39 Ways `The God Delusion` Is A Sloppy Book

The God Delusion seems to have become an atheist holy book. Its writer, Richard Dawkins, has elsewhere proved himself an innovative and competent scientist and popularizer. But in this book the competence goes out of the window. The reader is swept unthinkingly along by assertion and (admittedly superbly written) rhetoric. But if you do stop and think – and if you know a little of the other side of the argument – you begin to notice how sloppy it is; on page after page after page.

Let’s observe some specific, major flaws before moving onto the big issues.

1-2. First, “in my humble opinion”, he’s seriously ignorant about history.  However can he write the absurd top lines of p.283 (I’m using the 2007 UK paperback edition):`  I do not believe there is an atheist in the world who would bulldoze Mecca – or Chartres, York Minster or Notre Dame`?  Has he really never heard of the communists blowing up Moscow churches and, most obviously, the massive destruction of religious buildings and artefacts during Mao’s cultural revolution? Likewise his ignorance of the deep influence of Quakerism on Gandhi’s pacifism ruins his argument on p.307.

3-4. Two pages later there’s, in my opinion, equally striking sloppiness; atheism may not have been a driving force behind Hitler’s evil deeds (309), but evolutionISM most certainly was: get a copy of Mein Kampf and look at the chapter of titled `Nation and Race` – but Dawkins seemingly hasn’t bothered to check that. (And he should, but doesn’t, spot the similarity between Hitler and what he quotes of H.G.Wells using evolutionISM as a basis for genocidal racism on p.306.)

5. His ignorance about history extends (as one might fear) to ignorance of the historical data about Jesus (117-20,122). He may not agree with Christians’ views of the historical evidence; but a book like this might at least be expected to be aware of them (see writers like Professor Sir Norman Anderson or William Lane Craig) and respond.

6-9. When he moves onto the Bible he proves as ignorant of the skills of literary interpretation as of history. (Yes, I know he’s a biologist, but it was his own choice to venture into these disciplines.) The argument is continually flawed by poor research. He makes no effort (and this is serious in a scientist presenting a case) to understand how biblical books work as interlinked literary wholes, before asserting that they’re `chaotically cobbled together… disjointed` (268). He makes no attempt to read the texts with any interpretative skill, hence eg completely missing the point that Abraham is (surely, for any reader) not meant to be read simply as a role-model, rather as a warts-and-all example of how spiritual leaders can fail horribly (274). Again, he fails to grasp that the fact that the end of Judges records something terrible (273) doesn’t mean it’s approving it (any more than in a newspaper); but rather that, in the trajectory of the book that it climaxes (if we read it with any attention), it shows how bad things have got. (Nor does he seem aware of the possibility that Jesus might be the 100% clear (Hebrews 1:3) standard by which we learn to assess such passages.)

10-12. Again: what on earth does he mean – again appallingly careless reading – by describing the city of Sodom as an `intensely religious culture`(272)? Likewise he shows no understanding of the cultural context of the Sodom story, particularly the overwhelmingly high value that that culture (but not necessarily Scripture, let’s note again) put on hospitality and protecting any guests under your roof (273). Again, in a religious context that loathed human sacrifice, a competent interpreter might at least have asked whether he’s misreading the Jephthah story in Judges 11 if he reads it as describing human sacrifice, and whether indeed the text doesn’t contain obvious clues to that effect (276). This man’s a gifted biologist, but does he know how to read?

13. Indeed — has he actually read the Bible himself? `The epistles of Paul… mention almost none of the alleged facts of Jesus’ life` (118). No – Paul only mentions minor things like who Jesus’ famous brother was, Jesus’ institution and his explanation of communion, his betrayal (on the night of the `last supper`), his crucifixion, his burial, and that he then rose from the dead on the third day, and appeared to Peter, to the twelve apostles, to five hundred people at once, to James, and then to the apostles again. (1 Corinthians 11 and 15, Galatians 2.) Almost none of the `alleged facts` at all, really. Has Dawkins actually read what he’s talking about?

14-15. More broadly, he makes no effort to understand the underlying issues at stake in the crucial narrative of the Fall (284) – they’re not discussed and rejected, just apparently unknown to him. Likewise he’s made no effort to understand what the cross might mean to someone for whom it makes wonderful sense (ie, there has once again been no effort to understand the alternative hypothesis); with the result that, having made no attempt to understand it and having researched it completely inadequately, he dismisses it (the same way that a poorly-educated country bumpkin might react to a brief TV programme on quantum physics) as `barking mad` (287).

Towards the end of his section on the Bible I wrote in the margin Bob Dylan’s famous line `Don’t criticize what you can’t understand.` This might serve as a response to much of the book.

(I was indeed struck by his repeatedly-confessed inability to understand how other people can hold the views they do (84,125,143,172, 296) – Bob Dylan is relevant again; and (81,91,173) his inability to enter into an alternative position.)

