Meeting Richard Dawkins

Once in a while it's good to read a book you're pretty sure you will disagree with. In that spirit I've just started to read The God Delusion. Immediately I can see why Richard Dawkins sells lots of books and attracts lots of attention. He's an entertaining provocateur and a facile wordsmith. When he momentarily sets aside his role as "the world's most prominent atheist" he can write beautifully and movingly about the natural world, and even though Dawkins makes it clear he considers someone with my orthodox Christian beliefs to be an ignoramus, or worse, some of his zingers are well-aimed.

It's clear that Dawkins is an absolutist when it comes to the authority of science -- though he admits that "science's entitlement to advise us on moral values is problematic, to say the least." (p. 57) He's almost as contemptuous of namby-pamby liberal Protestants and pantheistic new age gurus as he is of the fundamentalists (anyone who believes in that nonsense about "resurrection, forgiveness of sins and all") in "the boondocks" (another of his favorite expressions). He sees clearly the danger to his worldview if the door is left open even a crack to the possibility of the supernatural. This leads him to call British philosopher Michael Ruse (who "claims to be an atheist") a member of the "Neville Chamberlain School of Evolutionists" because he believes that science and religion can coexist in their non-overlapping spheres (p. 67), and he flogs Stephen Jay Gould who came up with the acronym NOMA "non-overlapping magisteria" in defending the view that science can't speak to the issue of God's existence. (p. 55) Sometimes it seems Dawkins wrote this book as much to question the atheistic street cred of fellow scientists than to disprove the existence of a God.

Dawkins is confident that science can take us 95 percent of the way to explaining "Why There Almost Certainly Is No God" -- the audacious title of Chapter 4. Dawkins knows well that humor can be a powerful tool, and he wields it often. However, much of the time I find the joke is on the author. Aside from snide ridicule his favorite weapon is arbitrary assertion presented as self-evident fact.

Although Jesus probably existed, reputable biblical scholars do not in general regard the New Testament (and obviously not the Old Testament) as a reliable record of what actually happened in history, and I shall not consider the Bible further as evidence for any kind of deity. In the farsighted words of Thomas Jefferson, writing to his predecessor, John Adams, 'The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as his father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.' (p. 97)

Who are these "reputable" biblical scholars? Of course! They're the ones who share the author's belief that the gospels aren't reliable. The rest are ruled out of school. Dawkins' hero Jefferson is quoted often in The God Delusion, but I'll let you judge whether his "farsighted" prophecy is any closer to fruition today than it was 200 years ago.