The Richard Dawkins of The God Delusion is arguably the most unpleasant author in all of Darwinian scientific literature: intellectually superior and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving hatemonger; an angry, totalitarian elitist; a scolding, christophobic, classist, culture-killing, history-revising, misinformed, dis-informing, preening, self-congratulatory, pompous bully.
That, in a nutshell, is my evaluation of the persona of the narrator - Richard Dawkins - in The God Delusion. Can a Christian learn from such a hostile voice? Can the acclaimed author, the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, the most prolific and powerful proponent of atheism in our day, be used by God to teach and chastise? God can make even an atheist’s rant into a song for his glory, and he has done so with Dawkins’s bestseller.
I found reading The God Delusion to be an experience that was offensive but also instructive, corrosive yet corrective and ultimately fruitful. And I believe any thinking Christian would profit from the exercise of working through Dawkins’s many arguments for atheism and objections to biblical faith.
Richard Dawkins is part of a company of visible and volatile atheists, the so-called “Four Horsemen,” whose coincidental attack on religion (predominantly American Christianity) was recently concentrated in a series of books released in 2006-2007. The God Delusion has been the most read, with over 1.5 million copies sold. God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens, Breaking the Spell by Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris’s Letter to a Christian Nation square the unholy quartet.
Dawkins’s principle argument (Ch 4 in the most popular American paperback edition - “Why There Almost Certainly Is No God”) rests on an unstated premise – a worldview pre-supposition of naturalism. I tried to take it apart and critique it in a talk recently given to my class in Christian Thinking at Cornerstone Church. The mp3 audio and companion handout are available in the “Bill’s Audio Teaching” section of this blog. Because the quality of the recording was nearly un-recoverable, you may want to download it and tweak it on your own player. If I get a better recording, I’ll switch it out right away. I’ll also try to clean up the transcript and post it, for those who prefer to read.
The best single source for a Christian perspective and critique of Dawkins’s book
is The Dawkins Delusion by Alister McGrath. McGrath is an Oxford professor of historical theology and also holds a doctorate in molecular biology. He wrote with his wife, Joanna, who is a lecturer in the psychology of religion at the University of London. While many readers may not have the energy or interest to read The God Delusion on their own and instead opt for reading the McGrath’s book or some similar critique, there will be others who should take the challenge of listening to Dawkins not only as the sneering anti-religionist, but also as one whose misunderstandings and misgivings give Christian thinkers a foil for re-examining some important issues of faith and witness.
We’ve all become familiar with the grand “evolution vs. creation” debate in its many forms, gumming up the works from Parliament to U.S. public schools. Many of us who hold a view we believe to be consistent with the Bible find Darwinian models of evolution unacceptable, yet we hardly know why, much less how to dialogue with their proponents and defend a different view. My point in the talk is that one need not be a research biologist or astrophysicist to see the faults in Dawkins’s main thesis. Simple principles of analysis and reasoning reveal that Dawkins often speaks with more passion than precision in The God Delusion. Still, at his best, the significantly gifted professor enlightens his students, even those who wouldn’t want to be enrolled in the course.
The result is that those Christian readers who can critically interact with The God Delusion will find that some of the stances we have taken to defend our supernatural worldview and our faith in the God who stands behind it are not always strong ones. Instead, we have often demonized our opponents and sought to overpower them politically intellectually, that we might control the cultural battlefield.
I found reading The God Delusion to be an experience that was offensive but also instructive, corrosive yet corrective and ultimately fruitful. And I believe any thinking Christian would profit from the exercise of working through Dawkins’s many arguments for atheism and objections to biblical faith.
Richard Dawkins is part of a company of visible and volatile atheists, the so-called “Four Horsemen,” whose coincidental attack on religion (predominantly American Christianity) was recently concentrated in a series of books released in 2006-2007. The God Delusion has been the most read, with over 1.5 million copies sold. God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens, Breaking the Spell by Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris’s Letter to a Christian Nation square the unholy quartet.
Dawkins’s principle argument (Ch 4 in the most popular American paperback edition - “Why There Almost Certainly Is No God”) rests on an unstated premise – a worldview pre-supposition of naturalism. I tried to take it apart and critique it in a talk recently given to my class in Christian Thinking at Cornerstone Church. The mp3 audio and companion handout are available in the “Bill’s Audio Teaching” section of this blog. Because the quality of the recording was nearly un-recoverable, you may want to download it and tweak it on your own player. If I get a better recording, I’ll switch it out right away. I’ll also try to clean up the transcript and post it, for those who prefer to read.
The best single source for a Christian perspective and critique of Dawkins’s book
is The Dawkins Delusion by Alister McGrath. McGrath is an Oxford professor of historical theology and also holds a doctorate in molecular biology. He wrote with his wife, Joanna, who is a lecturer in the psychology of religion at the University of London. While many readers may not have the energy or interest to read The God Delusion on their own and instead opt for reading the McGrath’s book or some similar critique, there will be others who should take the challenge of listening to Dawkins not only as the sneering anti-religionist, but also as one whose misunderstandings and misgivings give Christian thinkers a foil for re-examining some important issues of faith and witness.We’ve all become familiar with the grand “evolution vs. creation” debate in its many forms, gumming up the works from Parliament to U.S. public schools. Many of us who hold a view we believe to be consistent with the Bible find Darwinian models of evolution unacceptable, yet we hardly know why, much less how to dialogue with their proponents and defend a different view. My point in the talk is that one need not be a research biologist or astrophysicist to see the faults in Dawkins’s main thesis. Simple principles of analysis and reasoning reveal that Dawkins often speaks with more passion than precision in The God Delusion. Still, at his best, the significantly gifted professor enlightens his students, even those who wouldn’t want to be enrolled in the course.
The result is that those Christian readers who can critically interact with The God Delusion will find that some of the stances we have taken to defend our supernatural worldview and our faith in the God who stands behind it are not always strong ones. Instead, we have often demonized our opponents and sought to overpower them politically intellectually, that we might control the cultural battlefield.
Dawkins cannot be easily overpowered. But for that very reason, wrestling with the arguments he presents, if we are strong enough in our understanding of Christian faith and worldview, can only make us stronger and more honest, weaker in ourselves but stronger in faith and dependence on Christ. The exercise will, I trust, yield a more effective witness to the very voices whose stridency drowns out the same human heart-cry we all carry about in this broken world – the cry to be known by One whose knowing means salvation and eternal life.
