Dawkins, McGrath & me

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.