In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins tries to prove not only that God is a statistical improbability, a pretty ambitious task for any scientist, but also that religious belief in itself is delusional, repressive, pernicious and potentially no more than an inadvertent by-product of evolutionary psychology.
It all makes for a pretty compelling read and reason enough to lug a hardback about on the tube.
Dawkins starts off with a robust argument that ‘the God question’ is very much within the scientific domain, for “a universe with a creative superintendent would be a very different kind of universe from one without.”
He gives a lucid account of how evolution explains such apparent improbabilities as an eye or a wing, then debunks creationistism and its cohort, intelligent design, with the ease of a chain-saw passing through warm butter.
This, I guess, was all to be expected from a renowned Darwinist. What I found more intriguing was the section exploring why religion – so ubiquitous, and yet so useless and wasteful in brute terms of human survival – emerged in the first place. Dawkins explores the theory that faith is a by-product of our tendency to revere and obey authority figures, which can be explained in evolutionary terms: children who follow their parents’ orders directly, particularly in relation to walking near cliffs or eating strange berries, are more likely to survive and pass on their genes.
In more controversial mode, Dawkins dredges up the nastiest bits of the Old Testament – incitement to genocide, glorification of rape, etc etc – to make the point that we clearly don’t get our morals directly from the bible, as we pick and choose which parts are now considered acceptable. It is therefore, he argues, untenable that Christian morals should have a privileged status within political debate. You can see why Ann Coulter apparently gets a kick out of imagining Dawkins burning in hell.
I’d recommend the book for its its range, grace and intellectual bravery – but that doesn’t mean I was entirely without reservations. Dawkins spends a lot of time discussing evil acts committed in the name of religion, but little time disentangling religious motivation from political or economic factors, or acknowledging the acts of charity or goodness directly inspired by religion. I also have my doubts about the post-religious utopia he seems to envisage – I suspect Big Macs and Nike trainers would feature more strongly than love of nature and scientific zeal.
I don’t think any of this makes his core arguments less valid, but the book would perhaps have been stronger if he’d made a little more space for the counter-arguments.
PS – This post may look remarkably familiar to anyone who’s read my Telegraph blog recently. Overlapping is pretty inevitable with two book blogs on the go.
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