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Monday 1 December 2008

The God Delusion

A voice crying in the wilderness

Similarly, the story of the Fall of Man excites Dawkins’s contempt because he thinks the punishment of Adam and Eve incredibly ‘vindictive’ for the minor offence of what he calls ‘scrumping’. That wasn’t the offence: it was disobedience of the one prohibition God had given them, the eating of the fruit which bestowed the knowledge of good and evil that would lead to death. Dawkins should acknowledge the internal logic of what he does not believe. If the tree guaranteed all life, then the intrusion of death by man’s wilfulness was indeed the ultimate wrong.

It is interesting, however, that Dawkins’s devotion to Darwin’s theory of natural selection produces in him a simulacrum of religious belief. He describes the pity we feel for the unfortunate and the desire we feel for members of the opposite sex even when we cannot have children with them as ‘misfirings, Darwinian mistakes: blessed, precious mistakes’. This is the Dawkins version of the ‘felix culpa’ of Adam and Eve, ‘felix’ because it led to Christ’s incarnation as a man, and to his saving death and resurrection.

And what Darwin called the ‘daily and hourly scrutinising’ carried out always and everywhere by natural selection ‘working … at the improvement of each organic being’ is expressed just as absolutely, and just as much in terms of intention (though Dawkins denies this), as is any statement about the purposes of the all-seeing God. Darwin was a very great man, but Darwinism can turn into a Victorian faith as dated as the Clapham Sect.

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