This is a rich collection of material, presented variously – logical arguments, comments on the current scene, case-studies, jokes – all in a vigorous, engaging way, with verve, con brio, even gung-ho.
Dawkins’ stated purpose is to raise consciousness, to help atheists come out. They are a disadvantaged group. A recent poll in the USA showed that while women, catholics, jews, blacks, mormons and homosexuals are now electable to political office, open atheists are far behind, practically disqualified. In 1988, George Bush Senior was quoted as saying, ‘I don’t know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots.’ Well, atheists have had a hard time in Europe, too – think of Spinoza, Shelley, Bertrand Russell, numerous Quakers. Dawkins also seeks converts: ‘If this book works as I intend’, he writes, ‘religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put it down.’ He cheerfully admits his presumptuous optimism.
I would describe the book as a reworking of Enlightenment themes, updated in the light of Darwinism and of concern for human rights. It has sold well. It is full of humanity, and it caters for our current exasperation with religious bigotry, fanaticism, extremism and violence.
Dawkins gracefully admits, on the intellectual level, to being a bit less than 100% atheist, since it is logically impossible to prove a negative, an absence. But at the practical level, he is fully atheist. He may be carried away too far when he claims that whether or not God exists is a scientific question, answerable yes or no. In principle, in the future, in some way, maybe. But at present, surely scientific evidence is unavailable? Many will remain agnostic.
The God Delusion has been widely reviewed, sometimes quite harshly. Terry Eagleton, in the London Review of Books ‘lambasted’ it (the editor’s word), mainly for displaying ignorance of (Christian) theology – though, as I see it, the sophisticated Christianity Eagleton proposes, drawing on Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein, scarcely registers in public discourse, and Dawkins shows a shrewd grasp of the down-market populist Christianity actually noised abroad. Jonathan Sacks urged readers to take the book as a help to selfcriticism, with the humility Judaism and Christianity both profess – ‘the supreme virtue... the opposite of the will to power.’ It may be useful, so long after the book’s appearance, if I look at it from the viewpoint of a SoF member. Did the book work for me? Having read it, am I now an atheist? But was I religious when I started it? Asking these questions showed me one of the book’s weaknesses: Dawkins reduces a very complex problem to a simple joust of two sides, perhaps enticing readers by the prospect of a decisive outcome. I am left as religious, as atheistic, as agnostic, as pantheistic, as before. I remember accepting the label panentheistic at some point long ago. Now all the labels seem faded, blurred, indecipherable, as if peeling off antique luggage in a dusty attic. It makes little difference which one adopts. Dawkins observes how widely, at the level of action, the liberal humanist ethic prevails (leaving aside the Taliban, the American Christian equivalent, etc.) The other weakness of the book, from a SoF viewpoint, is that it is a work of oldfashioned theological realism. There is no mention of Cupitt or of SoF. Perhaps we nowhere fit into the book’s polarised framework. Discussing Wittgenstein, and meaning, in The Sea of Faith (p.224), Cupitt notes that the word ‘atheist’ ‘has been used historically as a quasipolitical smear-word to brand innovators... including, at one time, the early Christians.’ And in his foreword to Scott Cowdell’s Atheist Priest? (1988) Cupitt wrote: ‘I said from the first that the truth is in the movement... I do not share the linguistic scientism of those who think in terms of attacking and defending formalised ‘positions’.’ And yet Dawkins’ book has sold well. There is a demand for realist theology and fixed position stuff, from a constituency SoF has failed to influence. We have to remain aware of the different levels of understanding and varied approaches to religion in the culture. Gibbon, writing about 1780 of the Roman Empire, observed: ‘The various modes of worship which prevailed... were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and, by the magistrate, as equally useful.’ Translate for today as you like, but I suggest Gibbon’s remark still has validity.
UK paperback edition out in September 2007.
John Challenor is a member of SoF and former Editor of Renew (Catholics for a Changing Church).
The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, Bantam Press, 2006, £20 hbk, 406 pages, ISBN 9780593055489