If you wanted to find out about the culture of an Amazonian tribe, would you send an anthropologist or a missionary? The former might seek to keenly observe the people and beliefs they are interested in. If particularly dedicated, they may even seek to assimilate themselves in to the culture. Unless they are repulsed by what they find, we might expect it to be rare that they would seek to change the people they interact with. The missionary, while perhaps taking time to learn the language and local etiquette, will ultimately seek to change the people they interact with.
In Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, the author clearly has an agenda of change in mind. I don’t know if he’d mind the term, but he has an air of missionary zeal about him. As early as the prologue, he states his intentions: that agnostics and theists reading the book might become atheists. Although he has religion in general in mind, his attack on religion is particularly targeted at Christianity, as that is the religion with which he is most familiar.
Christianity, in its various guises, has a few easy targets to aim for. Dawkins, an authority on evolutionary biology, is well equipped to take down some of the more ridiculously anti-scientific or unscientific expressions that have become attached to it. He is a clear communicator and the book is easy to read, especially when presenting scientific concepts. As we can fully explain these processes, Dawkins goes on to indicate that there is no room for a god-of-the-gaps. If we don’t need a god to explain anything , why would we need one at all?
As Dawkins strays from his professional field though, a few inconsistencies are apparent. He is happy to voice support for hypotheses with little evidential basis, as long as they suit his position. As he wanders from biology into physics, his enthusiasm for the concept of an evolving multiverse slips in. For someone seemingly so grounded in scientific empiricism, voicing support for something that is not currently falsifiable seems a little odd. The author doesn’t fail to notice this. Endorsement of this currently unproved hypothesis is claimed to be justified over belief in God, in that it is inherently simple, and therefore relatively believable. If God existed, explains Dawkins, He would be inherently complicated. The probability of such a being existing is explained in evolutionary terms and, according to such terms, would be improbable.
There’s an obvious objection that must be voiced here: no theistic system that I am aware of, with the possible very tenuous exception of Mormonism, believes in these kinds of god. They are classic straw man fallacies, and obvious ones at that. Perhaps Dawkins doesn’t realise that the arguments come across in a similar way to Aquinas’ proofs: arguments intended to stand together, cementing an existing position. And so the book progresses, although often with more subtlety, as men of straw are successively lined up and dispatched, one by one.
As Dawkins’ book continues, one can’t help but notice a strange Popperesque air of positivism. Non scientific knowledge is implicitly, and in the case of theology – explicitly, dismissed. It is here that we run into the book’s biggest flaw. Dawkins has stumbled headlong into academic fields of which he is deliberately ignorant. The author claims that there is no need to engage in theology, any more than one would study pixies. Why then, does he waste so much time developing his own probabilistic theology and take so little time engaging in discussion relating to presumably recognised academic disciplines such as history?
An extraordinarily selective view of first century Christian history is presented and little peer-reviewed work cited, with some frankly crackpot fringe views thrown in because they vaguely support the intended argument. Dawkins fails to mention where the few sources he does cite recognise the canonical gospels as early (and in at least one case) primary witnesses by people that believed that Jesus was resurrected. He dismisses this historicity of the New Testament based on the opinions of 19th Century theologians with, it has to be said, some- but by no means universal -current support . As it happens, things have moved on from there, although not necessarily to the literalistic historicity the Fundamentalists might hope for.
A ten year old biology textbook would be out of date in some areas. Likewise, history and theology have moved on. Recent peer reviewed work by secular historians on the dating and nature of the Gospels might have given Dawkins a harder argument to tackle but he chose not to engage with it. The lack of reading in this area was a glaring omission at first but has taken a more recent ironic turn. Earlier this year, A. N. Wilson, the author of one of Dawkins’ few sources on the historical Jesus publicly retracted some of the views he had expressed in his biography Jesus: A Life. While announcing his conversion to a relatively standard Trinity-believing Christianity in a national newspaper, Wilson blamed his former atheism on intellectual ‘peer pressure’ from Richard Dawkins, amongst others.
Perhaps intellectual peer pressure really does get to the crux of the matter. The title of the book gives it away. Dawkins admits that the theistic argument that he finds most difficult to deal with is the one from ‘personal’ experience. He emphasises the ‘personal’, as it is easier to dismiss than corporate or objectively demonstrable experience, which is harder to dismiss as a delusion. And here is where Dawkins, slips into an argument from personal incredulity. He goes to great lengths to dismiss the views of theists that he regards as ‘otherwise’ objective, seemingly misrepresenting individuals (Robert Winston certainly wasn’t happy) and attempting to portray an artificially minimised number of theists working in mainstream science. Sowing seeds of doubt here is Dawkins’ riposte to what will be most convincing for many believers: if you think you’ve experienced anything supernatural, you are mistaken.
The most uncomfortable argument for a reader from one of the Abrahamic religions is probably where Dawkins turns to ethics. Here we are reminded, based on the Bible, of the acts of the Israelite people and their sometimes fierce, warrior God. There are serious questions here. Can an end ever justify such terrible means? Can a God that endorses, and indeed commands, such violence really be regarded as good? If religion makes people comfortable with these things then perhaps there is something wrong with it.
There is something of a recovery in the latter stages of the book, which builds to a wonderful crescendo on the sense of awe that scientific knowledge can bring. I fear that by this point, Dawkins will have lost those of his readers with much knowledge in the areas in which he is ignorant. Even if he had engaged them in the early stages, they will have been turned off by carelessness on par with a Young Earther dismissing radiometric dating.
Thinking back to my introduction, we can imagine a third visitor to our remote corner of South America: the travel writer. This third figure isn’t necessarily interested being immersed in the local culture. Their job is simply telling the uninformed whether it’s worth going there. The chances are that their article will mainly be read by people that don’t live in the depths of the Amazon. Most of the people reading it, will never have considered visiting the place and this won’t change their opinion. Some people, who were thinking of going, will be put off. What if the anthropologist or the missionary were to read the article? If either of them did read it, I expect they might respond with “so they didn’t see...”, “so they didn’t understand...” or “why didn’t they mention ...?”. One might wonder whether it’s more probable that people of the Amazonian tribe will read the unfavourable article, or if a reader will decide to visit the area, in spite of what they’ve read.
