A while back one of the yogis at my studio suggested I read Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion and, having heard about Dawkins and his fellow “New Atheists” quite a bit, I agreed to give it a try. I hear about the New Atheists a lot in the news, and I figured that this may be an important (anti-) religious trend to know about. I really should know better than to get my news from the news.
Two weeks ago, I went to the hulking edifice that we call the Mahopac Library to check it out. I must say that the Mahopac Library is easily the best thing about living in Mahopac. It’s phenomenal! A large selection of actual books, plus many new-fangled contraptions like computers, books on tape, videos, and lots of classrooms for special events (including yoga for Seniors), all housed in a cyclopean fortress of poor architectural taste. I imagine that it was designed by the same guy that designed the wasteful absurdity that is our local volunteer fire station. For a conservative small town that seems to hate taxes, they love to waste money. But I degress…Despite the awesomeness of the local library, The God Delusion had vanished mysteriously from the shelves, so I grabbed God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens, another big name and big title by one of the so-called New Atheists. I figured, hey, one book by these guys should be the same as another, right? Glancing a several apparently similar books, the tables of contents seemed to roughly be the same:
Chapter 1: Why there’s no such thing as God
Chapter 2: Why people who believe in God are stupid.
Chapter 3: Religions are really, really bad. Like, AIDS bad.
Chapter 4: Conclusion: There’s no such thing as god.
So I took home God is Not Great, read it very quick, quickly decided to take some notes so that I could do to its infantile arguments what an ancient priest of Odin might do to a Christian. I also ordered a copy of The God Delusion from another library in the Mid-Hudson Valley library system, just to be safe. About a week later I got my robo-call from the library telling me it had arrived. By that point, I wasn’t even sure I wanted to read anything else by the New Atheists, but I picked it up anyway. I must say I was pleasantly surprised. There are definitely some things about both books that warrant their being grouped together under the same ‘movement’, but I was struck far more by their differences. Comparing Hitchens’ book to Dawkins’ book was like comparing conservatives Rush Limbaugh to David Brooks (of the NY Times), Jack Chick to St. Augustine, or a Jerry Springer episode to a TED Talk .
While at the library, I also picked up The Dawkins Delusion by Alister McGrath and Joanna Collicutt McGrath, a theologian who teaches at Oxford with Dawkins, and his diversely educated wife (Neuroscience, Experimental Psychology & Christian Theology). This is a direct rebuttal by some believers to the points raised in The God Delusion, so I figured it might help me break things down.
Below, you’ll find my reviews of all three books. If you don’t want to read about them in more detail, I’ll sum it up for you:
1) God is Not Great is well-written, but as intellectually bankrupt as a tabloid. Don’t bother.
2) The God Delusion is well-written, fascinating, educational, but flawed in important ways. Regardless, I recommend it.
3) The Dawkins Delusion is not as entertaining as the others, but it’s still fascinating, and emphasizes many of the problems in Dawkins thinking, as well as puts his ideas into a much needed context. That said, it is about as flawed as Dawkins book, maybe moreso. I recommend it only if you read Dawkins and think he’s the atheist version of a Messiah.
God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens.
The new atheists really like science. They’re pretty much all about it. I can totally get behind that – reasoned arguments, evidence, skepticism, maybe with some Bunson Burners and Tesla Coils thrown in for dramatic effect. And who doesn’t like Bunson Burners or Tesla Coils, I ask? I imagined that in their books these ‘New Atheists’ would be all about the use of reasoned arguments, appealing to my mind rather than the ‘gut’. Sadly this is not the case with Hitchens. I suppose I should have expected it. He’s a journalist after all.
Hitchens’ argument against religion is essentially this: Religious people do really, really bad things, and want to more bad things, plus only dumb rednecks believe in God anymore, therefore be an atheist. Rather than convince you, he points out the rather well known dumb things people do in the name of religion, as well as the dumb things that appear in the bible and Koran, trying his damnest to provoke the disgust reaction. He appeals straight to the gut, the emotions, and lets that overwhelm the critical mind rather than make reasoned arguments. This is demagoguery, nothing more, nothing less. To give this the veneer or reasonableness he also sets up religion as a straw man, defining it only by the most pathological cases, and using this as an argument against it. This is ultimately the same argument as saying “Stalin was an atheist and a really bad man. Ergo, all atheists are really bad men. Wow, what a good reason to believe in God.” All of Hitchens’ arguments are essentially along these lines. They prove about as effective as a creationist who argues “You expect me to believe I evolved from a monkey? That’s just dumb.”
In summary, if you’re an atheist, this is a good book to get you fired up about being an atheist and at the idiocy of any other point of view. If you’re a believer, you may find the book irritating, but it is so clearly full of biased, distorted logic and incomplete facts that you probably won’t waste your time being offended and just wonder how anyone takes him seriously. The subtitle “How Religion Poisons Everything” is an absolute statement, admitting no exceptions, and that is exactly how the whole book reads. Big provocative statements – very little to back it up.
