In the concluding chapter of The God Delusion Richard Dawkins ventures an explanation for how religions came to be. The short of it is that he thinks they may be an outgrowth of the childhood trait of having an invisible friend.
He has no evidence to offer us, of course, so he moves on to other matters on which to speculate.
For example he castigates people who believe in eternal life for what he sees as the inconsistency of grieving at the death of a loved one. If religious people really believed in heaven why shouldn't they rejoice at the loved one's good fortune, he asks?
Aside from the fact that grief is an emotion we feel because we are suffering a loss, not because our loved one is experiencing gain, Dawkins doesn't seem to realize that he has just spent pages deploring Islamists for acting completely consistently with their belief in eternal life when they sacrifice themselves in their suicide bombings.
He's appalled that people believe in an eternal reward and act in accord with that belief and then we turn the page to find him scoffing at people who believe in an eternal reward and act in ways he thinks to be at odds with that belief.
Dawkins' greatest consistency in TGD is his inconsistency.
He rules out miracles because they are so highly improbable, and then in the very next paragraph he tells us that evolution, which also seems highly improbable, is almost inevitable, given the vastness of time.
But if time and the existence of an infinite number of worlds make the improbable inevitable why doesn't that work for miracles as well?
To apply Dawkinsian reasoning, in all the zillions of universes of the Many Worlds landscape there has to be at least one in which a man capable of working miracles is born and himself rises from the dead. We just happen to be in the world in which it happens.
Why should the Many Worlds (or Multiverse) Hypothesis be able to explain the fine-tuning of the cosmos and the origin of life, both of which are astronomically improbable, but not a man rising from the dead?
He argues that the fact that there is no afterlife should make this life all the more precious, but what it really does is make this life utterly meaningless. Death is the big eraser. It negates everything most of us have ever done. It renders everything pointless and absurd.
Dawkins avers that his life is meaningful because he fills it with a "systematic endeavor to find out the truth about the real world," but for what end? When he dies whatever knowledge he has acquired will do him no good.
He's like a man on his death bed trying to master a new language. It gives him something to do, like working crossword puzzles, but what does it really matter?
The Christian, on the other hand, views death from this side of it as a tragedy, a terrible evil, but from the other side as little more than an unpleasant interruption of one's ongoing life. All that we do in this life matters forever.
There's a purpose in learning a language, even late in one's life, because it'll be something useful and give one pleasure on the other side of death. There's also a purpose in scientific study because what we learn here and now will be useful in eternity.
But if death is the end then there's no purpose in anything and all that matters now is avoiding pain and perhaps experiencing pleasure.
The terrible irony is that Dawkins could be doing the science he loves and to which he is devoted, or something like it, forever. Tragically, though, he chooses to empty his love of real significance by despising the God who is the only ground of the truth and knowledge he longs to attain.
The God Delusion was acclaimed by atheists around the world, but in fact they should've been hoping to see the book pass quickly into oblivion. Its sloppy reasoning did more to set back their cause among intelligent readers than almost anything Christians could do.
If this is the best that can be mustered as an argument against God, an undecided seeker might rightly think, then perhaps the case against God is not nearly as strong as one might've assumed. Indeed, TGD is a book which should be read and discussed by everyone, theist or non-theist, who wrestles with doubt.
A thoughtful, informed reading will allay the doubts and persuade the doubter that the case against God must, at bottom, be pretty anemic.
