Product Description

Alister E. McGrath is one of the world’s leading theologians, with a doctorate in the sciences. Richard Dawkins is one of the bestselling popular science writers, with outspoken and controversial views on religion. This fascinating and provoking work is the first book–length response to Dawkins’ ideas, and offers an ideal introduction to the topical issues of science and religion.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #42318 in Books
• Published on: 2004-10-18
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

Review
"In Dawkins′ God, McGrath has written a brilliant book, and it is difficult to think that the exposition of Dawkins′ writings and their religious implications, will ever be better stated, explored and criticised... at once dispassionate, robust and readable." Richard Harries, Times Higher Education Supplement

"Alister McGrath′s book Dawkins′ God: Genes, Memes and the Meaning of Life does a fair and sophisticated job of summarising my position." Richard Dawkins, Times Higher Education Supplement

"Dawkins is disposed of with panache, and with McGrath′s ususal clarity and conciseness." Theology

"Lucid and brief, without being perfunctory or dismissive, and fulfils the role of guide to the educated layperson without eliciting boredom from the academic familiar with the field ... The end result of this effort by McGrath is that, once again, I would have no hesitation in recommending the book as a basic text for A–level or first–year undergraduate students looking for their appetite to be whetted for a number of connected fields of scholarship, or indeed for the ′educated layperson′ seeking a grasp of the issues without having to wade through hundreds of pages of science and theology ... A very finely judged piece of writing." Kaleidoscope

"With clear and incisive argumentation, McGrath takes Dawkins on and exposes many of the weaknesses in his case for atheism." Reformed Theological Journal

"Wielding evolutionary arguments and carefully chosen metaphors like sharp swords, Richard Dawkins has emerged over three decades as this generation′s most aggressive promoter of atheism. In his view, science, and science alone, provides the only rock worth standing on. In this remarkable book, Alister McGrath challenges Dawkins on the very ground he holds most sacred – rational argument – and McGrath disarms the master. It becomes readily apparent that Dawkins has aimed his attack at a naive version of faith that most serious believers would not recognize. After reading this carefully constructed and eloquently written book, Dawkins′ choice of atheism emerges as the most irrational of the available choices about God′s existence."
Francis Collins, Director of the Human Genome Project

“In this tour–de–force Alister McGrath approaches the edifice of self–confident, breezy atheism so effectively promoted by Richard Dawkins, and by deft dissection and argument reveals the shallowness, special–pleading and inconsistencies of his world–picture. Here is a book which helps to rejoin the magnificence of science to the magnificence of God’s good Creation.”
Simon Conway Morris, Professor of Evolutionary Palaeobiology, Cambridge University

“This is a wonderful book. One of the world’s leading Christian contributors to the science/religion dialogue takes on Richard Dawkins, Darwinism’s arch–atheist, and wrestles him to the ground! This is scholarship as it should be – informed, feisty, and terrific fun. I cannot wait to see Dawkins’s review of Alister McGrath’s critique.”
Michael Ruse, Lucyle T. Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy, Florida State University

“A timely and accessible contribution to the debate over Richard Dawkins’s cosmology which exposes philosophical naivety, the abuse of metaphor, and sheer bluster, left, right and centre. Here Alister McGrath announces what every Darwinian Fundamentalist needs to hear: that science is and always has been a cultural practice that is provisional, fallible, and socially shaped – an enterprise to be cultivated and fostered, but hardly worshipped or idolised. A devastating critique.”
David N. Livingstone, Professor of Geography and Intellectual History, Queen’s University, Belfast

“Alister McGrath critically examines the places where Richard Dawkins’ well–established biological science changes into the speculations which undergird Dawkins’ own anti–religious faith. In his appreciative examination and ruthless analysis of Dawkins writings and the polemics associated with them, McGrath has done a marvellous apologetic job, as well as providing a particular service for those daunted by scientific authoritarianism. We are all in his debt for rigorously identifying and exposing the weaknesses of some of the commonly used arguments against the Christian faith.”
R. J. Berry, formerly Professor of Genetics, University College, London and President of the Linnean Society

“Alister McGrath subjects the atheistic world–view of Richard Dawkins to critical analysis and finds it severely lacking in intellectual rigour. As a former atheist himself, and a biochemist turned theologian and philosopher, the author is well placed to appreciate Dawkins’ well–deserved reputation as a populariser of evolutionary theory, but equally well qualified to assess his stratagem of using a biological theory for ideological purposes. This book is essential reading for those interested in the traffic of ideas between science, philosophy and religion.”
Dr Denis Alexander, Chairman, Molecular Immunology Programme, The Babraham Institute and Fellow of St. Edmund’s College, Cambridge

Michael Ruse, Lucyle T. Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy, Florida State University
"Informed, feisty, and terrific fun. I cannot wait to see Dawkins’s review of Alister McGrath’s critique."

