No More Mr. Nice Guy!

Deluded about Dawkins (Part II)

After posting the first part of this series, and promising to review Alister McGrath's The Dawkins Delusion for the second part, I had a twinge of misgivings. Wasn't I prejudging McGrath? Suppose he turned out not to be deluded after all?

Well, having finished the book, I've decided to stick with the proposed headline, "Deluded about Dawkins" - only because that it the most charitable possible reading of McGrath's ranting, intemperate screed. The only alternative is that McGrath is flat-out dishonest. I won't give a point-by-point refutation of McGrath's book, since this has already been done with devastating thoroughness by Dan Bye. Instead, let me give my overall impression of McGrath's arguments, and my response.

McGrath's 97-page book review of The God Delusion can fairly be summarized as:

• Dawkins is attacking some forms of religion, namely the dogmatic and literalist forms (he explicitly excludes what he calls "Einsteinian religion");
• Therefore, Dawkins is attacking all forms of religion;
• Therefore, he is attacking my religion, and lumping in my advanced, ethereal philosophy with the lowest-common-denominator religion of the literalists;
• Therefore, he is attacking me personally, and I must reply in kind.

Reduced to its essentials, McGrath's argument doesn't look very well founded. But I've often observed that people are very emotionally invested in their religious beliefs, and any attack on these beliefs is perceived as a personal attack, even an attack on their very identity. It seems ivory-tower professors of theology are just as susceptible to this process as your average megachurch attendee. Certainly, McGrath's constant stream of bile and ad-hominem remarks goes well beyond what you would expect from a theologian who was simply concerned with dispassionately correcting the ignorant mistakes of a layman, as McGrath tries to present himself.

The book's subtitle, "Atheist Fundamentalism and the Denial of the Divine", sets the tone right out of the starting gate. Early on in the book, in a rather self-congratulating passage, a furious young man who is a true believer of Richard Dawkins, angrily confronts McGrath for having "destroyed his faith". McGrath imagines Dawkins preaching to the "god-hating choir":

Those who think biological evolution can be reconciled with religion are dishonest! Amen! They belong to the Neville Chamberlain school" of evolutionists! They are appeasers! Amen! Real scientists reject belief in God! Hallelujah! The God that Jews believed in back in Old Testament times is a psychotic child abuser! Amen! You tell them, brother!

A large part of the book consists of McGrath putting words in Dawkins' mouth in this fashion. It's a pretty obvious example of the strawman argument, and is frequently accompanied by a kind of reverse strawman argument, where McGrath redefines religion, or leaves it deliberately fuzzy and undefined, in order to accuse Dawkins of a strawman attack. We don't even see any attempt at a definition of McGraths's god - a supernatural entity "who actively communicates with humanity and to whom one may pray in expectation of receiving an answer" - until we're more than halfway into the book. And yet McGrath feels free to leap from this tenuous basis to such certitudes as:

So how are we to make sense of the Hebrew Scriptures? Dawkins rightly demands that there should be an external criterion for dealing with the interpretation of these texts. Yet he seems unaware of the Christian insistence that there indeed exists such a criterion - the life and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth.

Surely McGrath understands that non-Christians by definition don't accept Jesus as the final authority on morals, or an objective reality whose existence cannot be questioned? That this is, in other words, an incredibly weak argument with which to respond to an atheist? What makes it even worse is the context: McGrath sneers at Dawkins for bringing up some of the horrific texts in the "Old Testament", and claims Dawkins is trying to make his readers "believe that Christians are in the habit of stoning people to death." Well, we don't, ripostes McGrath, we pick and choose which parts of the Bible to believe in. Which was precisely Dawkins' point!

There are many other places where McGrath takes his beliefs for granted and fails to recognize that not everyone shares them, thus hugely weakening his arguments. He ridicules Dawkins' "inept engagement with Luther" and with Aquinas, who fulminated against using reason to make sense of the world, and proposed "proofs" of God's existence respectively. Silly Dawkins doesn't understand theology! Aquinas is not claiming his proofs actually prove anything, they just show that belief in God is consistent. The true believer starts from the assumption that God exists, and Aquinas' "proofs" reassure him that he is on the right track, while Luther's attacks on "the devil's bride, Reason, that pretty whore" are to impress on the believer, just in case he is tempted to use reason, that it does not have all the answers. Score another one for McGrath! Except that all he has accomplished is to show a glaring difference in the MO's of science and theology, and strengthen my impression that much of theology is intellectually vacuous at best and dishonest at worst. The whole point of a proof should be to increase human knowledge, not reinforce the brainwashing!

Surprisingly in view of his scientific background, it is in discussing the scientific ideas in TGD that McGrath really flails and flounders, though he tries to cover it up with his by now familiar bluster and bombast. For example, he seems to think that a "Theory of Everything" (TOE) would literally be a theory of everything, and asserts that this would lead to the kind of infinite regress that is normally associated with positing an infinitely complex "Intelligent Designer" of the universe. He asks: "what explains the explainer?" He could have saved himself a lot of embarrassment if he realized that a TOE would simply unify the four fundamental forces of physics.

In a similar vein, McGrath derides the "god of the gaps" argument and repeats an argument by Richard Swinburne, that "the capacity of science to explain itself requires explanation." It's a neat ju-jitsu trick, using science's very success at explaining the physical universe against itself - if one accepts the basic premise. Personally, I'm not aware of too many scientists agonizing over this point. The whole thrust of science is to unify areas previously thought to be unconnected, and thus simplify the big picture, even if the details in any particular area are complex. The gaps are still shrinking, despite McGrath's sophistry!

In discussing Dawkins' idea of memes and their relation to religion, McGrath really comes unglued. He quotes Dawkins writing of memes "leaping from brain to brain", which is obviously a metaphor, and takes it literally! "Yet has anyone actually seen these things, whether leaping from brain to brain or just hanging out? [...] Dawkins, in my view, makes his critique of religion dependent on a hypothetical, unobserved entity that can be dispensed with completely in order to make sense of what we observe." Good grief! Obviously the memes leapt right past McGrath's brain.

The last few pages of McGrath's tedious lucubration positively reek of projection: "a whiff of panic [...] The God Delusion seems more designed to reassure atheists whose faith is faltering [...] (One wonders if this is because the writer is himself an atheist whose faith is faltering.) [...] substitution of personal creedal statements for objective engagement with evidence [...] Ironically the ultimate achievement of The God Delusion for modern atheism may be to suggest that this emperor has no clothes to wear."

I have to repeat my question: even if Dawkins is trying to destroy religion, so what? If religion is as triumphantly resurgent as McGrath claims, what are McGrath and his fellow theologians so afraid of?

The blurb on the cover of The Dawkins Delusion would have you believe that McGrath has written the ultimate, definitive rebuttal. If this is the best the anti-Dawkins brigade can do, atheism has nothing to fear.