Richard Dawkins is better known today as a celebrity atheist than he is for his work in evolutionary biology.  His “The God Delusion” (2006) presents a devastating critique of religion, which became a bestseller and provoked many people of faith to respond in defence of religion, including Alastair McGrath and Terry Eagleton.  Overall, Dawkins’ critique of religion was shown not to be successful.

Firstly, Dawkins argued criticised religion because as he sees it, science has made faith either unnecessary or impossible.  Big Bang Theory and Evolution explains the existence and nature of the universe better than Religion, offering a simpler and evidence-based view.  It is no longer necessary to posit God as the explanation for why the universe and human life exists and not intellectually possible given the existence of a superior alternative explanation.  For Dawkins’ “The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity” so that “Today the theory of evolution is about as much open to doubt as the theory that the earth goes round the sun.” Religion makes assertions which are grounded in faith, which represents a retreat from a rigorous, evidence-based concern for truth. For Dawkins, truth is grounded in explicit proof; any form of mysticism grounded in faith is to be opposed vigorously. Dawkins is deeply suspicious of faith, which he understands as being unshakably committed to a position beyond the evidence or even in the teeth of the evidence. By this definition, faith would be the opposite of the approach a scientist should have towards the truth. Scientific method demands that scientists accept only those beliefs that are supported by evidence and then in such a way as to be open to those beliefs being falsified and either dropped or modified as new evidence comes to light. For Dawkins, being committed to an unevidenced position is the antithesis of the scientific ideal.  He wrote “Religious fanatics want people to switch off their own minds, ignore the evidence, and blindly follow a holy book based upon private ‘revelation’.” And “I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.”, “Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.” Concluding, “Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.”  Nevertheless, in both “The Dawkins Delusion” (2006) and in lectures given on the topic, Professor Alister McGrath makes several criticisms of Dawkins’ arguments. In particular, he pointed out that Dawkins promotes the myth that science and religion are engaged in a warfare from which only one can emerge as victorious. This sets up a FALSE DICHOTOMY, meaning that Dawkins argument is fallacious.  McGrath’s argument is supported by the existence of many leading scientists who are religious, for example John Polkinghorne.  They do not subscribe to the view that religion is unnecessary or that faith is impossible and nor do they accept that science and religion are opposed, that it has to be either or.  McGrath is right to argue that that Science does NOT necessarily lead to Atheism. As scientists from Aristotle to Stephen Jay Gould have observed, science just can’t answer questions about God’s existence or nature. McGrath wrote… “To say it for all my colleagues and for the umpteenth millionth time: science simply cannot (by its legitimate methods) adjudicate the issue of God’s possible superintendence of nature. We neither affirm nor deny it; we simply can’t comment on it as scientists”.  This view is persuasive; it is unscientific to do as Dawkins does and treat Evolution as if it was fact and simply ignore evidence to the contrary or the prevalent human experience of God because it doesn’t suit the theory. Because of this, McGrath showed Dawkins’ critique of religion not to be successful.

Secondly, Dawkins argued that belief in God arises from a “meme”, or a “virus of the mind”. The idea of the MEME first appeared in Richard Dawkins’ first book “The Selfish Gene” (1976) as an attempt to understand why some behaviours, from an evolutionary perspective, seemed to make no sense but, somehow or other, were found to be very common in human societies. As Dawkins emphasised, natural selection is a ruthless judge of its subjects and any frailty, physical or behavioural, is almost inevitably rewarded by a rapid exit from the gene pool. It therefore followed that any widespread behaviour, prevalent in a thriving population, no matter how immediately inexplicable, should give some advantage in terms of gene survival. Continued research – now called MIMETICS and conducted by Psychologists like Susan Blackmore aimed to understand the reasons behind animal behaviours has yielded results that are entirely consistent with Dawkins’ thesis. Aaron Lynch in Thought Contagion: How Belief Spreads Through Society (2005) sets out seven different ways in which memes are passed on in society, including through proselytism or encouraging believers to pass them on, through encouraging believers to preserve them, or through being adversarial (encouraging people to oppose the dominant view), cognitive (appealing to reason) or motivational (inspiring people to behave in a particular way).  Nevertheless, while Dawkins’ claim that religion is a meme is influential and superficially attractive, there is no scientific evidence to support the existence of memes and as McGrath pointed out, in fact Dawkins relies on memes of his own.  These come in the form of prevalent historical myths – such as the legendary account of the debate between Wilberforce and Huxley at Oxford – which cast a lingering shadow over contemporary discussions by supporting Dawkins’ erroneous view that science and religion are necessarily opposed and that it has to be either/or and that there is no middle way of accepting both science and religion. For McGrath, Dawkins taps into science vs. religion memes so that participants in today’s debate are DAMNED BY ASSOCIATION with caricatures of previous participants, showing that Dawkins’ critique of religion is fallacious in relying on the GENETIC FALLACY as well as a FALSE DICHOTOMY.  In this way also McGrath showed Dawkins’ critique of religion not to be successful.

