The Dawkins Delusion? - Critical Reception

Critical Reception

Publishers Weekly remarked, "...Dawkins's The Blind Watchmaker "remains the finest critique" of William Paley's naturalistic arguments for deism available... he can no longer say that Tertullian praised Christian belief because of its absurdity or that religion necessarily makes one violent. The McGraths are frustrated, then, that Dawkins continues to write on the a priori, nonscientific assumption that religious believers are either deluded or meretricious, never pausing to consider the evidence not in his favor or the complex beliefs and practices of actual Christians.

Jeremy Craddock, a former forensic biologist who is now a vicar, writes in the Church Times that the McGraths "attend rationally to evidence, and present their findings unemotionally to answer The God Delusion ... and make many justified criticisms." He adds that "Dawkins asserts that God is so improbable that he cannot exist, and that, if he did, he would need explaining..." But Craddock believes that Dawkins contradicted himself by asserting that the fine tuning of the universe (the seemingly arbitrary values for such constants as the masses of the elementary particles, upon which the universe as we know it depends) needs no such explanation. Craddock concludes, "I am sad that Dawkins, once my hero, has descended to unscientific nonsense. McGrath makes much more sense."

Bryan Appleyard in the New Scientist says "Whatever else .. The God Delusion may have achieved, it has inspired very grand refutations. Impressive essays by ...Marilynne Robinson...Terry Eagleton and... H. Allen Orr set out to tell Dawkins how wrong he is. Now enter Alister McGrath extended essay covers some similar ground to the others, notably in analysing the extent of Dawkins's ignorance of theology. Of course, the point about that attack, from Dawkins's perspective at any rate, is that it is no attack at all." Appleyard goes on to commend the book as "a fine, dense, yet very clear account, from particular Christian perspective, of the full case against Dawkins."

Anthony Kenny writes in the Times Literary Supplement that Dawkins is often more accurate than McGrath on historical theology. He gives an assessment of the debate between Dawkins and McGrath while arguing that both men fail to make the crucial distinction between belief in God and faith. He writes,

Faith is something more than the mere belief that there is a God: it is an assent to a purported revelation of God, communicated through a sacred text or a religious community. It is faith in a creed, not mere belief in God, that is Dawkins's real target in The God Delusion The idea that faith is an irrevocable commitment, which goes far beyond any evidence that could be offered in its support, is explicitly stated by Christian thinkers as different from each other as Thomas Aquinas, Søren Kierkegaard and John Henry Newman.

While Kenny partly agrees with Dawkins's view of faith and its dangers, he disagrees that all those who believe in God are unreasonable in so doing. He also disagrees that religious belief is incompatible with science. He finds it hard to disagree with McGrath's conclusion that The God Delusion is more harmful to science than to religion because "most people have a greater intellectual and emotional investment in religion than in science." If forced to choose between them, as Dawkins insists they must, "it will be science that they will renounce".