Dawkins, McGrath & me

On reading the book Dawkins’ God by Alister McGrath ...

Richard Dawkins is a professor of the public understanding of science at Oxford and a declared atheist. He has, for a long time, been one of the most articulate defenders of Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection. That is the theory which explains the process by which human beings evolved from the beginning of life about four billion years ago.

Alister McGrath is a professor of theology at Oxford and an ordained priest in the Anglican Church as well as being the director of the Centre for Evangelism and Apologetics. He was born into a Methodist family in 1953. He remained attached to that branch of Christianity until early youth when he lost his belief in God and declared himself an atheist.

On entering Oxford University as an undergraduate he chanced on a book on the history and philosophy of science which renewed his interest in theology and, in particular, Christianity. He gained degrees in both biophysics and theology and is an evangelical defender of the Christian God. The book Dawkins’ God is specifically aimed at the ideas of his fellow-Oxfordian, and if the cover blurbs are any guide, he has reached an enthusiastic audience of like-minded academics. As one who is quoted says: “In this remarkable book, Alister McGrath challenges Dawkins … and disarms the master.”

Me? I have an abiding interest in the development of the science and religion debate and its relevance to the wider community.

A clash of world view

McGrath is a theologian, Dawkins is a scientist. There is a deep gulf between them in their attempts to understand the world.

McGrath believes a supernatural being named "God" exists. In that belief, he follows “the view of the world set out by the leading Christian theologian Thomas Aquinas”. In the 13th century Aquinas put forward five “proofs” of God’s existence and presented them in his Summa Theologiae. Although apparently accepted by McGrath, they are not proofs in the scientific sense of the word. They are arguments, manipulations of words to convince himself and others that there must have been a first cause to the beginning of the world, and that cause is given the name God. Subsequent to its naming that being was credited with a variety of characteristics and powers which, as the philosopher Feuerbach noted in his Essence of Christianity, are simply projections of human qualities writ large. The qualities are: omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, omnibenevolence, righteousness and mercifulness.

Dawkins, on the other hand, requires something tangible in a proof: something which can be tested; something material which can be manipulated, experimented on, to enlarge the understanding of the real world.

The difference is that between the idealist and the materialist. Idealists use words in the brain to try to create an image, an interpretation, of the world. Materialists use experience of the real world to try to create the words (theories) to describe it.

I have made the point in a previous article (“The Science of Religion”, On Line Opinion) that both science and religion derive from the same source: the need for human beings to control their environment from the very earliest days of their existence some million years ago. The idealist/religious approach arose from the use of magic and spells with the practitioners, the witchdoctors, evolving into priests with their prayers and ceremonies. The materialist/scientific approach arose from experiencing the real world by actually handling it. The resulting science is really the systematic collection of experience of the world as a basis for extending control of that world. There is no equivalent in religious theory or practice, although religious leaders do attempt to control human behaviour by using words to manipulate conscience.

Science, that is, the result of scientific investigation, goes from strength to strength. Each new step in understanding how parts of the world relate to all the other parts always opens up further avenues for exploration.

Religion, on the other hand, has nowhere to go, it runs out of the very words on which it is based. The God of theology is, apart from all his other qualities, thought of as absolute and unchanging so, once described, there is no need for further words. That is not to say that theologians such as McGrath would agree. They do in fact indulge in an endless production of works in which the words are re-arranged in an ongoing attempt to overcome the basic contradiction between their mental image of a pure unchanging God and his relation to an impure turbulent world.

Resolving the debate

Alister McGrath was prompted to write his book 25 years ago when he read Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene. That book presented a modern picture of the natural material basis for the evolution of human beings. There was no need for believing that some supernatural force or being played a part.

Dawkins’ point, that God was irrelevant to the study of human evolution, obviously reawakened McGrath’s feeling that the very basis of his theology was under attack just as so many theologians of Darwin’s day had felt.

He, McGrath, should not have felt any surprise at Dawkins or other scientific investigators ignoring the existence of a supernatural force (or its personification as God) because he had spent some years researching biophysics himself. In that role I am sure that he never once felt the need to include a factor for the effect of the supernatural in his explanations. Neither have investigators in any other scientific discipline. Supernatural force is irrelevant to scientific investigations.

McGrath does point out that to conclude that a thing is irrelevant does not prove that it does not exist. True enough, but one can multiply irrelevancies without adding anything towards understanding a problem.

There is good reason to think that McGrath’s belief in God is an emotional attachment coming from his early experience in a loving religious family. Darwin’s studies led him to comment, in his book The Descent of Man, “That a belief constantly inculcated during the early years of life, while the brain is impressible, appears to acquire almost the nature of an instinct, and the very essence of an instinct is that it is followed independently of reason”. The same idea was also contained in the Jesuits’ saying, “Give us a boy and we will return you a man, a citizen of his country and a child of God”.

If any proof is required for the overwhelming role of early indoctrination and emotional attachment it can be found now in the self-immolation of Iraqis and Palestinians.

That early impressibility is one, perhaps the strongest, path by which cultural beliefs and attitudes are passed from one generation to the next. Once impressed in the early years, the impressed images have to be sustained as part of society’s norms so that stability is maintained. In the case of the Christian religion that personal attachment is constantly strengthened by the continuous use of emotional words. One only has to listen to the words of common hymns and prayers to recognise that the emotional content is centred on love and comfort and the satisfaction of earthly desires. Even the ultimate goal, heaven, is pictured as a beautiful, peaceful place to be shared in the loving company of the father.

The modern Pentecostals, with their displays of shouting, sobbing and falling at the touch of a preacher’s hand illustrate the emotional ecstasy which is generated and used in a mass ceremony of devotion.

At the beginning of his book McGrath says,“the real issue for me is how Dawkins proceeds from a Darwinian theory of evolution to a confident atheistic world-view ...” I would have thought that the irrelevancy of supernatural forces to the theory of natural selection would have provided that basis. It obviously does not convince McGrath and at the end of his book he asks for the debate to continue: “I’m sure that we all have much to learn by debating with each other, graciously and accurately. The question of whether there is a God, and what that God might be like, has not - despite the predictions of overconfident Darwinians - gone away since Darwin, and remains of major intellectual and personal importance.”

My own view is that the debate has been going on, without any sign of an agreement, ever since people have been recording their thoughts. The chance of a useful debating conclusion being reached now is remote. Scientific investigators (even those with religious commitment) will continue to explore the real world without recourse to supernatural forces. Non-scientists with religious attachment will only be shocked into facing reality and a recognition that human beings are alone in the world when they meet a personal or community crisis and realise that appeals to their God get no reply.