Fiercely faithless

THE GOD DELUSION

By Richard Dawkins

Published by Bantam Press, Transworld Publishers

Available at Bookazine (Bt795) and Asia Books (Bt750)

Reviewed by William Page

Special to The Nation

Readers who believe in God will find this book remarkably conducive to the circulation of the blood. Those with high blood pressure are advised to avoid it. 

Richard Dawkins is a professor at Oxford, the author of nine books, a renowned evolutionary biologist, a champion of scientific thinking, one of the three top intellectuals in the world (according to a recent poll) and an atheist.         

This cornucopia of qualifications promises us a robust read as he "focuses his fierce intellect" (I'm quoting the back cover) on "the irrationality of belief in God".

His intellect is indeed fierce and his assault on the citadel of religion lights up the night sky like fireworks on New Year's Eve. 

Lovers of feisty polemics will appreciate passages like this: "The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully."

Oh, and he's also a "psychotic delinquent".

Whew. "Fierce intellect" is putting it mildly. To his credit, Dawkins admits that "it is unfair to attack such an easy target. The God Hypothesis should not stand or fall with its most unlovely instantiation, Yahweh". 

Also to his credit, Dawkins defines his terms clearly. He is attacking what he calls the God Hypothesis: The belief that "there exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it".  

To this hypothesis he opposes his thesis: that "any creative intelligence, of sufficient complexity to design anything, comes into existence only as an end product of an extended process of gradual evolution. Creative intelligences, being evolved, necessarily arrive late in the universe, and therefore cannot be responsible for designing it.  God, in the sense defined, is a delusion".

This sounds convincing, but it ignores other possibilities. What if a powerful creative intelligence evolved during the course of an earlier universe, then survived the destruction of that universe to condition the formation of our own? What if such an intelligence evolved in another dimension, then burst into our dimension to create our universe? And consider the spider: It spins a web out of its own body, then enters the web and nests in it. The microbes that evolve to live in the strands of the web would deny the existence of the spider if they were able, because, being only microbes, they can neither perceive nor imagine it.

Such scenarios may sound like something scripted by Steven Spielberg, but they're not beyond the range of possibility.

The weakness of Dawkins' thesis is its narrowness. The universe, to put it mildly, is a very big place. Isn't it possible that somewhere, out amid all that vastness, or maybe even in another dimension, there might be creative intelligences that are far different from our own? 

This is not a proposition you'd want to bet the farm on. But to make grand and sweeping generalisations about the entire universe from what little we know about the microscopic corner we live in seems to me just a tad premature.     

 In 406 pages, Dawkins covers a lot of territory. Lest we should misunderstand him, he is quick to clarify: "I am attacking God, all gods, anything and everything supernatural." While reserving his most entertaining invective for the God of the Bible, he also takes on monotheism in general, polytheism, deism, pantheism and even agnosticism. 

What's wrong with agnosticism? Well, agnostics say we don't have enough evidence to prove whether God exists or not. Dawkins admits that it's impossible to prove the non-existence of any given entity. But we can estimate its probability. And given the evidence we currently have at hand, Dawkins thinks it's a pretty sure bet that God does not exist. The fact that the evidence we have at hand is drawn from one small corner of the universe does not deter him.

All of this is very bracing. Dawkins is witty, urbane, verbose, admittedly self-indulgent, prone to go off at tangents, and very much full of himself.  You'd be, too, if you were one of the world's top three intellectuals. He's fond of snappy phrases (the "Ultimate Boeing 747", the "Great Beethoven Fallacy", the "God of the Gaps", the "Mother of All Burkas"), but some of his witticisms fall a bit short (intelligent design is "creationism in a cheap tuxedo"). 

None of this vitiates the vigour of his arguments. He demolishes the classical arguments for the existence of God, skewers the claim that religious phenomena are beyond the purview of science, dismisses visions as hallucinations born of deeply felt needs, trashes the Bible (chapter seven), and castigates the crimes committed by religion (chapter eight), especially against children (chapter nine). All of this will have fundamentalists reaching for their shotguns.  

Dawkins is writing from a Western perspective, so his assault is directed primarily against the Christian worldview. Those of us who are even slightly familiar with eastern religions may find it a source of regret (or maybe gratitude!) that he does not focus his fierce intellect on some of the more subtle concepts of the eastern faiths. 

He dismisses Hinduism in a single paragraph, reduces Buddhism to a footnote and has nothing at all to say about Taoism. With all the vast literature we have on these religions, it's disappointing that Dawkins treats them in such a cavalier manner.

In fairness, though, the eastern religions constitute a vast topic of their own, well beyond the scope of this book, which is big enough already. It would be educational for all concerned if Dawkins were to focus his fierce intellect on them in his next book. This one is recommended to all who love a good theological slugfest.

William Page is the author of "The Nirvana Experiments and Other Tales of Asia", published by White Lotus. 

God: Harmful and Irrational?

 

Dawkins attacks God as harmful and irrational in his book "The God Delusion",  one of the bestselling titles in town for weeks. Readers can now post their views on his book at Dawkins' weblog: http://richarddawkins.net/