The God Delusion
Book review by George Jelliss
Title: The God Delusion
Author: Richard Dawkins
Publisher: Bantam Press
At least, this started out as a review, but rather than being a summary of the contents it has developed into my reactions to the contents; but perhaps that is what a review should be.
To someone familiar with the works of secularists, rationalists and atheists over the years there is very little in The God Delusion that is unfamiliar but, that being said, it is so well organised and accessible to the general reader that it must immediately take its place as a classic alongside The Age of Reason, and is written with the same clarity and fervour. I'll be donating my copy to the Leicester Secular Society library.
He begins by making clear that the God he is calling a delusion is not the abstract God of the pantheists or the deists. That being said, he does strongly criticise those who use the idea of God in this way: "The metaphorical or pantheistic God of the physicists is light years away from the interventionist, miracle-wreaking, thought-reading, sin-punishing, prayer-answering God of the Bible, of priests, mullahs and rabbis, and of ordinary language. Deliberately to confuse the two is, in my opinion, an act of intellectual high treason."
His main original point is his evolutionary argument against the existence of a creator god, which he gives at the start of the second chapter and elaborates in chapter four. He defines "The God Hypothesis" as: "there exists a super-human, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us". And straight away he gives his "central argument" against this: "any creative intelligence, of sufficient intelligence to design anything, comes into existence only as the end product of an extended process of gradual evolution". This is similar to the more general philosophical argument which asks, what is meant by an "explanation": to which the answer is: deriving something complex from simpler antecedents. So explaining the complex in terms of the complex is no explanation at all. However I would also go further and question the very idea that the creation of the universe is a rational concept. By definition the universe is everything that exists, so the concept of something existing "before" or "outside" the universe is a nonsense.
The same chapter examines the nature of religion, and criticises T. H. Huxley's "agnosticism" and S. J. Gould's "non-overlapping magisteria" (NOMA) which try in their different ways to untangle religion and science. The truth is that the religious beliefs of many people have implications for science that cannot be ignored, for instance belief in the efficacy of prayer, in the reality of faith healing, in the involvement of a creator in evolution, in claims of personal communion with God. What I call the "agnostic fallacy" is to treat every opposition of views as if both views are equally valid, despite the preponderance of evidence being on one side. There is very little that we can be absolutely certain about, outside elementary arithmetic, but there are many things that we can have sufficient confidence to believe as if our life depended on it; as it well may do (in the case of evolution versus creationism for instance).
In chapter three he adequately demolishes the so-called proofs for the existence of God associated with Aquinas and Anselm, and even Stephen Unwin's more recent foray into Bayesian statistics. He also counters Pascal's wager. Dawkins' book is of course aimed at the general public. Some reviewers have foolishly criticised him for not fighting the theologians on their own esoteric ground, but he is quite correct to dismiss their arguments as fatuous and their subject as vacuous. In two places in other chapters he quotes the Oxford theologians Richard Swinburne and Keith Ward at sufficient length to demonstrate the ridiculously convoluted way they think.
In chapter four he also discusses the anthropic principle, which maintains that six physical constants of the universe are just right for life to evolve. The religious believer concludes that since we don't know how these constants got their values they must have been set by a "Divine Knob-Twiddler". This is just another example of the God of the Gaps: if we don't have an explanation then God did it. "Hard-nosed physicists say that the six knobs were never free to vary in the first place. When we finally reach the long-hoped-for Theory of Everything ... It will turn out that there is only one way for a universe to be." Other alternatives are the Multiverse theory of Martin Rees, and the evolution of universes theory of Lee Smolin. But we just don't know, yet.
In chapters 5 to 7 he considers how and why religion and morality might have evolved. He conjectures that religion is a byproduct of the need for children to have faith in what their parents teach them, and also discusses similar theories in recent books by Daniel Dennet and Lewis Wolpert. For myself, I find wish-fulfillment sufficient explanation for all the religious concepts: wouldn't it be nice if our loved ones didn't really die (but could be reincarnated or survive as spirits); wouldn't it be nice if all injustices were put right (at judgement day or through karma); wouldn't it be nice if our lives had some ultimate purpose (assigned by Providence, or Fate, working in its mysterious ways) rather than us having to work hard at achieving something worthwhile.
On morality he surveys the recent work of biologists on the evolution of altruistic behaviour. Then he examines the Old and New Testaments as sources of moral guidance and finds them worse than useless. Finally he discusses "The moral Zeitgeist" which is "a consensus about what we do as a matter of fact consider right and wrong". Unfortunately he falls short of explaining this mysterious consensus, saying:: "The onus is not on me to answer. For my purposes it is sufficient that they certainly have not come from religion." and "It is beyond my amateur psychology and sociology to go any further in explaining why the moral Zeitgeist moves in its broadly concerted way."
I must admit to disappointment that Dawkins does not take a more positive line here, but I suppose he is being careful to stick to the facts and not go beyond his area of expertise. As a layman I would go further and attribute the progress of the Zeitgeist in the abstract to the rise of rationality, enlightenment and science over the last 400 years, and in the concrete to the sustained efforts of the many reformers, and ordinary people, who have fought for freedom of speech, for representative government, for widespread education, for basic human rights, and so on. Such people have often had to put their lives on the line to achieve this progress and many have struggled long and hard, and often have not lived to see their aims fulfilled. The fight continues today, and I hope the Secular and Humanist Societies are doing their bit.
There is much more in the 400 pages than I can include here; the above points were those that gave me something to think about. The final chapters make clear why faith-based religion and science are incompatible, why the indoctrination of children is a form of abuse, and how science can provide a liberation of "the human spirit". As Dawkins makes clear in his preface, the raising of consciousness, making people think, is what it is all about.
Other reviews of The God Delusion, many of them hostile, can be read at the official Richard Dawkins website: (http://richarddawkins.net/home) together with extensive comments and counter-comments by visitors to the site. There is also an associated discussion forum (http://richarddawkins.net/forum/).
George Jelliss is a member of Leicester Secular Society and maintains their site.