16. It might help if he showed any sign of ever stopping to ask himself just why the Bible is `the world’s all-time bestseller` (293).

17. Dawkins’ inability to interpret, or even see, alternative interpretations besides the one he’s jumped to, shows up in a different way on 297, where he denounces a rabbi for insisting that couples he marries agree to premarital counselling; might not this rabbi’s commitment to the need for premarital counselling have other (and good) reasons (eg ensuring good preparation for marriage), besides, as Dawkins thinks, getting Jews to marry Jews?

18-19. So it goes on. Mind-bogglingly, he says Jesus was `following the old testament tradition` in limiting the commands about `loving thy neighbour` strictly to Jews (288); has he really never heard of the parable of the good Samaritan, told precisely (Luke 10:29) as an exposition of that command? Come to that, if we’re talking about the old testament’s attitude to non-Jews, do we assume he’s never read the book of Ruth the Moabitess?

20. Again, he doesn’t seem aware of the data (292 is where he should seek to disprove it) showing that the `great commission` culminating Matthew’s entire gospel represents Jesus` loving attitude to Gentiles (to say nothing of other gospel passages like Luke 24:47, John 10:16 and 7:35). Again, this ignorance is incredibly sloppy in such a book about the Bible.

21-22. But he’s also ignorant on philosophy. The chapters on ethics are desperately inadequate, begging some huge questions. Especially: Are not the moral progressions beyond racism that he values flowing in fact from a Christian heritage, as promoted by such people as Martin Luther King, or Wilberforce whose faith motivated him and his Clapham Sect colleagues to be the prime movers in the abolition of the slave trade? And, might not some of these altruistic ethical developments be weakening as that heritage weakens (listen to gangsta rap)? Again, if we haven’t got God, how shall `equally sincere` people decide what is right and wrong (335), since it matters if there is no clear answer, and Dawkins has little of substance to give? (Dawkins does present his own ethical consequentialism with great confidence (it’s a matter of faith I suppose) as a credible life-philosophy, but its lack of consistency would get really short shrift in a lot of university philosophy departments.)

23-24. His concept of when something has been proved (298) is worryingly weak for a professional scientist. However strong he thinks his abstract argument that `We do not – even the religious among us – ground our morality in holy books` may have been up to that point, is he really incapable of observing the awkward empirical fact that in eg the current Anglican sexuality debates, the conservative Anglicans are very clearly `grounding` their position on their holy book? (He also doesn’t seem to notice that he contradicts himself on this point on p.343 where he quotes Sam Harris approvingly that Osama bin Laden’s killings built directly on the Koran.)

25-27. Then he’s indeed `amateurish` (308) in his sociology, as he admits. But anyone writing sociologically about a group of people (religious believers in this case) should do their research and seek to understand how they live from the inside, rather than relying on rumour, cuttings and innuendo. A minor example is his daft quotation about women loathing religion (58); hasn’t he noticed that, empirically, in most churches women outnumber men? Much more serious is his ignorance of Christians’ position that faith-claims are and must be open to debate (19,43,82). P.320 is self-evidently silly about fundamentalists being people who are impervious to evidence against their faith, as the fact that he himself has made converts from this background demonstrates. More broadly, however, in the course of researching the book one would have hoped he would have gone to any decent Christian bookshop and checked (then critiqued) the better-looking books in the apologetics section; he would quickly have learnt how important a solid, evidential basis for faith is for many believers, if they are to stake their lives on it.

(28. Although, this is a man who hasn’t felt he himself needed to have solid scientific evidence for his whole doctrine of memes!)

29. As an `amateur sociologist`, then, he’s ignorant about those he dislikes. Some of what he includes is plain stupid and instantly verifiably so, eg the quotation about the `principal concern` of American Christians being sexual on p.286. Personally, I have never met an American Christian of whom that’s true.

30. Pp.323,346 are completely wrong about `unquestioning faith`. If he listens to the message of the books of Job or Habakkuk being preached in any decent church he should probably hear the point being made forcibly that asking honest questions of God (as these books’ protagonists do) is absolutely right. And any decent Christian book he picked up on religious doubt would have said the same.

31. On p.380 he asks: `Can you even imagine a church or mosque` refusing to allow a child to be a member if it’s only because they’ve been told to be, like the self-described `Brights` (US atheist group) does? Well, ours certainly does, and I’m pretty sure that’s pretty common – we don’t like baptizing people, even on their request, until well into their teenage years, precisely because we want to be sure their faith is theirs and not their parents`. Again, sloppily inadequate research.

32. P.399 Why, he says argumentatively, don’t religious people talk with joy about the prospect of dying and going to heaven? Inadequate research again. Had he asked around (even around Oxford) he would easily have found many who do. (Take, for example, the joyous title of the Christian Medical Fellowship publication Dying – the Greatest Adventure of My Life.)

