REVIEW: The Dawkins Delusion? - Alister McGrath and Joanna Collicut McGrath.

At just 66 pages, The Dawkins Delusion? was an obvious choice for my first read of 2024 - short enough to illicit a sense of satisfaction at rattling through a book in double time, yet packed with enough nuggets of information and compelling arguments to satisfy a curious reader. Given the commercial success of Dawkins' 2006 book The God Delusion, which has sold over 3 million copies, an adequate response was necessary, and there have been many, from esteemed apologists and philosophers such as Richard Swinburne, Alvin Plantinga, and William Lane Craig. Alister McGrath finds himself in good company with this very compelling rebuttal of Dawkins' atheist fundamentalism. 

Firstly, I was impressed and encouraged by the approach of the book itself - McGrath is careful not to mirror Dawkins' combative and inflammatory style, offering as much credit to Dawkins as is possible (which is admittedly not much, but remaining respectful to Dawkins gives a refreshing sense of taking the high road). Furthermore, McGrath declines to engage with every single argument made by Dawkins in The God Delusion, as it simply represents a collection of “convenient factoids” rather than coherent arguments, and therefore a response that engages with each one of Dawkins’ claims would be scattered and equally as incoherent as The God Delusion. Instead, McGrath engages with Dawkins’ approach at large – particularly criticising his hypocritically patchy application of scientific methods and empirical evidence. This criticism of Dawkins which draws from his own field (which McGrath, who is positively a polymath, is perfectly qualified to make) so as to ‘hit him where it hurts’, so to speak, is executed brilliantly, with evidence from around the world of science, and an undogmatic approach. The same cannot be said of Dawkins’ The God Delusion.

When annotating The Dawkins Delusion? I managed to loosely categorise McGrath’s criticisms of Dawkins, identifying a two main concerns:

1. Dawkins does not rigorously follow the scientific arguments and processes to which he holds religious believers. Many of his arguments are hopeful at best, and some are even baseless assertions, derived from the faith-based approaches that he denounces so strongly. This failure is compounded by Dawkins’ poor grasp of Theology.

A common theme that McGrath points out is Dawkins’ tendency to uncritically engage with unpopular, disproved, or even impossible scientific ideas, his typical objective tone giving the reader the sense that these theories have thus far gone unchallenged. For example, Dawkins attributes the cultural evolution of religion to a ‘mind-virus’, yet McGrath points out that real viruses can be monitored, observed, and scrutinised. They can be physically recognised and subjected to scientific investigation. Somewhat unsurprisingly, the idea of a ‘God-virus’ is not so easy to investigate or monitor: because it doesn’t exist. Furthermore, Dawkins’ engagement with Philosophy and Theology is deemed to be “inept” by McGrath. For one, Dawkins mistakes Aquinas’ a posteriori arguments to prove the coherence of belief in God for a priori proofs for the existence of God, and judges them by these standards. McGrath masterfully points out and dismantles these clearly flimsy arguments with ease.

2. McGrath points out that Dawkins mimics the religious fundamentalism he purports to vehemently oppose.

Dawkins is described as an ‘atheist fundamentalist’. He paints an unavoidable war between science and religion, rationalism and superstition. In doing so, he exhibits, according to McGrath, “the absolute same dichotomous mode of thought” as religious fundamentalists. McGrath states that this mirrors the approach of creationists like Henry Morris, who saw the world as “absolutely polarised into two factions”. In this critique, McGrath adopts a popular view amongst both religious apologists and atheists: Dawkins is as fundamentalist as his enemies.

There are many other specific concerns raised in The Dawkins Delusion?, such as Dawkins’ disrespect towards scientists who do not align with his views, however, much of McGrath’s critique can be seen to align with these two main categories. This framework makes the book easy to digest as well as compelling, and the engagement with science and empiricism is a masterstroke, to truly defeat Dawkins using his own metrics. This reminded me of Pastor Timothy Keller’s approach in The Reason for God, when he applied the philosophical parameters of ‘strong rationalism’ to the theory itself, proving it to be philosophically impossible and self-defeating.

McGrath, in his well-reasoned conclusion, describes “Dawkins’ crude stereotypes, vastly oversimplified binary oppositions…straw men, and seemingly pathological hostility towards religion”. He emphasises throughout The Dawkins Delusion? that Dawkins’ approach is one of faith over fact, wishful thinking over reason – The God Delusion is a work of propaganda! It prioritises Dawkins’ own agenda, his as yet unexplained hatred of religion (which McGrath puts down to an overcompensation due to a possibly wavering faith in atheism, an explanation which I have to accept as tongue-in-cheek, as I don’t find it particularly convincing) over rational, respectful, and sensible discourse with religion – another theme of Dawkins’ work is his lack of engagement with religious believers.

One criticism I could make of McGrath is his slight oversimplification of the crimes of atheist regimes when compared to religion. Using the anti-religious policies of the USSR and China to counter arguments that organised religion is brutal and negative for society seems, to me, to play into the narrative of ‘binary opposition’. The arguments of The Dawkins Delusion? would be stronger had McGrath engaged with the (I believe) more credible argument that the religious fundamentalists and flawed institutions who have committed egregious crimes against others are simply individuals and institutions following a flawed interpretation of a certain Holy Book or doctrine, as they very often are.

Overall, The Dawkins Delusion? was a highly satisfying read. One can imagine Dawkins sifting through the pages of various responses to his work, at first with a smug sense of satisfaction, having provoked a reaction from countless eminent theists (as well as many atheists and scientists), before having to contend with the fact that the reasoned counter-arguments of scholars like McGrath make Dawkins look like a petulant, stubborn, A-Level Philosophy student with an irrational grudge against religious believers. McGrath writes clearly and concisely, and avoids stooping to propagandistic distortions, or mirroring Dawkins’ approach of militant, fire and brimstone atheism. In fact, the only mirroring that occurs is when McGrath aptly approaches Dawkins from a scientific perspective, showing the world-renowned evolutionary biologist to be somewhat isolated in his own community due to his inflammatory views on religion and its apparent incompatibility with science. If any atheists out there are embarrassed by the spectre that Richard Dawkins casts on the scientific and atheist communities, The Dawkins Delusion? can act as a short ‘how-to’ guide on combatting atheist fundamentalism, making for a read that is both more insightful than The God Delusion, and more humble, right down to the question mark in the title.

- Jacob Owen. 

If you would like an in depth essay on the pitfalls and philosophical inconsistencies of the New Atheist movement, let me know in the comments box below!