Book Review: The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins

If there’s one sure way to provoke an inflammatory response, it’s to challenge someone’s personal belief system. Simply the fact that here we are, existing, has puzzled most of us at some point. God is seen by many as the answer to the problem. For Dawkins – “the Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University and a fellow of the New College” – God is too improbable and too complex an explanation. Indeed, he is no explanation.

The first half of his book is devoted (no pun intended) to an overview of theology, the various arguments for the existence of God and the scientific arguments against them. In God’s corner, to convert you there’s everything from the five proofs of Thomas Aquinas to other people’s  personal experiences; even Pascal’s wager, which I remember found its way onto one of Tim Blair’s threads, gets a mention. For science, Dawkins spends much time explaining Darwinism and comparing it to its arch-enemy, Intelligent Design – the theory of evolution versus irreducible complexity. And although Dawkins admits to some obvious gaps in our knowledge, he sees these as no excuse to pack up scientific research, open the sacremental wine and relax on the comfy cushions of ID. His biggest argument against the existence of God is a kind of reversal of one common theist position (no, Tizona, not that position): the creation of life is so improbable and complex it can be equated to a hurricane making a Boeing 747 out of bits of metal in a scrapyard. But, if this were the case (which, thanks to Darwinism and similar ideas, he concludes it isn’t, but just saying it is), then God is the ‘ultimate 747’, by necessity more complex than the universe which he created, and therefore more improbable.

The second half of his book focuses more on the moral aspects of each debate. Of course, religious fundamentalism gets its serve here and I noticed, with amusement, our good friends Pastor Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church getting more than a passing comment. Dawkins rails against the barbarity of Islam, but seems equally leery of the rise of Christian fundamentalism in the United States. Anne Coulter is quoted a couple of times and it must be admitted, she’s said some very stupid things in her time. Dawkins holds particular grudges against the ‘indoctrination’ of children with religious parents, arguing that children are too young to form such opinions, though he is certainly in favour of teaching them comparative religion – teaching them how to think, not what to think, as he puts it.

Predictably, Dawkins claims that he doesn’t expect his book to convert legions of faithful Christians or Muslims to atheism. His hope is that it gives some people, already in doubt but constrained by their upbringing, family and/or society circle, the philosophical tools to break free. To that end, I would imagine his book serves its purpose. His arguments should not be dismissed out of hand by anyone with any claim to having thought about life, the universe and everything. Certainly, he makes many points very persuasively, though even an atheist such as myself can tell he sidesteps (though never ignores) some of the curliest conundrums, and it is valid when he illustrates how many so-called gaps in our previous knowledge have been comprehensively explained by science, what’s to say we’ll never nut out the remainder? Towards the end of the book I found one of the most intriguing ideas: as much as our eyes and brain have evolved to perceive the visible light spectrum, remaining oblivious to the enormous range of electromagnetic radiation to either side, so our minds have evolved to comprehend the solid, physically concrete world with which we interact day-to-day. That’s not to say, however, that just as we invented tools to ‘see’ all the EM radiation beyond our natural senses, might we not one day develop something to understand that which we currently consign to the metaphysical too-hard basket? That basket is already being relabelled by some: scratch out ‘meta’ and write instead ‘quantum’.

 (Trivia: Dawkins is married to Lalla Ward, one-time TARDIS resident and companion of Doctor Who. Lalla was briefly married to Tom Baker, who played the Doctor at the time. Maybe she realised he was actually just an actor, so moved on to a real scientist. Even more incidentally, The God Delusion is dedicated to Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams, a friend – and convert – of Dawkins. Adams worked on Doctor Who as script editor at the same time Lalla was involved).