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The God Delusion

A voice crying in the wilderness

Richard Dawkins
Bantam, 416pp, £20,

Charles Moore

Thursday, 5th October 2006

As the more zealous evangelicals sometimes take refuge in statistics — ‘Last year, 13,732 people in the State of Oklahoma were healed of cancer by accepting Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Saviour’ — so does Dawkins. He tells us that scientists used to be religious in the old days because of ‘social and judicial pressure’ (without seeing that this, if true, might make us as sceptical of claims of absolute truth made by scientists as of those made by theologians), and then goes on to tell us about a recent survey of the religious opinions of 1,074 Fellows of the Royal Society. Only 3.3 per cent of these ‘agreed strongly with the statement that a personal god exists … while 78.8 per cent strongly disagreed’. He is not far off the argument that 846.312 Fellows of the Royal Society can’t be wrong.

Just think, shouts Pastor Dawkins, if the world had no religion, the Twin Towers would still be standing! True, perhaps, but this architectural point seems a particularly odd place to start (it appears on the first page of his book), since without religion there would also be no Dome of the Rock, St Paul’s Cathedral, Parthenon or Pyramids. He rightly assails the Taleban for blowing up the Bamiyan statues, but does not consider the fact that those statues were themselves religious.

Without belief in God, saith the atheist preacher, there would have been ‘no Crusades, no witch-hunts, no Gunpowder Plot, no Indian Partition’, no Northern Ireland Troubles, ‘no flogging of female skin for the crime of showing an inch of it’ neither. But the same assault could be made on science — without it, there would be no napalm, no atom bomb, no global warming, no asbestosis, no car crashes, no BSE, no internet pornography and no gas chambers. These statements may be true so far as they go, in both cases, but as arguments against God or against science they are utterly unfair.

There are many things in this entertaining book which should certainly give religious people pause. Dawkins makes powerful attacks on the shiftiness of many religious apologists, and gives good examples of the sheer absurdity of some deference to religious belief. Did you know, for instance, that in the United States the Reverend Green in Cluedo has been renamed ‘Mr Green’? His points about the abuse of power by religious leaders are not new, but that does not make them less telling.

Because Dawkins is an evangelical, however, he never does his opponents the justice of taking their position seriously. Just as the televangelist takes disagreement as showing sin, so Dawkins, as his book’s title states, speaks of belief in God as a ‘delusion’. This may be an appropriate word for those who died in the Jonestown massacre, but it simply does not tell you anything worth knowing about John Henry Newman, or George Herbert, or Thomas Aquinas.