Dawkins' God

Well, I finished it and I would recommend it to anyone. Dawkins' God: Genes, Memes and the Meaning of Life, by Alistair McGrath, ISBN 1-4051-2538-1.

What's immediately refreshing is that McGrath is also less than favourable towards a couple of unconvincing Christian arguments in favour of God -- the "mad, bad or God" argument (sadly, a staple of the otherwise pretty good Alpha Course), and Paley's Watch, which apparently had already come under heavy criticism from theologians like John Henry Newman before Darwin.

That's because, quite simply, McGrath is a scientist as well as a theologican, and has much more regard for logic than, apparently, Mr D himself. Time and time again he takes Dawkins' arguments and shows in simple terms how they just do not add up. Let no one doubt Dawkins' excellence at describing evolution, but please, let no one take seriously his own blind leaps of faith, from that to "therefore religion is all rubbish."

There is no doubt that Darwin, evolution et al is completely incompatible with the waffle of the creationist brigade -- but then McGrath, unlike Dawkins but like most Christians I know, is entirely aware of the faults in their own stance as well. McGrath knows Christians. He gets Christians. And he shows just how wrong, pure and simple, wrong is Dawkins' view of us.

Read the book -- he says it all so much better than I could. But I will just mention his excellent treatment of the argument that goes roughly: religion has caused untold harm, therefore it is bad, while science is pure and rational and enlightened and therefore good. Both have caused good, both have caused bad. If Dawkins was right then the officially atheist Soviet Union really should have been the Earthly paradise that its propaganda claimed -- yet it gave the world the gulag and, because bad science (Lysenko) was more ideologically acceptable than good science, millions starved in a famine that could easily have been avoided. Yet Dawkins doesn't cite this as a good reason to abandon all science -- because, of course, it isn't, any more than the Inquisition is a good reason to give up on faith.

It would no doubt surprise Dawkins, in the unlikely event of his ever hearing of me and/or caring what I thought, to learn that if I want to find out more about the world in which we live, I will choose science every time. And if the findings of that science seem to say that my understanding of some matter of religion is wrong, then I will (I hope, happily) change my understanding of religion. Human understanding, in science and everything else, is all over the place, but the facts remain true.