Notes
Introduction
1 Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion. London: Bantam, 2006.
2 Dawkins, God Delusion, 5.
3 Michael Shermer, How We Believe: Science, Skepticism, and the Search for God. New York: Freeman, 2000, 16–31.
4 Stephen Jay Gould, ‘Impeaching a Self-Appointed Judge’, Scientific American, vol. 267, no. 1 (1992): 118–21.
5 For some such books, see C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity. London: Collins, 1975; N. T. Wright, Simply Christian. London: SPCK, 2006.
6 Readers who would appreciate a more extended scholarly and analytical engagement with Dawkins’ ‘scientific atheism’ should read Alister E. McGrath, Dawkins’ God: Genes, Memes and the Meaning of Life. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. While this book represents a sympathetic yet critical study of Dawkins’ views on science and religion up to 2004, The God Delusion develops a broader range of arguments, which clearly invite further evaluation and response.
1 Deluded about God?
1. Dawkins, God Delusion, 38.
2. This definition dates back to 1976, when it appeared in The Selfish Gene. See Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene. 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989, 198.
3. Dawkins, God Delusion, 308.
4. A much more sophisticated account of the origins of belief, bearing some slight resemblance to that offered by Dawkins, is to be found in the writings of Sigmund Freud. Dawkins shows no awareness of this, and makes no reference to Freud in The God Delusion.
5. Dawkins, God Delusion, 325–37.
6. Terry Eagleton, ‘Lunging, flailing, mispunching: A Review of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion’, London Review of Books, 19 October 2006.
7. Dawkins, God Delusion, 326.
8. Dawkins, God Delusion, 5.
9. Richard Dawkins, A Devil’s Chaplain: Selected Writings. London: Weidenfield & Nicholson, 2003, 139.
10. Dawkins, God Delusion, 190. The web source provided is a list of citations, all in English translation, without the original German or Latin, or any indication of their sources, and making no attempt at scholarly engagement.
11. For a more careful account, see Alister E. McGrath, Luther’s Theology of the Cross: Martin Luther’s Theological Breakthrough. Oxford: Blackwell, 1985.
12. Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution reveals a Universe without Design. New York: W. W. Norton, 1986.
13. See the points made by David O’Connor, ‘On failing to resolve theism-versus-atheism empirically’, Religious Studies, vol. 26 (1990): 91–103.
14. Dawkins, God Delusion, 77–9.
15. For the importance of this point, see Samuel P. Huntington and Lawrence E. Harrison (eds), Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress. New York: Basic Books, 2000.
16. A point that Dawkins himself makes: Devil’s Chaplain, 81: ‘We must acknowledge the possibility that new facts may come to light which will force our successors of the twenty-first century to abandon Darwinism or modify it beyond recognition.’
17. Dawkins, God Delusion, 111–59.
18. Dawkins, God Delusion, 109.
19. Dawkins, God Delusion, 77.
20. Among the best introductions, see David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality. London: Allen Lane, 1997; Brian Greene, The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory. London: Vintage, 2000.
21. Richard Dawkins. Climbing Mount Improbable. London: Viking, 1996.
22. Dawkins, God Delusion, 125–34. Dawkins here focuses on the American ‘Intelligent Design’ movement.
23. See the account in David J. Hawkin and Eileen Hawkin, The Word of Science: The Religious and Social Thought of C. A. Coulson. London: Epworth, 1989.
24. Dawkins, God Delusion, 126.
25. Dawkins, Devil’s Chaplain, 19.
26. Richard Swinburne, Is There a God? Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
2 Has science disproved God?
1. Gould, ‘Impeaching a self-appointed judge’. For a more extended discussion of the issues, see Stephen Jay Gould, Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life. London: Vintage, 2002.
2. Dawkins, God Delusion, 57.
3. For Dawkins’ tetchy response, which hardly addresses the issue, see God Delusion, 56.
4. I take this from one of the best recent studies of this question: Peter Lipton, Inference to the best explanation. 2nd edn. London: Routledge, 2004, 5.
