The God Delusion (Ch. 2)

Yesterday I began to rerun an old series of posts on Richard Dawkins' book The God Delusion and discussed chapter one of his very influential extended complaint against religion in general and Christianity in particular.

Today I'd like to repost what I wrote about chapter two:

Richard Dawkins doesn't like God. He makes that quite clear in the opening lines of chapter 2 where he famously asserts that,

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all of fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser;a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniac, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.

Having exhausted his thesaurus' pejoratives, Dawkins mercifully jogs to a panting halt and gives us a preview of his main argument against the existence of the monster he has just described.

He recognizes, of course, that he has just created a straw man and that it's possible some believers do not see God quite the way Dawkins portrays him. Thus, he defines the God whose existence he hopes to disprove by laying out for us what he calls The God Hypothesis. He defines it as the claim that:

There exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us.

One might think that it'd be very difficult to find empirical or even philosophical evidence to refute the existence of such a being and that the best Dawkins could do would be to argue that there's no reason to believe such a being exists. After all, it's very difficult to prove that something - UFOs, for example - doesn't exist and a lot easier to argue that there's no good reason to believe that it does.

But Dawkins is undaunted. He believes he's in possession of a knockdown argument that he's eventually going to present to us, but first he wants to take a few more swipes at religion.

Confusing the question of the existence of God with popular religious expressions of belief, a confusion he indulges throughout the book, Dawkins launches into a rambling catalogue of complaints about tax exemptions, trinitarian theologizing, and the religious views of the American Founding Fathers.

He claims to be attacking God simpliciter ("I am not attacking any particular version of God or gods. I am attacking God, all gods, anything and everything supernatural..."), but busies himself in chapter two with peripheral concerns that have little to do with the question of the truth of "The God Hypothesis."

For instance, at pains to show that the Founders were not Christians, he adduces a document drafted by George Washington and signed by John Adams as giving the lie to the belief that the U.S. was founded as a Christian nation. He cites Washington's statement in a treaty with Tripoli that "[T]he government of the United States of America is not in any sense, founded on the Christian religion."

This may be true enough as far as it goes, but what it elides is that the U.S. was founded on the principles of equality, liberty, and human rights which arguably could not have been derived from any worldview other than the Christian worldview. There may be no mention of Christianity in the Constitution, but the principles the Constitution embodies were found nowhere else but in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

In other words, the Founders imported into our nascent government ideas which were rooted uniquely in their Christian heritage while at the same time keeping the government neutral with respect to matters of religion. This distinction, however, escapes Dawkins' notice.

Dawkins repeatedly quotes Thomas Jefferson's hostile comments about the Christianity of his experience and deduces from these quotes that ... Jefferson didn't much like Christianity. This rather banal conclusion is hardly a surprise nor is it much to the purpose of demonstrating that God doesn't exist.

Dawkins is contemptuous not only of Christian believers but also of those timorous agnostics who hide behind their ignorance and refuse to take a stand against belief in God. In the course of chastising them for their pusillanimous fence-sitting he makes an astonishing claim, one that he insists upon several times throughout the chapter: He asserts that the question of God's existence "is a scientific question."

In one single sentence the dean of contemporary Darwinism has undone all the arguments that have ever been mustered against teaching intelligent design in public schools. Those arguments have been based on two premises: Intelligent design entails the existence of a Designer, i.e. God, and, second, God doesn't belong in the science classroom.

But now Dawkins, the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, has assured us that indeed God does belong in the science classroom!

Lest you think maybe I'm misreading him, here he is again on pages 72 and 73: "I shall suggest that the existence of God is a scientific hypothesis like any other...it belongs in the same...box as the controversies over the Permian and Cretaceous extinctions. God's existence or non-existence is a scientific fact about the universe..."

And again on p. 82: The presence or absence of a super-intelligence is unequivocally a scientific question....So also is the truth or falsehood of every one of the miracle stories...."

As more than one commenter on the book has observed, one can almost hear Dawkins' Darwinian comrades yelling at him: "Richard, please shut up! You're giving away the game!"

The rest of chapter 2 is given to scoffing at such things as prayer experiments and deriding some of his fellow evolutionists who deny that evolution leads to atheism. Dawkins is convinced that it does. He writes:

Any creationist lawyer who got me on the stand could instantly win over the jury simply by asking me: "Has your knowledge of evolution influenced you in the direction of becoming an atheist?" I would have to answer yes and, at one stroke, I would have lost the jury.

Yes, and he's also blown the case for keeping intelligent design out of our science classes. If ID is forbidden because it may point to God, why should not evolution be forbidden because it points away from God? Isn't it equally as "religious" to teach a theory that entails atheism as it is to teach a theory that entails a cosmic designer?

If we're going to allow our children to be taught the one, why not the other?

I'll repost a discussion of chapter 3 tomorrow.