I want to add one more thing before I go on to Dawkins’ book. In The God Delusion, Dawkins notes that he, as a policy, never debates Creationists, and prefers not to debate at all. Google “Hitchens Debate” and you’ll see that Hitchens seems always happy to go a round with anyone. Why? Because verbal debates are ultimately won by bullying, and nothing actually comes of them. They make good sound-bites for the news cycle, and help people reinforce views they already have. It’s not hard to see why Hitchens likes the format. He’s a gifted communicator with nothing much to communicate. As he can’t brow-beat you as effectively in a book, God is Not Great falls consistently flat.
The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins.
Unlike Hitchens, Dawkins is actually a scientist, specifically an Evolutionary Biologist. This scientific training comes through very clearly, and the parts of the book I most enjoyed are the parts when his talent for explaining science to the layman (which I certainly am) really shines through. Dawkins is slightly less polemical than Hitchens, one might be tempted to say less certain, but this is clearly not true. Dawkins is pretty damned sure there’s no God and that religion is a dangerous fraud, but he seems to recognize the possibility that he could be wrong. He gives you a little space to breathe, and really seems to hope you make up your own mind, although he clearly has definite ideas about there being only one possible conclusion based on the evidence he presents. The book just comes across as more intellectually honest than Dawkins, and because he attempts to reason rather than emotionally manipulate, the book is far more convincing. In fact, I don’t hesitate to say that I really enjoyed it.
Dawkins wisely begins by identifying exactly what he’s trying to refute in religion (something Hitchens cannot be troubled to do) – a supernatural God, ie, a God which is outside of nature, and unbound by its laws. A Creator God, yes, but one who is also around after the fact to answer prayers and meddle with his creation. He then spends the rest of the book taking this notion apart pretty effectively, especially any areas that overlap with what science has discovered. Creationism is easily banished by the Evolutionary Biologist, but then again, I don’t know many people who take Creationism seriously.
He also goes into the other sciences, where he is a bit less sure of himself (which The Dawkins Delusion takes him to task for), and tries to do the same thing he did to Creationism. He presents interesting data, but he shows his bias in his interpretation of the data. Although not specific to the individual points raised in The God Delusion, McGrath illustrates this tendency in Dawkins extremely well, using a quote from another of Dawkins’ books. Here’s an excerpt from The Dawkins Delusion:
[Dawkins in another book, The Selfish Gene]:
[Genes] Swarm in huge colonies, safe inside gigantic lumbering robots, sealed off from the outside world, communicating with it by tortuous indirect routes, manipulating it by remote control. They are in you and me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence.
We see here a powerful and influential interpretation of a basic scientific concept. But are these strongly interpretative statements themselves actually scientific?
To appreciate the issue, consider the following rewriting of this paragraph by the celebrated Oxford physiologist and systems biologist Denis Noble. What is proven empirical fact is retained; what is interpretative has been changed, this time offering a somewhat different reading of things.
[Genes] are trapped in huge colonies, locked inside highly intelligent beings, moulded by the outside world, communicating with it by complex processes, through which, blindly, as if by magic, function emerges. They are in you and me; we are the system that allows their code to be read; and their preservation is totally dependent on the joy that we experience in reproducing ourselves. We are the ultimate rationale for their existence.
There’s a lot of this kind of thing in Dawkins’ work, and it’s hard to detect unless you’re paying close attention. McGrath is good at bringing it out.
There are also the polemical parts of Dawkins’ book that are only slightly less annoying than Hitchens as they’re less vitriolic by a few degrees. What makes both of these guys ‘New Atheists’ is the fact that they’re charging into the mainstream with this stuff with all the subtlety of Sarah Palin in a china shop. They’re culture warriors, disturbed by the radical excesses and distortions of certain religious groups and doctrines, as well as the “enabling” of religious moderates and political correctness. They’re polarized, and polarizing, and they seem only really able to see their own points of view. Dawkins sees thing so completely through the warfare model, he calls fellow scientists who are not atheists the “Neville Chamberlain” school of science. He is even quoted as saying that he prefers “an honest fundamentalist” to those who try to reconcile religion with science. It certainly makes sense that he would – a caricature is much easier to defeat than a complex issue.