5. For a particularly bold statement of this approach, see Peter Atkins, ‘The Limitless Power of Science’, in John Cornwell (ed.), Nature’s Imagination: The Frontiers of Scientific Vision, 122–32. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.
6. Dawkins, Selfish Gene, 21.
7. Denis Noble, The Music of Life: Biology beyond the Genome. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, 11–15.
8. Noble, Music of Life, 13; see also Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype: The Gene as the Unit of Selection. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982, 1.
9. M. R. Bennett and P. M. S. Hacker, Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003, 372–6.
10. Bennett and Hacker, Philosophical Foundations, 374: ‘It is wrongheaded to suppose that the only forms of explanation are scientific.’ The entire section dealing with reductionism (355–77) merits close study.
11. Peter B. Medawar, The Limits of Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985, 66.
12. See, for example, the illuminating discussion in Luke Davidson, ‘Fragilities of scientism: Richard Dawkins and the Paranoid idealization of science’, Science as Culture, vol. 9 (2000): 167–99. The best discussion to date of this phenomenon is Mikael Stenmark, Scientism: Science, Ethics and Religion. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001. Dawkins and E. O. Wilson are here treated as the leading representatives of the movement. Dawkins considers himself not to be ‘narrowly scientistic’: God Delusion, 155.
13. Dawkins, God Delusion, 56.
14. Francis S. Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief. New York: Basic Books, 2006, 6.
15. For an introduction, see Alister E. McGrath, The Science of God. London: T&T Clark, 2004.
16. See especially Roy Bhaskar, The Possibility of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary Human Sciences. 3rd edn. London: Routledge, 1998.
17. Owen Gingerich, God’s Universe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.
18. Dawkins, God Delusion, 152.
19. Dawkins, God Delusion, 152.
20. See the disappointingly superficial analysis in God Delusion, 14–18. Dawkins speaks of ‘Einsteinian pantheism’ (which is certainly one aspect of Einstein’s religious ideas), while failing to realize that pantheism is both a religious and theological notion. For a good analysis, see Michael P. Levine, Pantheism: A Non-theistic Concept of Deity. London: Routledge, 1994.
21. Dawkins, God Delusion, 279–86.
22. Dawkins, God Delusion, 66–9.
23. His best work, in my view, is Monad to Man: The Concept of Progress in Evolutionary Biology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996.
24. Dawkins, God Delusion, 67.
25. Dawkins insists that he is not an atheist fundamentalist: God Delusion, 282. This is very contestable!
26. Dawkins, God Delusion, 131–4, with reference to Michael Behe; William Dembski is not mentioned. For a somewhat more in-formed engagement with the movement, see Niall Shanks, God, the Devil, and Darwin: A Critique of Intelligent Design Theory. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
27. For Dembski’s approach, see William A. Dembski, Intelligent Design: The Bridge between Science and Theology. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1999.
28. See Madeleine Bunting’s perceptive article ‘Why the intelligent design lobby thanks God for Richard Dawkins’, Guardian, Monday, 27 March 2006.
29. For Ruse’s Darwinism, see Michael Ruse, Taking Darwin Seriously: a Naturalistic Approach to Philosophy. New York: Prometheus Books, 1998. The exchange of e-mails between Ruse and Dennett took place on Sunday, 19 February 2006, and was widely distributed.
30. For Ruse’s assessment of this statement, see Michael Ruse, ‘John Paul II and evolution’, Quarterly Review of Biology, vol. 72 (1997): 391–5.
31. Cited in Dawkins, God Delusion, 67.
3 What are the origins of religion?
1. Dawkins, God Delusion, 51–4. The idea is borrowed from Bertrand Russell.
2. See Van A. Harvey, Feuerbach and the Interpretation of Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
3. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo: Resemblances between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1938.
