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The God Delusion

A voice crying in the wilderness

Richard Dawkins
Bantam, 416pp, £20,

Charles Moore

Thursday, 5th October 2006

It is important for Dawkins to deny a real distinction between ‘moderate’ religion and fundamentalist extremism. He needs the cannabis-leads-on-to-heroin argument so beloved of schoolmasters. Yes, there are lots of nice religious moderates, but they set children off on the slippery slope, he says. This reveals his misunderstanding of what he attacks. The difference between moderates and bigots in religion is just as vital as is the difference between liberals and fascists in politics. Moderates (inadequate word, but I haven’t got another) see man’s relationship to his creator differently from fanatics. Their religious belief in man’s sinfulness leads them to humility: how can fallen man, with his partial understanding of everything, kill in the name of God and thus arrogate Godlike powers to himself? The fanatic’s attitude is different not in degree, but in kind: God tells him to kill, he believes, and so he must.

Dawkins appears not to accept this distinction, and it leads him to the most extraordinary omission in his book — the failure to discuss, beyond a couple of perfunctory, derisive mentions, the belief in divine love. Such a belief, which is at the heart of Christianity, does not, in itself, refute atheism. But it does explain the other aspects of faith which Dawkins barely notices — the lives devoted to teaching, medicine, care for the poor, the visiting of prisoners, the abandonment of material things, the creation of beauty, the dying that others might live — which a pathologist inspecting the corpse of religion might see as even more marked than the cruelties inflicted in its name. To ignore it is Hamlet without the prince, or rather, Lear without Cordelia.

Dawkins does treat, briefly, of love. He links human ‘falling in love’ with religion, each being ‘an accidental by-product — a misfiring of something useful’. He is puzzled why the majority of the human race remains unpersuaded by such language. Could it be that this man, so clever, so confident, so scientific, so modern and so liberal, has nevertheless missed something? For all his advocacy of the inquiring mind, this is not a question that seems ever to have occurred to Professor Dawkins.