I should mention that I’m not an atheist, although I’m finding that I have more sympathy with that viewpoint than with that of most religious folk. I agree with these New Atheists that anyone who takes ANY book as literal, perfect, eternal and changeless truth for all (or even some) people at all times, is not substantially different from any other form of lunatic. These people scare me, and I hope they scare you too. However, I don’t think most believers are like that. There’s a huge range and variety to belief, even within a single religion, not to mention the countless believers who have liberated themselves from traditional religions entirely. The real weakness of Dawkins’ book is a superficial understanding of both religious doctrine and religious experience. Essentially, he doesn’t know much about the religions themselves, and really doesn’t seem to understand how it impacts in most people’s lives. He just doesn’t seem to be built that way. I’ve been thinking a lot about why that is, but now’s not the time to go too deeply into it. In a nutshell, it seems to me that some people just have a spiritual drive, and some do not. I think of it like a talent (at least in regards to mysticism), you have it or you don’t. Maybe it’s not much different than artistic ability (and who knows, it may be related), or skill in mathematics and science. As not everyone can appreciate art on the same level, not everyone can appreciate religion. Similarly, not everyone can create art, just as not everyone can create a religion (have direct experiences of God, etc). Similarly, I’m not cut out to be an evolutionary biologist. I think Dawkins is wired to see things a particular way (and it shows when he tries to apply Darwinism to physics), and therefore there is a major blindspot is his views, as do the rest of us. He simply cannot appreciate that religion can be valuable, or sane. I’ll save my thoughts on the value of spirituality for another time. I’m going to have to assume you share my views for now.
We can divide the main thrust of the argument of the New Atheists into two, and I’d like to very briefly touch on each. The first is that science has disproven much of the claims about the physical and mental world made by traditional religions and holy books. I would basically agree with this idea, but I would also point out that people do not hold religious beliefs the way scientists hold theories. Most (I hope) religious folks don’t really take things that literally. Regular people are ruled by common sense primarily, at least in my experience. They may believe in God, but most haven’t read the bible, let alone believe that they were created wholesale from a lump of clay. Similarly, most people are not exactly on the cutting edge of science either. Many people straight up don’t care about what religion or science says, other than what is necessary to fulfill their professional or personal goals. I’d venture that its really about fitting in, rather than weighing evidence. As for those who refute science, I believe the New Atheists are correct that mere respect for that position should not be the default position for a healthy society. Perhaps such ridicule as is heaped by the New Atheists isn’t the way to go either (as it just makes people dig in their heels), but I don’t have a counter-proposal to give.
The second argument is that religions do not make people better, but worse. Dawkins and Hitchens both have extensive (and distorted) chapters attempting to debunk claims that religion makes people more moral. In one of Hitchens’ few insightful statements he writes “…religion has been an enormous multiplier of tribal suspicion and hatred...” (p36) and I can’t help but agree. However, I’d say the same thing about international soccer. The problem, as it seems to me, is not religions exactly, but the tribal, exclusionary, and absolutist tendencies in mankind. The problem is that we are instinctive animals, evolved as Dawkins says to “survive in a world – I shall use the name Middle World – where the objects that mattered to our survival were neither very large nor very small; a world where things either stood still or moved slowly compared with the speed of light…” and a world where other humans were often the main threat. The struggle is to step out of this limited perspective, as science has so often been able to do, and Dawkins and Hitchens both view religion as the main obstacle to this. Certainly it can be, and I’ve argued that religion is inherently conservative for this reason. However, just about any man-made institution can do the same. Just look at Hitchens book, which is just as polarizing as ANY religion. Both try to explain away Stalin’s atheism as an aberration, just like Christians would say of Hitler or the Inquisition. But the problem seems to me not religion, but our own inborn stupidity and our nature as upright primates. Religions are made of people, not doctrines, and people are very often dumb, arrogant, unthinking, bigoted, and irrational. Religious beliefs can help some people become “better” and can be used by others to justify whatever their ape-like brains want. Science can help us become “better”, more secure, more egalitarian, more healthy, but it can also can be used (as it has been) to justify eugenics programs and social Darwinism, which are clear distortions of science, just as fundamentalism can be viewed as a distortion.
In summary, I think Dawkins’ book is insightful, sharp, and informative about certain areas, but greatly weakened by the author’s limited experience of religious life and doctrine. Much of his argument against organized religion was convincing (to me), but he was largely preaching to the choir there. But on the whole, I found it rather good, and I’d recommend it to any independent thinker. If you’re already an atheist, I’d definitely pair it with the next book I’m going to review rather than take it at face value. If you’re a believer you won’t need the latter, but I even more strongly recommend reading the book to challenge yourself.
One last note – the last chapter in The God Delusion reminded me strangely of Robert Anton Wilson. I mean this in the best possible way, and I’m curious to see if anyone agrees with me.
The Dawkins Delusion? Atheist Fundamentalism and the Denial of the Divine by Alister McGrath and Joanna Collicutt McGrath.
I’m going to be extremely quick here, as this is a very short book (118 pages). This is an attempt by some smart believers to tear down Dawkins’ arguments. It definitely pokes some holes and shows where Dawkins’ reasoning is weak, but it has some flaws of its own. The main flaw is the defensiveness of its tone. It kinda feels like the Dawkins hurt the McGraths’ feelings. They do a good job of reining it in, but its still there, like a smell that just won’t go away.
I think this book is a must read by anyone who was convinced by The God Delusion, because it might weaken such premature certainty. It’s also excellent for someone like me who wanted to take the New Atheists seriously, but critically. For believers, it might make you feel better about your faith, but it’s just not necessary. After all, if you’re a believer, we both know you probably weren’t convinced by Dawkins anyway.
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