Alister McGrath on Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins is an important writer, with solid scientific credentials. He is the author of a number of books (see the link in the previous sentence). He happens to be an outspoken atheist. One of his books is The God Delusion. The title apparently describes Dawkins' belief and message. (I haven't read the book, although I have read some other books by Dawkins, and found them worthwhile.)

The first book I finished reading in 2010 was The Dawkins Delusion: Atheist Fundamentalism and the Denial of the Divine, by Alister McGrath, with some assistance from his wife, Joan McGrath. It is a short book (96 pages plus additional scholarly apparatus), easy to read, and focused, from InterVarsity Press. The focus is to show that Dawkins, a scientist, is an atheist fundamentalist, relying not on evidence, but on his own beliefs, in his passion to show that there is no God. McGrath has a doctorate in science from Oxford University, so knows a little something about that field.

Dawkins, says McGrath, has confused his presuppositions with his conclusions, and is acting much like, say, Muslim fundamentalists, who are not willing to even listen to any doctrine that does not agree with their own. Based on McGrath's evidence, and my previous knowledge of Dawkins, I agree. The most damaging item cited by McGrath is Dawkins' reaction to Rocks of Ages, by the late Stephen Jay Gould, a well-credentialed scientist who was also a splendid popularizer of science. In Rocks of Ages, Gould proposed that science and Christianity did not need to be in conflict -- they examine phenomena that don't interact. (I think Gould was wrong about the non-interacting part, but correct that science and Christianity do not need to be in conflict, and I'm not the only one who thinks so.) But Dawkins says, according to McGrath: "I simply do not believe that Gould could possibly have meant much of what he wrote in Rocks of Ages." (p. 34 of McGrath, quoting p. 57 of The God Delusion.) I can just imagine Dawkins' reaction to, say, Billy Graham writing that he simply does not believe that Dawkins could possibly meant it when he said that God didn't exist.

McGrath has also written Dawkins' God: Genes, Memes, and the Meaning of Life. It is a longer book, with the same purpose. Currently, I have no plans to read it, nor The God Delusion. I will quote from the Wikipedia article on the book, which gives part of Dawkins' response to it, in particular to the charge that Dawkins doesn't know very much about Christianity:
Yes, I have, of course, met this point before. It sounds superficially fair. But it presupposes that there is something in Christian theology to be ignorant about. The entire thrust of my position is that Christian theology is a non-subject. It is empty. Vacuous. Devoid of coherence or content. I imagine that McGrath would join me in expressing disbelief in fairies, astrology and Thor's hammer. How would he respond if a fairyologist, astrologer or Viking accused him of ignorance of their respective subjects?

In The Dawkins Delusion, McGrath has met that criticism, saying, approximately, that, for example, you may believe astrology to be totally false, but that if you were writing a 400+ page book denouncing it, you should have most of your facts right.

McGrath is not totally anti-Dawkins, by any means. He says that he considers Dawkins' The Selfish Gene to be a fine book. (I agree.)

God cannot be proved, or disproved, in anybody's laboratory. He is apprehended by faith (See Hebrews 11:3) and then, as a result of this faith, we can see Him, or at least His work, in molecules and mountains, gnats and galaxies.

Thanks for reading.