4. Daniel C. Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. New York: Viking Penguin, 2006.
5. See the original study of Charles Y. Glock and Rodney Stark, Religion and Society in Tension. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1965. The anthropologist Talal Asad argues that ‘there cannot be a universal definition of religion, not only because its constituent elements and relationships are historically specific, but because that definition is itself the historical product of discursive processes’. Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993, 29.
6. Dawkins, God Delusion, 188.
7. Richard Dawkins, River out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life. London: Phoenix, 1995, 133.
8. Dawkins, God Delusion, 31–8.
9. See, for example, Ernest Gellner, Muslim Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981, 9–11, which extends David Hume’s notion of the ‘flux and reflux’ of polytheism and monotheism to suggest that a natural part of human experience is a cyclical movement from polytheism to monotheism – and then back again.
10. Dawkins, God Delusion, 161–207. In terms of the substance of Dawkins’ intellectual case against religion, this is the most important chapter in the book.
11. See, for example, Peter Harrison, ‘Religion’ and the Religions in the English Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990; Tomoko Masuzawa, In Search of Dreamtime: The Quest for the Origin of Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993; Daniel L. Pals, Seven Theories of Religion. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996; Samuel J. Preus, Explaining Religion: Criticism and Theory from Bodin to Freud. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987.
12. Peter B. Clarke and Peter Byrne, Religion Defined and Explained. London: St Martin’s Press, 1993, 3–27.
13. Dawkins, God Delusion, 188.
14. See Eric Csapo, Theories of Mythology. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005, 36–43.
15. Dawkins, God Delusion, 166.
16. For a recent study of cognitive bias in relation to self-esteem, see Jennifer Crocker and Lora E. Park, ‘The Costly Pursuit of Self-Esteem’, Psychological Bulletin, vol. 130 (2004): 392–414.
17. A classic study of this theme is Robert P. Carroll, When Prophecy Failed: Cognitive Dissonance in the Prophetic Traditions of the Old Testament. New York: Seabury Press, 1979.
18. See for instance Rodney Stark and Charles Y. Glock, American Piety: The Nature of Religious Commitment. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1968.
19. John D. Teasdale and Philip J. Barnard. Affect, Cognition, and Change: Re-modelling Depressive Thought. Hove: Erlbaum, 1993.
20. See the analysis in Alister E. McGrath, The Genesis of Doctrine. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990.
21. For some interesting experimental work in this area see N. J. Gibson, The experimental investigation of religious cognition. Unpublished PhD dissertation. University of Cambridge, 2006.
22. Dawkins, God Delusion, 168–9.
23. Dawkins, God Delusion, 179.
24. Bennett and Hacker, Philosophical Foundations, 127; 243. For a detailed study of the ‘mereological fallacy’, see 68–107. (‘Mereology’ is the logic of the relationship between the whole and its constituent parts.)
25. Dawkins, God Delusion, 182–4. For a critique of the ideas set out here, see Bennett and Hacker, Philosophical Foundations, 419–27.
26. J. Saver and J. Rabin. ‘The neural substrates of religious experience’, Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience, vol. 9 (1997): 498–510.
27. Michael A. Persinger, Neuropsychological Bases of God Beliefs. New York: Praeger, 1987. Dawkins does not appear to be familiar with this work at first hand, providing indirect reference (God Delusion, 168) through Shermer’s How We Believe. He offers no critical assessment of the validity of the hypothesis.
28. Peter Fenwick, ‘The neurophysiology of religious experiences’, in D. Bhugra (ed.), Psychiatry and Religion: Context, Consensus, and Controversies, 167–77. London: Routledge, 1996.
29. Fraser Watts, ‘Cognitive neuroscience and religious consciousness’, in R. J. Murphy et al. (eds), Neuroscience and the Person, 327–46. Vatican City: Vatican Observatory, 1999.
30. Dawkins, God Delusion, 185: ‘Could irrational religion be a by-product of the irrationality mechanisms that were originally built into the brain by selection for falling in love?’ It is an interesting suggestion, though one that is simply not sustained by the very limited evidence Dawkins bothers to present, which is in any case inattentive to the extent to which ‘falling in love’ is a culturally conditioned notion.
