Dawkins’ confusion

I advise those seeking reliable assessment of Richard Dawkins’ writings and the many questions they raise against relevance of faith and the quest for meaning of life to read Alister McGrath’s books Dawkins’ God: Genes, Memes, and the Meaning of Life (2004) and The Dawkins Delusion? Atheist Fundamentalism and the Denial of the Divine (2007).

McGrath, professor of historical theology at Oxford University, has doctorates in both theology and molecular biophysics, and so is well placed to tackle issues of science, theology and philosophy.

All thinking human adults live by faith. The real question is what you base your faith on. For Dawkins, the only legitimate reason to believe something is true is when it is supported by evidence. As a scientist he bases his faith on observable facts that can be scrutinised by reason, be refined, and changed when proved to be false. Religious faith, according to Dawkins, is not; which is why he thinks God is a delusion. By the way, all Dawkins has ever said about his non-belief in God is: “I cannot know for certain but I think God is very improbable, and I live my life on the assumption that he is not there” (The God Delusion, pp 50-51).

In The Dawkins Delusion, Alister McGrath and Joanna Collicutt McGrath discuss Dawkins’ mistaken understanding of faith. Contrary to Dawkins’ caricature, they say, biblical faith is informed faith, based on reason and an honest examination of the evidence. They show that authentic faith is grounded on evidence, and that Christianity, especially, offers a fair amount of evidence for its truth claims. McGrath says Dawkins’ thinking is over-simplistic and sometimes promotes the idea that unless something can be proved, it is false. If all we could know are facts, then there would be no need for faith, including faith in scientific theories, say the McGraths.

There is a confusion between “knowledge” and “belief”. Scientific evidence promotes “knowledge”, whereas religious faith promotes “belief”. “Knowledge” is based on evidence. We believe in God — at least some of us — based on reason and natural evidence. Some disbelief is based on similar reasoning.

McGrath’s major argument is that science can never answer the question of whether or not something exists without evidence, and therefore the existence of God lies outside its realm. “The scientific method is incapable of delivering a decisive adjudication of the God question. Those who believe that it proves or disproves the existence of God press that method beyond its legitimate limits, and run the risk of abusing or discrediting it…[the] final adjudication on the God question lies beyond reason and experiment.”

In The Dawkins Delusion, McGrath concerns himself mostly with a critique of philosophy and ideology masquerading as science. What one makes of Darwinism, for instance, is a matter of scientific debate whose evidence can be weighed and considered. McGrath’s argument left me unsatisfied here since I do not think Darwinism is equally compatible with both theism and atheism. McGrath cites as a witness atheist-Darwinist Stephen Jay Gould, who noted that half his Darwinist colleagues believed in God, and half did not. And also recounts surveys showing many scientists to be theists. But a human mind can hold incompatible beliefs with quiet ease, so this does nothing to establish the compatibility of Darwinism and theism.

I’ve argued, in this column, that natural selection by random mutations leaves no room for theistic Darwinism. The words random and natural, used in Darwinist sense, are meant to exclude intelligence. If God chooses which organisms survive so as to guide life’s evolution, the selection is intelligent rather than natural. Theists can have a variety of legitimate views on life’s evolution, but the minimum requirement is that you believe the process involves origins in God, and, if you are Catholic, subsistence in God’s intelligence, transcendental or otherwise.

Otherwise, McGrath shows, in scholarly care and with graciousness, that it’s not only inappropriate, inadequate and disingenuous for scientists who have a beef with religion to seek to use the scientific method to do their dirty work.  “[S]uggesting that science may have its limits is in no way a criticism or defamation of the scientific method. Dawkins does, I have to say with regret, tend to portray anyone raising questions about the scope of the sciences as a science-hating idiot,” McGrath writes.

He concludes that Dawkins’ emotive and irrational attack on faith and religion is a misuse and abuse of science.