at one point to question everything, is Dawkins’s own critique of science, objectivity, liberalism, atheism and the like?)

As if this weren't enough, another philosophical and theological heavyweight Alister McGrath (himself a microbiology Ph.D.) offers a response critiquing more Dawkins' very method:

You'll have to read the rest of Eagleton's review and McGrath's book (when it comes out) to see them blaze all across Dawkins' sloppy landfill. Even many of Dawkins' fellow atheists are embarassed at his empty, irresponsible rhetoric.

Alister McGrath discusses his realization of God in this lecture delivered to the Royal Society of Arts on 13 March 2006 (downloadable as PDF Here):

When I was an atheist, back in the late 1960s, everything seemed so simple. A bright new dawn lay just around the corner. Religion would be relegated to the past, a grim and dusty relic of a bygone age. God was just a cosy illusion for losers, best left to very inadequate and sad people. It was just a matter of waiting for nature to take its course. I was in good company in believing this sort of thing. It was the smug, foolish and fashionable wisdom of the age. Like flared jeans, it was accepted enthusiastically, if just a little uncritically.

I arrived at Oxford from school a Marxist, believing that religion was the cause of all the world’s evils. As an intellectual Darwinian, it seemed perfectly clear to me that the idea of God was on its way out, and would be replaced by fitter and more adapted ideas – like Marxism. I was a “bright”, to use Professor Dennett’s language.

But it didn’t work out like that. At Oxford – to my surprise – I discovered Christianity. It was the intellectually most exhilarating and spiritually stimulating thing I could ever hope to describe – better even than chemistry, a wonderful subject which I had thought to be the love of my life and my future career. I went on to gain a doctorate for research in molecular biophysics from Oxford , and found that immensely exciting and satisfying. But I knew I had found something better – like the pearl of great price that Jesus talks about in the gospel, which is so beautiful and precious that it overshadows everything. It was intellectually satisfying, imaginatively engaging, and aesthetically exciting.

But this raised questions for me. I had been taught that science disproved God. That all good scientists were atheists. That science was good, religion evil. It was a hopelessly simplified binary opposition, not unlike George Orwell, in Animal Farm: Four legs good, two legs bad. But it suited me just fine then.

Yet my new-found Christian faith brought a new sense of fulfilment and appreciation to my studies and later my research in the natural sciences. I saw nature as charged with the grandeur and majesty of God. To engage with nature was to gain a deeper appreciation of the divine wisdom. I gave up the sciences to read theology, but I still love the sciences, and follow the literature, especially in evolutionary biology. And above all, I have a passion for relating Christian theology to the natural sciences.

McGrath is Dawkins' worst nightmare, because McGrath is everything Dawkins wishes Christianity weren't.