THEOLOGIAN MISSES CHANCE TO K.O. DAWKINS

[Copyright Cedric Pulford, 2007. This article may not be reprinted or distributed other than for individual and personal use, either electronically or on hard copy, without permission from the publisher]

Expectations were high when Alister McGrath, one of Britain’s leading Christian commentators, squared up to Richard Dawkins, the country’s most famous atheist. But CEDRIC PULFORD finds that the eminent theologian failed to nail his opponent 

THE Christian rebuttal of militant atheist Richard Dawkins comes with a brilliant title, The Dawkins Delusion, but after that the problems begin.

I admired Alister McGrath’s The Twilight of Atheism, a title well expressive of its theme, but The Dawkins Delusion by the learned professor and his wife left me disappointed.

A rebuttal book is one of the hardest forms to pull off, even, it seems, for an eminent and hugely prolific polemicist. Rebuttal is by its nature negative, and point-by-point criticism can become tedious. The McGraths, I’m afraid, have not avoided these reefs and shoals.

Dawkins’s top-selling The God Delusion is avowedly populist, but the McGraths’ rejoinder has the smack of an Oxford senior common room. Worse, there are touches of de haut en bas – Dawkins-has-misunderstood-this-elementary-point sort of thing - as if to say “I’m a professional theologian - stay out of my woods”!

“Childishly naïve view”, “simplistic belief” and a “hopelessly muddled reading of things … intellectual nonsense” are not normally expressions that one Oxford professor uses of another – at least in public. Nor do the McGraths have a good opinion of Dawkins’s overall grasp of the subject. The withering words “He is clearly out of his depth” and “But it’s not that simple” are followed by: “There are points at which his [Dawkins’s] ignorance of religion ceases to be amusing, and simply becomes risible.”

Dawkins gives a lot of space to supposedly demolishing St Thomas Aquinas’s famous five proofs for the existence of God. No doubt correctly, he asserts that Darwinism destroys the argument that living creatures are so complex that only God can have made them. Neither Dawkins nor anyone else, however, can get past the first cause argument – that something must have started it all off.

These must be theological college commonplaces and wearily familiar to the McGraths. They dismiss the whole area in a few paragraphs – yet for the searching general reader this area is among the most important in Dawkins’s book.

The McGraths are more interested in showing that belief in God is not the same as having a religion. This is true – think Buddhism or more broadly all sorts of world views – but it is irrelevant for those readers, presumably the majority, who are reading Dawkins in terms of Christianity. Some trendy Anglicans excepted, you can’t be a Christian without believing in God.

I don’t write as an admirer of Dawkins. In his militant atheism, he is making unprovable faith statements just as much as the Christian zealots he scorns. This is a point compellingly made by Alister McGrath in The Twilight of Atheism.

Worse for Dawkins, his approach looks dated – another of McGrath’s points. As the universe has increasingly revealed its complexities, humbler scientists accept that science can’t explain all and isn’t all.

Dawkins showed the same tunnel vision in his recent TV series in which he sweepingly dismissed complementary medical therapies including millennia-old Ayurvedic medicine from India. His idea is that if a treatment can’t prove itself in Western scientific terms, it is valueless. He should beware: it’s only half a lifetime ago that Western doctors comprehensively dismissed acupuncture. Few dare to do so now.

Dawkins is undoubtedly aware of Thomas Kuhn’s seminal The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. This demonstrates, through his famous idea that science is governed by the prevailing paradigm, that today’s scientific truth is tomorrow’s rubbish.

Think flat earth, the sun revolving around the earth, humours of the body; think the phlogiston theory of air; think the creatures of the world produced ready-made, to take an example from Dawkins’s own field of biology. He is Simonyi professor for the public understanding of science at Oxford University, but he would do better to style himself professor for the misunderstanding of science.

However, after this foray by the McGraths, Britain’s most prominent atheist lives to fight another day. I came to The Dawkins Delusion with high expectations, which were not met. The problem appears to be whom the book is written for. It should have been for the questioning general reader, uninitiated in religious discourse; in fact, it is more suitable for theological students and other initiates – who don’t really need it.

THE DAWKINS DELUSION, BY ALISTER McGRATH WITH JOANNA COLLICUTT McGRATH (SOCIETY FOR PROMOTING CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE, 2007)