In Defense of Religious Faith: The Dawkins Delusion, by Alister and Joanna McGrath

The Dawkins Delusion, written in the main by Alister McGrath a leading Christian theologian, one time atheist and eminent scientist, is in reply to The God Delusion, a volume by the renowned scientist Richard Dawkins who states:

If this book works as I intend, religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put it down.

In order to respond to Dawkins' critique of faith, McGrath answers the charge that God is a delusion, faith is intellectual nonsense, and Christianity is simply a force for evil, and begins by stating that it is highly significant that Dawkins thought it necessary to write such a book at all, for wasn't religion meant to have disappeared many years ago? However, despite a widespread belief that religion would decline, McGrath points out that religion has made a comeback worldwide and with a high percentage of the American population believing in God.

Faith is a delusion, says Dawkins, it is not grounded in evidence and it flies in the face of evidence. It is something that should have disappeared when we reached maturity, like belief in the Tooth Fairy or Santa Claus. And isn't the indoctrination of children with a belief in God just the same, isn't it a corruption of innocent minds and sustaining religious belief when it should have been wiped out ages ago? Isn't it a form of child abuse at a time when children lack the discriminatory ability to evaluate ideas?

Not so, says McGrath, the analogy is flawed. How many people believe in Santa Claus in adulthood? Many people discover God when they are older. Do they see this as a form of regression? And wouldn't the secularists enforce their own dogmas that science had disproved religion, as in the education of Soviet children in the 1950's? Is it only abusive to impose religious, but not anti-religious, dogmas and delusions?

Dawkins returns to a familiar theme. Who made God? Who designed the designer? But when searching for an answer to this question, says McGrath, it needs to be said that the natural sciences is also a quest for a theory that can explain everything and needs no explanation of itself. So who explains the explainer?

Maybe there is no ultimate theory. Even if the theory of everything turns out to be the theory of nothing, should we give up the quest because it represents the end of the search? It is this search which provides the motivation for all scientific quests, says McGrath.

Dawkins then points out the sheer improbability of our existence and that a belief in God represents belief in a being whose existence must be even more complex - and therefore more improbable. But why is something complex improbable? What has a complex theory of everything to do with improbability? One highly improbably fact is that that we are here, and there are many improbable things, but the fact that they are improbable does not entail their non-existence. So we must not ask whether God is probable, but whether God is actual.

Religion, in an attempt to come to terms with new scientific discoveries in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, came up with the idea that there were gaps in this knowledge and therefore God would be found in the gaps. Why return to something that has been discredited so many years earlier, says McGrath, and there is nothing wrong in admitting limits in our understanding.

Throughout the God Delusion, there is the belief that science has disproved God, and for a thinking person, atheism is the only option. But the natural sciences depend upon inductive thinking, which is not proof, and many different explanations are used to understand the world, from quantum mechanics to the ultimate meaning of life. Many scientists believe that the great questions of life cannot be answered with certainty and therefore remain unanswered. There is no scientific proof and we must answer them on grounds other than science.

That won't do, says Dawkins, science is a reliable tool that has no limits, and if we don't have all the answers at the moment, we shall in the future, and he's sees the question of whether science has limits as improper. No, you can't leave it there, says McGrath, your science still hasn't answered many important questions, such as the purpose to nature. It is not a nonsensical question, it is simple beyond the scope of science.

It was Sir Peter Medawar, who won the Nobel Prize for medicine in his publication The Limits of Science, who explored the question of how science was limited by the nature of reality. In his work, he states that there are no limits to scientific exploration in the organization and structure of the material universe, but the transcendent questions are best left to religion and metaphysics:

There is indeed a limit upon science is made very likely by the existence questions

that science cannot answer, and that no conceivable advance in science would

empower it to answer....I have in mind such questions as:

How did everything begin?

What are we all here for?

What is the point of living?

Finally, McGrath returns to something that he touched upon at the beginning of his book, for he sees in Dawkin's writing something deeper than anger at the refusal of God to go away. He sees an anxiety that it is atheism itself that is at stake. Is the unexpected resurgence of religion leading him to ask the question that maybe atheism itself is fatally flawed as a world view? Is he worried about the future of atheism, and is it this worry that has led him to express his views in a dogmatic and fundamental style? Relying on rhetoric rather than evidence indicates to McGrath that something is wrong. And he concludes with this thought:

Might atheism be a delusion about God?

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Publisher: S.P.C.K.

First publication: Great Britain, 2007.

ISBN 978-0-281-05927-0