David N. Livingstone, Professor of Geography and Intellectual History, Queen’s University, Belfast
"A timely and accessible contribution to the debate over Richard Dawkins’s cosmology … A devastating critique."

Customer Reviews

Insightful analysis that could be better
Reading many of the other reviews of this book, it's pretty clear that most had their minds made up before they ever opened it. I don't recognize in many of the hostile reviews the book that I read. This probably shows that both Dawkins and McGrath are inevitably preaching to the choir, to use a religious metaphor - that Dawkins (writing about religion) will persuade many zealous atheists, despite the (sometimes almost unbelievable!) superficiality of his analysis, and that McGrath will persuade many devout Christians, despite the circularity of some of his arguments.
So, having said all that, Dawkins' God is a lucidly written book, which homes in relentlessly on the weaknesses in Dawkins' treatment of religion - it's strength is that it covers a wide range of Dawkins' writings (rather than just book - a number of Amazon reviewers seem to have missed this, terming Dawkins' God a rebuttal of The God Delusion - read the footnotes!). Its weaknesses are threefold, I think.
First is that at times McGrath on Dawkins is guilty of the same sin as Dawkins on religion - he asserts without sufficient evidence. Yes, this is a short book, for general readers, but some more substantiation is needed of claims about the nature of faith. McGrath is doubtless right that many university-based theologians don't treat faith as simplistic, which is one of Dawkins' major arguments, and very annoying to the many Christians who do blend faith and reason. But there are also many religious people who DO have a very simple faith - and in fact many Christians, at any rate, are proud of that, and actively try to promote simple and simplistic faith, rejecting any use of reason or science. McGrath's characterization of the nature of Christian is not substantiated, in effect he says "It's so because I say it's so" - and thus he fails to acknowledge the complexity and nuances of the nature of religious faith is more complex. (Dawkins is, of course, exactly the same!)
The second weakness is that the writing, though lucid and attractive, is sometimes disorganised. The structure and transitions from one section to the next don't always make sense. This is not always the case and even when present it sometimes is only an irritation, but at times it's a serious weakness.
The chapter on the 'battle between science and religion' is an example - McGrath keeps asserting that in fact the idea that science and religion have always been in conflict is wrong - but he doesn't really substantiate that in his text (I'll come back to that in a minute) and just keeps repeating it, writing around and around in a circle. To be fair to McGrath, his notes cite a series of works on the history of the relationship between science and religion which do support his view - but he doesn't summarize their arguments very well, so that there is no evidence in the text - and there really needs to be, it can't all be left to reading a dozen monographs or articles.
Third, at times McGrath descends into petty points scoring. Again, it isn't frequent, but I think it happens more as the book advances, and while Dawkins is actually much nastier, personally, about people of faith than McGrath is about Dawkins, it still isn't to McGrath's credit. When the arguments become ad hominem, too, it is likely to make a reader doubt the argument.
Nevertheless, much of the book is a detailed and insightful dissection of Dawkins' writings, which superbly brings out that Dawkins is a superb writer with a gift for a brilliant turn of phrase, but that he completely loses his detachment when dealing with religion, in response to which tends to assemble a series of weak, even inane, arguments that have been around forever, and advances them as though they are somehow new, brilliant insights. However, the occasional circularity of some of McGrath's own arguments and a slight tendency to assume, rather than demonstrate, the accuracy of some of his assertions, mean that some of Dawkins' criticisms of religion are unanswered. This is insightful, and exposes the superficiality of much of Dawkins' writing on religion - but it is not the comprehensive critique of Dawkins that the book's publicity claims it to be.

Dawkins, Darwin, and and some muddled sources
This book it is a prolonged attack on Dawkins and, indirectly through him, on Darwin. Nothing new in that. What did surprise me, however, was the selective way McGarth, an Oxford academic, treated his quoted sources, frequently dropping parts of them which do not support his argument. Another ploy is to constantly reiterate throughout the book that atheism is a sort of childish delusion, an adolescent phase intelligent people like McGarth grow out of.

McGrath says that "Darwin's 'Origin of Species' and later writings must be seen as a nineteenth-century refutation of of an early eighteenth-century idea [Paley's] - an idea already rejected by leading Christian writers of the age. He offers no evidence why they 'must' be seen in this light; far from being simply `an early eighteenth-century idea', Paley's `Natural Theology' wasn't published until 1802. Darwin was a prodigious letter writer, over 13,700 have survived, but in only one letter (Cambridge reference No. 2,532), dated 15 November 1859, did Darwin mention Paley. Hardly the actions of a man obsessed with him. The reason why a few Christian theologians dropped Paley's approach was that Natural Theology was eventually seen as counter-productive in promoting Christian dogma, having nothing to say about Christ and his miracles. Paley's `watchmaker' argument logically led to theism, little better than atheism in the eyes of some 19th century theologians. McGarth fails to say that Newman, and every other theologian, in all other respects was in full agreement with Paley and with his `demonstration' that man and the universe had been created by God.

But there are further distortions and half-truths in this book. We are told that Augustine of Hippo "stressed the importance of respecting the conclusions of the sciences in relation to biblical exegesis", but not a word is said about Augustine's authoritative dictum regarding science that "Nothing is to be accepted save on the authority of Scripture, since greater is that authority than all the powers of the human mind", a stern pronouncement which set scientific enquiry back by centuries.

McGrath says that, "On the rare occasion when [Dawkins] cites classic theologians, he tends to do so at second hand, often with alarming results. ... Dawkins [he continues] singles out the early Christian writer Tertullian for particular acerbic comment, on account of two quotations from his writings: 'it is certain because it is impossible' and 'it is by all means to be believed because it is absurd'. McGrath tells us that Tertullian never wrote the words. It is, he tells us, a misattribution and from this concludes "So at least we can reasonably assume that Dawkins has not read Tertullian himself, but has taken this citation from an unreliable secondary source". Quite, this is a translation. The `unreliable secondary source' used by Dawkins is the Oehler text, the standard Victorian critical edition of the Ante-Nicene Fathers, a highly respected work of Christian theology still in print.

He then tries to justify Tertullian's absurd reasoning by telling us it was all probably meant as a joke. We are told, in terms, that the joke was not detected for several hundred years until it was happily discovered by James Moffat in 1916. But Moffat says only that "The odd thing is, however, that consciously or unconsciously he [Tertullian] was following in the footsteps of that cool philosopher Aristotle." From this, McGrath draws the conclusion that "it was probably meant as a rhetorical joke, for those who knew their Aristotle". But nowhere does Moffatt even tentatively suggest it was a joke. McGrath should know that the very last thing Tertullian, or any of the early Church Fathers, would do is crack jokes while discussing the mystical body of Christ. McGrath concludes his discussion on Tertullian with "Dawkins' views on the nature of faith are best regarded as an embarrassment to anyone concerned with scholarly accuracy". Scholarly accuracy? McGrath gives the source of the quotation as "Tertullian, de paenitentia (sic, for `poenitentia', a repeated McGrath misspelling), v, 4"; but do not waste time looking for it there - it is in another work and place, Tertullian, de carne Christi, v, 25. An astonishing misattribution, especially when berating another academic for faulty scholarship.

McGrath may hold a PhD in molecular biology, but his grasp of physics is startlingly limited. He seems to believe, for he repeats it several times, that the discovery that light did not consist purely of waves was made in the 1920s. He also implies that the wave theory of light was then dropped. Neither of these assertions is true. Light is still defined as electromagnetic waves in the visible spectrum. McGraw also seems to think that 'big bang' cosmology dates back to 1920 - even the expression wasn't used before 1950. Again and again McGrath hammers away at the notion that scientific theories are not to be trusted. He says " History simply makes fools of those who argue that every aspect of the current theoretical situation is true for all time." But no scientist has ever claimed this, Dawkins certainly hasn't.

As for God, we are given a long lecture on what McGrath claims is the illogicality of Dawkins' position and attributes to Dawkins the mistake of believing that 'since A hasn't been proven, A is false'. There is no proof that either the god Mars nor the goddess Venus exists or ever existed, although there is ample proof that for over 2,000 years to around 500 AD they had many sincere believers. As the Roman poet Horace said 'Caelo tonantem credidimus Jovem regnare' (The sound of thunder is evidence for our belief that Jove reigns in Heaven), a belief which made sense before the true cause of thunderstorms was known, but according to McGrath we should simply suspend our judgement on Jove's existence, since we cannot disprove nor prove it.