33. Moving up to the bigger picture we find equal levels of sloppiness. Dawkins’ grasp (ch3) of the arguments for God’s existence is superficial, and his treatment of them consequently is woefully inadequate. (Could he not have read and critiqued J P Moreland’s Scaling the Secular City, say, or Roger Forster’s Reason, Science and Faith?) Ch.3 would admittedly have needed to be book-length to be adequate, but this is just sloppy.

(Actually it’s very seldom he expounds both sides of a case for his reader to consider. Pp.312ff on whether Hitler was an atheist stands out as remarkable because of its rarity.)

34. In turn his evidence against God in ch.4 (`Why There Almost Certainly Is No God`) boils down to just one, endlessly-repeated, argument about God and the multiverse, which, though genuinely interesting, is unproveable either way. (No one has ever seen the multiverse. And we might wonder whether it makes more sense for God OR the multiverse to just `be there forever`?)

35. But in fact a huge, undefended non sequitur underlies his argument here. God, he repeats, is improbable as ultimate reality because He is so complex (176). Actually, the prime realities proposed by quantum physics are every bit as complex as those proposed by theology (a vital point completely ignored on p.54). And to describe the alternative theory of a multiverse capable of continually generating new and diverse universes as `simple` is bizarre (176).

36. One other way in which the book is sloppy is in its arrogance. Perhaps it’s not amazing that, to Dawkins, `enlightened` just means people-who-think-like-me (81); this isn’t surprising in a man whose co-warriors have the humility to name themselves `the Brights` (380). What’s more striking is his disrespect towards physicists as a profession (175), towards internationally renowned scientists like Hoyle (138,142) or Gould (81), or the globally-respected postmodernist thinkers he dismisses instantly as `francophonyism` (388). (Maybe there’s a hint of racism in the `franco` here.) And of course as an anti-Christian it’s not surprising he feels no need to love or respect his enemy, eg the patronizing way he speaks of the renowned Christian scholar Swinburne (176).

(But then why not be arrogant, unloving and selfish (he notices the issue without answering it in the note to p.246)? After all, judging by pp.247,250, altruism itself is primarily (to use Helena Cronin’s phrase about the moral sense) `just another of natural selection’s tricks`, isn’t it?)

37. But in fact he does need to engage with the postmodernists he dismisses; since, in his simple faith in scientism, Dawkins is a classic case of the `modernist` ethos the postmodernists argue is being left behind by our culture’s evolution. He might seem particularly responsible to do so since his `meme` idea is oddly postmodern in undermining the value of our beliefs – in its comparison of ideas to viruses, it seems significantly to strengthen the cultural impact of the postmodernist assertion that truth (including scientific truth) is inaccessible (eg Barthes, Baudrillard, Lyotard, Feyerabend), and that most of what we believe we buy into for other reasons besides its truthfulness. (As indeed would Dawkins’ words on p.416: `“Really”, for an animal, is whatever its brain needs it to be, in order to assist its survival.`) As it happens I agree with Dawkins against, say, Lyotard; but it’s typical of Dawkins` inability to engage with advocates of other views that he doesn’t debate with the postmodernists at all.

38. But then again, when there’s so much hostility in an influential writer towards those he differs from, you start to wonder where he’s really going when he pleads for totalitarianism. Dawkins wants freedom for his friends only. He cites with approval Nicholas Humphreys’ plea for freedom of speech to be removed from Christian parents (367) (so that their children can be brainwashed into atheism by the unspoken consensus of the media, presumably). Just the way it was in atheistic Russia’s gulags, and Mao’s atheistic China. (However, when it comes to `secular humanists` running camps to train children in their views, Dawkins finds this `entirely admirable`(76).)

39. And lastly, the book’s philosophically sloppy at root because Dawkins explains nowhere from whence he gets the moral standards by which his book condemns the evils done in religion’s name. Since morality is a subjective human construction (or, like our sense of reality (416), something that evolved merely to suit our evolutionary convenience), Dawkins’ own moral critique of religion is meaningless. In fact, his work is (unintentionally) one of the strongest forces in contemporary culture suggesting there is no real basis for our longstanding conceptions of `right` and `wrong`, and hence no reason not to be selfish. (In a time of profound environmental crisis, we need this like we need a hole in the head.) Dawkins, with his widely-spread notion of the `selfish gene`, has done as much as anyone to popularize the idea that selfish processes (eg of genetic evolution) are the basic, universal reality behind our existence.

But in the end, what crucially shapes the book is perhaps that Dawkins hates God, whether or not He exists (see p.51). And yet, for the reasons he outlines so well in his closing chapter, our brains can’t be equipped to handle something as huge as God would be if He did exist…….. unless revelatory help comes from outside. But if you hate God enough to close your mind to Him, you’ll probably never learn (at least on earth) whether He exists or not. A basic and massively important life-problem…

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