Thirdly, Dawkins argues that Religion offers an impoverished vision of the world. In contrast, science offers a bold and brilliant vision of the universe as grand, beautiful, and awe-inspiring. As Dawkins explained in his “Religion: The Root of All Evil?” documentary for Channel 4 (2000), religion proposes a poky, medieval vision of the universe which pales into insignificance beside the grand design of the scientific vision of the universe.  As he wrote: “The universe presented by organized religion is a poky little medieval universe, and  extremely limited” As Dawkins sees it Religion peddles bronze-age myths to answer life’s big questions, myths which offer us as poor a moral guide as they do a scientific account of creation. Yet McGrath presents a convincing riposte to this point as well.  He points out that Dawkins is working with a very particular definition and understanding of the things he argues against. For Dawkins faith “means blind trust, in the absence of evidence, even in the teeth of evidence” (The Selfish Gene, 1988) and faith is “the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence… Faith is not allowed to justify itself by argument” This non-propositional, fideist definition of faith wholly contrasts with the propositional definition of faith put forward by many Philosophers of Religion… so Dawkins is, in effect, setting up a STRAW MAN and introducing yet another fallacy into his argument. For McGrath, Scripture contains a positive moral message and Truth, but it needs to be interpreted as a whole rather than quoted selectively to understand this.  He argues that religion accounts for the existence of morality much better than evolution, which struggles to explain altruism. McGrath drew on CS Lewis’ moral argument here. It is fair to say that evolution cannot, albeit as yet, provide a convincing explanation for moral altruism, despite the efforts of Robert Trivers and other evolutionary psychologists to explain it in terms of kin selection and other theories. McGrath’s critique of Dawkins is, therefore, persuasive.  He shows that Dawkins claims about religion offering an impoverished vision of the world are based on an unfair and narrow account of religion and are fallacious once again.

On the other hand, Dawkins’ critique of religion is persuasive when he points out that “The universe doesn’t owe us condolence or consolation; it doesn’t owe us a nice warm feeling inside…” and when he asks “How can you take seriously someone who likes to believe something because he finds it ‘comforting’?”  While McGrath is not guilty of wishful thinking and projecting a God to fulfil human needs and wants, as Dawkins – and of course Feuerbach and Freud before him – rightly point out, many religious people are. Even if Dawkins Critique cannot fairly apply to all religious believers, it certainly does apply to some.  Further, Dawkins is right to point out that “The chances of each of us coming into existence are infinitesimally small, and even though we shall all die someday, we should count ourselves fantastically lucky to get our decades in the sun.”  It is true that religious beliefs sometimes encourage people to think, rather like babies, that their own existence was planned and inevitable and that they are the centre of the universe.  This can lead believers to over-emphasise their own and human importance more generally, leading to selfish behaviours and Speciesism, as Peter Singer has pointed out.  Yet again Dawkins critique is unfairly applied to all religion and all religious believers.  As McGrath points out, Dawkins’ critique of religion depends on a GENETIC FALLACY, damning all believers because of their association with “prevalent historical myths” such as the denial of the heliocentric universe or evolution. Just because Bishop Wilberforce was a Christian does not make him a fair representative of Christian faith today!  Just because many believers are guilty of wishful and childish thinking does not mean that all are. It is unfair to characterise the faith of McGrath, or of others such as John Polkinghorne or William Lane Craig in the way that Dawkins attempts to.  Dawkins’ critique of religion depends, therefore, on the FALLACY OF ASSOCIATION… damning all believers because they are associated with those whose faith depends on lazy or ill-informed thinking. It follows that Dawkins’ critique of religion is unsuccessful.

In conclusion, McGrath shows that Dawkins’ critique of religion is fallacious to its core and therefore unsuccessful.  As Terry Eagleton wittily observed in a review of “The God Delusion” back in 2006, “Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology”