Dawkins’ God: Genes, Memes, and the Meaning of Life
by Alister McGrath
Blackwell, £45.00 (hb), £9.99 (pb), ISBN 1-4051-2539-X (hb), 1-4051-2538-1 (pb)
McGrath, a theologian and former atheist and researcher in molecular biophysics, argues that some of Dawkins’ attacks on religion are directed against views that do not represent mainstream Christian thought, e.g. the argument from design as expressed by William Paley. However, very similar ideas are alive and well in the form of ‘intelligent design’, and Dawkins could well claim to be attacking this. Similarly, McGrath criticizes Dawkins’ sharp dichotomy between science, as relying on reason and evidence, and religion, as relying on faith. Dawkins regards faith as ‘belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence’.
McGrath considers this an absurd caricature, and quotes instead a Christian definition in which faith ‘commences with the conviction of the mind based on adequate evidence’. But the Catholic Encyclopaedia, surely authoritative, states ‘there is a twofold order of knowledge…in one we know by natural reason, the object of the other is mysteries hidden in God, but which we have to believe and which can only be known to us by Divine revelation’.
One might add that McGrath, an ordained Anglican priest, must believe that 2000 years ago God impregnated a virgin in an obscure Middle Eastern village, whose offspring died, was buried, came back to life, and ascended into Heaven. The only evidence for this is a story written down, in different versions, many years later, for which there is absolutely no corroboration. All this looks to me much more like Dawkins’ version of faith than McGrath’s.
The strongest part is an attack on Dawkins’ concept of ‘memes’. I think McGrath is right in saying that these are really no more than an analogy. I also think McGrath has shown that Dawkins too often over-eggs his pudding, and sometimes offers polemic rather than informed argument. Religion, and even Christianity, are such complex phenomena that they cannot be dismissed in the way Dawkins sometimes seems to do.
John Radford