For me, the one good thing about this book is that it might lead curious and fair-minded readers to Richard Dawkins' work.

The best of Christian Apology - and still feeble beyond belief
Alistair McGrath wrote this before Richard Dawkins brought out "The God Delusion", and it will be interesting to see later revisions because Dawkins answers many of his points. However, The God Delusion is, for the most part, a more thorough articulation of points Dawkins has made in various other forums, so McGrath's book remains mostly relevant.

I recommend this book, it is, with momentary exceptions, an enjoyable read, and a good introduction to the wonderful world of modern liberal Protestant theology. The language is accessible except where McGrath is forced to descend into the obscurantist world of theo-babble. McGrath's arguments against Dawkins are about as sophisticated as they get. And therefore it is extremely interesting how totally unsatisfactory, in fact rather pathetic, they are.

McGrath starts with a precis of the mechanism of Darwinian evolution, and of Richard Dawkins' work that is correctly described by Dawkins himself as admirable. He has criticisms of Dawkins' sometimes confrontational approach that is, to some extent, justified. His criticism of Dawkins' idea of 'memes' is understandable. But you may already be seeing where the problem is; while his arguments are without doubt more sophisticated, the actual points being made are just the same as everyone trots out whenever they're criticising Dawkins: he is arrogant, his meme theory is flawed, he is claiming authority beyond his qualifications, and his characterisation of religion is a flimsy strawman. None of these really address the arguments made and are distinctly unsatisfying.

The claim of authority, for instance, presupposes that there is a qualification one must obtain before one can legitimately comment on religion. Dawkins' own response is probably best: "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?" (Science&Theology News). Dawkins doesn't need to study astrology to know that the suggestion that the motion of heavenly bodies millions of miles away affects the details of our lives is absurd.

McGrath continually expresses annoyance at Dawkins' failure to find out what the current status of sophisticated theological belief is. He gets really worked up at Dawkins' clear characterisation of religious faith as 'belief without evidence'. He claims that theologians haven't had that view of faith in over a century, and proceeds to give a definition of faith so obscure and convoluted it is hard to believe that he was able to write it with a straight face. Basically, McGrath thinks that Dawkins should be waging a battle in the lofty halls of theological academia. But he isn't, of course. He is engaged against the beliefs of the average person, and the average person has beliefs that are clearly a world apart from those of McGrath and his colleagues. One is forced to wonder whether McGrath ever asked a typical christian whether they think you need evidence to have faith, before writing this book. It is perfectly obvious to anyone who spends time with real christians unlike, apparently, McGrath, that faith really is, as St Paul said, "the promise of things wished for, the hope of things unseen", and that strong assent to some religious proposition in the absence of evidence is indeed seen as a virtue, which is what Dawkins so objects to.

In actual favour of his own beliefs McGrath presents almost nothing. Basically, nothing Dawkins has said proves god doesn't exist (another mischaracterisation, since Dawkins never claims it does). Dawkins' own response would be to make the same argument about other superstitions, but this isn't the forum for debate. Suffice it to say, McGrath engagingly presents to us the entirety of the vapidity of christian apologetics: "God works in mysterious ways, way too mysterious for you to understand without decades of study so just shut up and take my word for it, ok? Everything is fine, nothing to see here." This is telling stuff and anyone who wants to have their religious beliefs justified should read this book to realise why there's no point.

My only real complaint about this book (in terms of the reading enjoyment) is that McGrath is a bit schizophrenic. Most of the time he is respectful of Dawkins' viewpoint and applauding him for kicking off a robust debate, but occasionally he'll just fly off the wall and start calling Dawkins names. It would appear that this corresponds with the weakest parts of his arguments. So he is positively foaming at the mouth over Dawkins' definition of religious faith; I think he is less upset at Dawkins' definition and more that the common believer really does have the unsophisticated beliefs that McGrath derides. If only they knew what I knew, he seems to be screaming, they would be immune to Dawkins' arguments! This invective is somewhat offputting.

Otherwise I recommend this book, particularly to Dawkins fans who want to see just why Dawkins' religious opinions are so solidly unanswerable.