31. Antoine Vergote, ‘What the psychology of religion is and what it is not’, International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, vol. 3 (1993): 73–86.
32. For my comments, see McGrath, Dawkins’ God, 135–8.
33. Dawkins, God Delusion, 186, 188.
34. Dawkins, God Delusion, 191–201.
35. Dawkins, Selfish Gene, 193.
36. For an extended analysis of Dawkins’ concept of the meme, see McGrath, Dawkins’ God, 119–35.
37. This point was made forcefully by James W. Polichak, ‘Memes – what are they good for?’ Skeptic, vol. 6, no. 3 (1998): 45–54. Polichak’s concerns were not met by Susan J. Blackmore, The Meme Machine. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. See further Bennett and Hacker, Philosophical Foundations, 431–5.
38. Maurice Bloch, ‘A well-disposed social anthropologist’s problem with memes’, in Robert Aunger (ed.), Darwinizing Culture: The Status of Memetics as a Science, 189–203. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
39. For examples of such models, see Michael Carrithers, Why Humans Have Cultures: Explaining Anthropology and Social Diversity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996; Maurice Bloch, How We Think They Think: Anthropological Approaches to Cognition, Memory, and Literacy. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998. Even biologists have problems with the idea. As Simon Conway Morris, professor of evolutionary palaeobiology at Cambridge University, pointed out, memes seem to have no place in serious scientific reflection. ‘Memes are trivial, to be banished by simple mental exercises. In any wider context, they are hopelessly, if not hilariously, simplistic.’ Simon Conway Morris, Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, 324.
40. Dawkins, God Delusion, 196.
41. Dawkins, God Delusion, 250. His own view seems to be that Jesus probably did exist: God Delusion, 97. The reasons for this important judgement are not stated or defended.
42. See Alan Costall, ‘The “Meme” Meme’, Cultural Dynamics, vol. 4 (1991): 321–35.
4 Is religion evil?
1. Dawkins, God Delusion, 31.
2. See Dawkins, God Delusion, 301–7.
3. Dawkins, God Delusion, 329–31.
4. For a good discussion, see Keith Ward, Is Religion Dangerous? Oxford: Lion, 2006.
5. Anna Dickinson, ‘Quantifying religious oppression: Russian Orthodox Church closures and repression of priests 1917–41’, Religion, State and Society, vol. 28 (2000): 327–35.
6. Dawkins, God Delusion, 249 (my italics for emphasis).
7. Alexandru D. Popescu, Petre Tutea: Between Sacrifice and Suicide. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004.
8. Dawkins, God Delusion, 303–4.
9. Others include Dennett, Breaking the Spell; and Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. New York: Free Press, 2006.
10. Robert A. Pape, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism. New York: Random House, 2005. See also the nuanced discussions in Diego Gambetta (ed.), Making Sense of Suicide Missions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
11. See the important study of Malise Ruthven, Fundamentalism: The Search for Meaning. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
12. For an illustration of the importance of the device, see Kathy Mills, ‘Deconstructing binary oppositions in literacy discourse and pedagogy’, Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, vol. 28 (2005): 67–82.
13. As pointed out by Michael Wheeler, The Old Enemies: Catholic and Protestant in Nineteenth-century English Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
14. See the analysis in Stephen E. Cornell and Douglas Hartmann, Ethnicity and Race: Making Identities in a Changing World. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge, 1998; Fredrik Barth, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland, 1998; Jane Hubert, Madness, Disability, and Social Exclusion: The Archaeology and Anthropology of ‘Difference’. London: Routledge, 2000.
15. Dawkins, God Delusion, 259.
16. See the brilliant study of Edward Muir, Mad Blood Stirring: Vendetta in Renaissance Italy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.
17. Bruce E. Blaine, The Psychology of Diversity: Perceiving and Experiencing Social Difference. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield , 2000.
