The Atheist Delusion of Richard Dawkins
The God Delusion, by the atheist writer Richard Dawkins, is remarkable in the first place for having achieved some sort of record by selling over a million copies. But what is much more remarkable than that economic achievement is that the contents—or rather lack of contents—of this book show Dawkins himself to have become what he and his fellow secularists typically believe to be an impossibility: namely, a secularist bigot. (Helpfully, my copy of The Oxford Dictionary defines a bigot as “an obstinate or intolerant adherent of a point of view”.)
The fault of Dawkins as an academic (which he still was during the period in which he composed this book, although he has since retired) was his scandalous and apparently deliberate refusal to present the doctrine which he appears to think he has refuted in its strongest form. Thus we find in his index three references to Einstein. They are to the mask of Einstein and Einstein on morality, to Einstein on a personal God, and to Einstein on the human situation and on how man is here for the sake of other men and above all for those on whose well-being our own happiness depends. But I find it hard to write with restraint about this obscurantist refusal on the part of Dawkins to make any mention of Einstein’s most relevant report: namely, that the integrated complexity of the world of physics had led him to believe that there must be a Divine Intelligence behind it. (I myself think it obvious that if this argument is applicable to the world of physics then it must be hugely more powerful if it is applied to the immeasurably more complicated world of biology.)
Of course many physicists with the highest of reputations do not agree with Einstein in this matter. But an academic attacking some ideological position which he or she believes to be mistaken must of course attack that position in its strongest form. This Dawkins does not do in the case of Einstein, and this failure is the crucial index of his insincerity of academic purpose and therefore warrants me in charging him with having become a secularist bigot.
On page 82 of The God Delusion is a remarkable note. It reads:
“We might be seeing something similar today in the over-publicised tergiversations of the philosopher Antony Flew, who announced in his old age that he had been converted to belief in some sort of deity triggering a frenzy of eager repetition around the internet.”
What is important about this passage is not what Dawkins is saying about Flew but what he is showing here about Dawkins. For if he had had any interest in the truth of the matter of which he was making so much, he would surely have brought himself to write me a letter of enquiry. (When I received a torrent of enquiries after an account of my conversion to Deism had been published in the quarterly of the Royal Institute of Philosophy I managed—I believe—eventually to reply to every letter.)
This whole business makes all too clear that Dawkins is not interested in the truth as such but is primarily concerned to discredit an ideological opponent by any available means. That would itself constitute sufficient reason for suspecting that the whole enterprise of The God Delusion was not, as it at least pretended to be, an attempt to discover and spread knowledge of the existence or non-existence of God but rather an attempt—an extremely successful one—to spread the author’s own convictions in this area.
A less important point which needs to be made in this piece is that although the index of The God Delusion notes six references to Deism it provides no definition of the word deism. This enables Dawkins in his reference to Deism to suggest that Deists are a miscellany of believers in this and that. The truth, which Dawkins ought to have learnt before his book went to the printers, is that Deists believe in the existence of a God but not the God of revelation. In fact, the first notable public appearance of the notion of Deism was the American Revolution. The young man who drafted the Declaration of Independence and who later became President Jefferson was a Deist, as were several of the other founding fathers of that abidingly important institution, the United States.
In the monster footnote to what I am inclined to describe as a monster book—The God Delusion—Dawkins reproaches me for what he calls my ignominious decision to accept, in 2006, the Phillip E. Johnson Award for Liberty and Truth. The awarding institution is Biola, The Bible Institute of Los Angeles. Dawkins does not say outright that his objection to my decision is that Biola is a specifically Christian institution. He obviously assumes (but refrains from actually saying) that this is incompatible with producing first-class academic work in every department—not a thesis which would be acceptable in either my own university of Oxford or in Harvard.
In my time at Oxford, in the years immediately succeeding the Second World War, Gilbert Ryle (the Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy in the University of Oxford) published a hugely influential book, The Concept of Mind. This book revealed by implication, but only by implication, that minds are not entities of a sort which could coherently be said to survive the death of those whose minds they were.
Ryle felt responsible for the smooth pursuit of philosophical teaching and the publication of the findings of philosophical research in the university and knew that, at that time, there would have been uproar if he had published his own conclusion that the very idea of a second life after death was self-contradictory and incoherent. He was content for me to do this at a later time and in another place. I told him that if I were ever invited to give one of the Gifford Lecture series my subject would be “The Logic of Morality”. When I was, I did, and these lectures were first published by Blackwell (Oxford) in 1987. They are still in print from Prometheus Books (Amherst, NY).
Finally, as to the suggestion that I have been used by Biola University. If the way I was welcomed by the students and the members of faculty whom I met on my short stay in Biola amounted to being used then I can only express my regret that at the age of eighty-five I cannot reasonably hope for another visit to this institution.
There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind by Antony Flew and Roy Abraham Varghese was reviewed by Dennis O’Keeffe in the June issue.
Many will disagree, but World War III is too great a risk to run by involving ourselves in a distant border conflict
Sep 25 2024
5 mins
To claim Aborigines have the world's oldest continuous culture is to misunderstand the meaning of culture, which continuously changes over time and location. For a culture not to change over time would be a reproach and certainly not a cause for celebration, for it would indicate that there had been no capacity to adapt. Clearly this has not been the case
Aug 20 2024
23 mins
A friend and longtime supporter of Quadrant, Clive James sent us a poem in 2010, which we published in our December issue. Like the Taronga Park Aquarium he recalls in its 'mocked-up sandstone cave' it's not to be forgotten
Aug 16 2024
2 mins