Dawkins’ The God Delusion

In The God Delusion (Houghton Mifflin, 2006) Oxford evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins seeks to demonstrate that theistic belief in general, and in particular belief in the God of Christian faith, is irrational and irresponsible. It is belief in an entity that “in all probability does not exist.” Turning the tables on those who try to justify belief in God as necessary to explain the world’s complexity, Dawkins rhetorically asks, “Who designed the designer?” Any postulated mind responsible for biological complexity or cosmological fine tuning would be more complex than what it is invoked to explain. Whatever ultimate reality is, it is something simple, not anything we could seriously call a God. However, it is hardly a surprise to Christian theology that design arguments are vulnerable on this score. Dawkins seems unaware of the tradition’s insistence that God is a metaphysically simple and necessary being. Divine necessity and simplicity are for various reasons problematic concepts, but this book does not even enter into the serious discussion of such matters. Indeed, there is no sustained treatment of any of the traditional attempts to justify theistic belief. Dawkins breezily dismisses in the space of a few pages arguments that have been subject to years of intricate debate. In his view they are even less worthy of attention than the design argument he thinks he has handily shown to be self-refuting. Dawkins puts greater effort into setting out current scientific attempts to explain the origin of human morality and religiosity but, while these parts of the book are far more rewarding than his treatment of traditional issues, he simply assumes, without argument, that these theories decisively undermine theistic belief. There are critics who raise deep and serious challenges to belief in God, but the author of The God Delusion is not one of them.Yet Dawkins’ failure to engage the theological and philosophical arguments is ultimately tangential to a fair evaluation of this book, for it is clear that this is not his purpose. Indicative of his actual purpose is his claim that the problem of evil, which most theists regard as the most profound challenge belief faces, should not bother us at all, since the God we purport to believe in, the God encountered in the Bible, is far from good. This deity is, Dawkins delights in pointing out, “unjust,” “a monster,” a “psychotic delinquent,” a “malevolent bully,” and so on, so we should expect any world this deity created to be rife with pain and evil. This rhetorical excess is in keeping with Dawkins’ avowed aim, which is not so much to refute religious belief as to delegitimize it by showing what great fun is to be had in treating it with contempt, thereby modeling honest disbelief and inviting others to join in. To this end The God Delusion is replete with wickedly amusing anecdotes and thus an enjoyable read, even for persons of faith, at least for the thick-skinned among us. Dawkins is outraged by the social convention that treats ridiculous beliefs with solemn respect, especially when those beliefs so often inspire morally reprehensible behavior. He does not think he can argue committed believers out of their faith. His aim is not the refutation of religion but “consciousness raising” designed to liberate those who feel they must pretend to believe, or at least pretend to respect those who do.

Dawkins takes it for granted that all religious communities teach that blind faith, belief that arises and proceeds with no regard to truth or reason, is a supreme virtue. It is distressing that someone as perceptive as Dawkins finds it plausible to suppose that an honest account of the evidential status of belief is not to be found in the Christian community, and that intellectual dishonesty is definitive of, rather than inimical to, genuine faith. However, on reflection it seems obvious that the proper response to Dawkins’ indictment is not to be put off by his ridicule, but to seek to model the possibility of being at once intellectually honest and faithful.

This appeared in the newsletter of the Episcopal Church Network for Science, Technology and Faith