18. This theme is particularly emphasized by Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. London: Allen & Unwin, 1915.
19. Dawkins, God Delusion, 257.
20. Dawkins cites the Jewish prayer thanking God for not making the supplicant a gentile, a woman, or a slave: God Delusion, 259. He fails to point out that Jesus repudiated such sentiments: Luke 18.9–14.
21. See Jeremy Duff and Joanna Collicutt McGrath, Meeting Jesus: Human Responses to a Yearning God. London: SPCK, 2006, 20–25, 58–62.
22. Theologically alert readers will note that Dawkins seems docetic in his understanding of Christ at this point: God Delusion, 253.
23. Dawkins, God Delusion, 250–1.
24. Dawkins, God Delusion, 344.
25. The issue is dealt with in all standard histories of Israelite religion: see, for example, Patrick D. Miller, The Religion of Ancient Israel. London: SPCK, 2000.
26. Dawkins, God Delusion, 253. It has been accepted for several centuries that the author of this letter is not Paul. Other errors and misunderstandings include the bald statement that original sin ‘lies at the heart of New Testament theology’ (p. 251). It does not; it is an Augustinian development, dating from centuries later. Jesus rarely talked about sin at all, and he certainly did not link it with Adam. Jesus’ notion of forgiveness was really about liberation from bondage, not moral exoneration. On the face of it, Paul talks quite a lot about sin in the first half of his letter to the Romans. Yet his point is not so much that all have sinned but that all have sinned. His agenda is to establish a level playing field between Jew and Gentile. Dawkins also fails to understand the genre of apocalyptic, as found in the book of Revelation, which Dawkins dismisses as one of the ‘weirdest books in the Bible’. He represents the interpretations of this book associated with the Jehovah’s Witnesses as normative for Christianity – for example, the assertion that none of the saved could be women. The 144,000 ‘sealed’ are not identical with the ‘saved’ (p. 257), in that people from every tribe and tongue are saved (Revelation 7.9; 14.6). The 144,000 are probably Christian ascetic ‘warriors’ who are using pacifist means and spiritual warfare to resist secular atheist powers and cosmic evil powers.
27. Twelve of the 14 references Dawkins cites are taken from the Pentateuch or Torah. The remaining two are from Judges; none are cited from the remaining 36 books of the Old Testament.
28. Dawkins, God Delusion, 237.
29. Dawkins, God Delusion, 243.
30. For its basic elements, see Joel Marcus, The Way of the Lord: Christological Exegesis of the Old Testament in the Gospel of Mark. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1993.
31. Dawkins, God Delusion, 249–50.
32. See, for example, David Myers, ‘The funds, friends and faith of happy people’, American Psychologist, vol. 55 (2000): 56–67; Harold G. Koenig and Harvey J. Cohen, The Link between Religion and Health: Psychoneuroimmunology and the Faith Factor. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002; Marc Galanter, Spirituality and the Healthy Mind: Science, Therapy, and the Need for Personal Meaning. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
33. Dawkins, God Delusion, 167.
34. Kenneth I. Pargament, The Psychology of Religion and Coping: Theory, Research, Practice. New York: Guilford Press, 1997; K. I. Pargament, B. W. Smith, H. G. Koenig and I. Perez, ‘Patterns of positive and negative religious coping with major life stressors’, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, vol. 37 (1998): 710–24.
35. Dawkins, God Delusion, 166.
36. See especially Nicholas Lash, Easter in Ordinary: Reflections on Human Experience and the Knowledge of God. London: SCM Press, 1988.
37. Shermer, How We Believe, 71.
38. Dawkins, God Delusion, 102, citing approvingly Shermer’s How We Believe. See also 127, 168.
39. Eagleton, ‘Lunging, flailing, mispunching’. For Eagleton’s own perceptive and critical comments on this important issue, see Terry Eagleton, Holy Terror. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
40. See the points made by Nicholas D. Kristof, ‘A Modest Proposal for a Truce on Religion’, New York Times, 3 December 2006.