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Stanley Mushava  Literature Today
Book: The Dawkins Delusion?
Authors: Alister and Joanna McGrathPublisher: Intervarsity Press (2007)

If Richard Dawkins is the contemporary pope of atheism then “The God Delusion” is the ultimate papal encyclical.

“The God Delusion” borders on the polemical claim that one person’s delusion is called insanity while many people’s delusion is called religion

The take-home message from the Kenya-born theophobe is that God is an irrational invention of mad and deluded people.
Dawkins steps up to the podium to complete a secularist trinity featuring, before him, Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx.  The former assigns religion to an infantile prism where the longing for a father figure necessitates the existence of a deity, while the latter regards religion as an emanation of social and economic deprivation.

Both authorities anticipated the foundation of faith being dismantled by their crusades.

Dawkins weighs in with an equally ambitious agenda.

“If this book works as I intend, religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put it down,” the former chair of Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University declares.

Perchance the Darwinist succeeds in turning every customer into a convert, his achievement would be no mean feat considering that the book had already sold more than two million copies as at 2010, hundreds of thousands in translation, and still counting.

“Dawkins preaches to his god-hating choirs, who are clearly expected to relish his rhetorical salvoes and raise their hands high in adulation,” observes a fellow don.

Not everyone, though, has swallowed the secular pope’s communion without chewing.

The book has provoked a number of critical counter-punches.

A riled-up Ray Comfort challenged Dawkins to a public debate for US$10, 000 which the latter turned down, saying he could only debate Comfort if he donated US$100 000 to his atheist foundation.

The most elaborate rebuttal of the book is “The Dawkins Delusion: Atheist Fundamentalism and the Denial of the Divine” by noted Christian theologian and biologist Alister McGrath, and his psychologist wife Joanna McGrath.

It is pertinent, though, to take a snap anatomy of Dawkins’ book before considering the McGraths’ objections.

“The God Delusion” seeks to deal the definitive death-knell to belief in God. To this end, Dawkins employs a chain of observations which are littered with the inference that God almost certainly does not exist.

Dawkins points out that the complexity of the world is a challenge to the intellect which yields the observer to the “illusion” of design.
He faults the God hypothesis arguing that it opens up a larger problem of who designed the designer.

To put paid to the cosmological question once-for-all, Dawkins invokes Darwinian evolution as the definitive answer.
From this premise, Dawkins sounds a dirge for the funeral of God after the tenor of Fredrick Nietzsche.

Unlike Dawkins’ scathing tome, the McGraths’ method is closer to scientific inquiry.
The four chapters, like the title of the book, are headed by the questions “Deluded about God?”

“Has Science Disproved God?” “What are the Origins of Religion?” “Is Religion Evil?”

Readers are given a comprehensive summation of Dawkins’ main ideas before a rational appraisal is offered, in most cases exposing him as out of his depth theologically.

For the most part, the McGraths censure Dawkins for frothing his anti-religious bile with scant attention to academic rigour.
They point out that his assumption of philosophical and theological question is an unfortunate departure from earlier works which showed the beauty of evidence-based reasoning.

By contrast, Dawkins is accused of substituting anecdotes for evidence and trawling the Internet selectively for quotes instead of engaging rigorously and comprehensively with primary sources in “The God Delusion” — a recourse generally strong on populism and deficient of intellectual substance.

“In this book, Dawkins throws the conventions of academic scholarship to the winds; he wants to write a work of propaganda and consequently treats the accurate rendition of religion as an inconvenient impediment to his chief agenda, which is the intellectual and cultural destruction of religion,” the McGraths note.

Dawkins’ misconstrued tirade on what he supposes to be Christian aversion to rational thinking is debunked for its slip-shop premises.
He conjures early medieval reformers and early thinker to fault faith based on the arguments.

The Dawkinsian refutations appear plausible if it escapes the reader that his material is wrested out of context.

For example, he quotes Martin Luther coming down on reason as an arch-enemy of faith, which seldom aids spiritual things but strives against the divine Word.

The McGraths point out that Luther was actually discussing the inadequacy of human reason in fathoming the Christian centrepiece of salvation by grace: “Left to itself, human common sense would conclude that you need to do something to earn God’s favour — an idea that Luther regarded as compromising the gospel of divine graciousness, making salvation something that you earned or merited.”

Hence, by gleefully cherry-picking quotes out of context, Dawkins has a field day facilitated by wilfully shoddy research and dry wit.
The principal flaw in Dawkins’ method is that a scientific explanation for the cosmos puts paid to everything.

McGrath argues that there must be other levels of explanation — complimentary ontological avenues which must not be discarded before an objective appraisal of their validity.

Dawkins does not so much as conceal the self-contradiction which litter his “shrill atheist manifesto”.
He challenges his readers to query whether writers of scriptures were unbiased or had an agenda colouring their work.

While the question is superfluous considering that every world view is inherently biased, the irony is lost on Dawkins that he declares his own slanted interests at the beginning of his book.

Steve Gould’s proposition of “non-overlapping magisteria,” the idea that science explains material and religion accounts for metaphysical cosmological questions from mutually exclusive angles is critiqued by Dawkins a pacifist indulgence of religion.

The McGraths pose an alternative view of “partially overlapping magisteria” where the two intersect and cross-fertilise each other for more elaborate results.

As Nobel laureate Peter Medawar says, “I have in mind such questions as: How did everything begin?

“What are we all here for?
“What is the point of living?”

There is a short shrift to the dogmatic assertion that religion is responsible for violence and envisages a utopia that the abolition will make the word a peaceful utopia.

The McGraths admit acts violence among religious extremists have especially deviated from the core values of their faith.  However, political fanaticism and atheism as in the Pol Pot and Lenin show that religion is not the lone begetter of violence.

Wit without knowledge, Jonathan Swift says, is an overnight froth which can be scummed away by skilful reasoning.
The same can be said of Dawkins’ book which falls short of its declared intention of disproving the existence of God.