Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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73 of 105 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Darwin's Angel gives Dawkins a pasting?, 16 Sep 2007
I approached this book with some glee; it has generally had good reviews and I had high hopes of it. There have been several previous books, attempting serious criticisms of Richard Dawkins's highly popular (currently 51 weeks on the US `Bestseller list') The God Delusion. These earlier books disappointed me; they either failed to rebut Dawkins, they misrepresented him or, it appeared, their authors had not read TGD. So, how does Cornwell's Darwin's Angel compare? Unlike other writers, Cornwell has clearly read TGD; but to what effect? I had some surprises. The seraph writes:
Two natural philosophers, Diderot and d'Holbach, invoked atheism in reaction to theology's continued sway over physics, mathematics and medicine. These philosophers... were convinced that the autonomy of the sciences must be achieved by denying the existence of God. (DA, p. 158)
This misrepresents the French Enlightenment. The philosophes railed against the Church (not `theology') for its stifling of rational inquiry and it's cruel, authoritarian nature. In writing the Encyclopedie, the attempt to record the sum of human knowledge at the time, the philosophes did not `deny the existence of God' to achieve the autonomy of science; some may have concluded `there is no God' but others, perhaps the majority, were actually Deists and believed in a non-interventionist, non-personal God. And the Encyclopedie was about far more than science.
You may not see this as important and think that such differences do not matter. But they do. It is an example of how Cornwell twists things. Virtually the whole of Chapter 10 is a mis-representation of Dawkins's writing about Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov.
Then there is Chapter 4, the `Beauty' argument. Here, the seraph again wilfully misunderstands Dawkins's position but, as for Chapter 10, you would have to read TGD yourself to understand. Here's just a snippet, where you can see that Cornwell doesn't give the whole picture:
It seems perfectly understandable, doesn't it, that an artist should be moved by a religious story without necessarily adhering to orthodox beliefs. Could anyone doubt that...the music of Mozart's Requiem was influenced by the liturgy of the Mass of the Dead? (DA, p. 18)
Well, you also have to understand patronage. Forget Amadeus here. Because Mozart - an Enlightenment figure par excellence - was hard up at the time, he was probably more influenced by the promise of a large fee from Count Walsegg-Stuppach who commissioned the work.
Finally, here's some more and obvious mis-attribution. Dawkins writes of the Amish, parodying and ridiculing an implied legal opinion thus:
... you quaint little people with your bonnets and breeches, your horse buggies, your archaic dialect and your earth-closet privies, you enrich our lives. Of course you must be allowed to trap your children with you in your seventeenth-century time warp, otherwise something irretrievable would be lost to us: a part of the wonderful diversity of human culture. (TGD, p.331; DA, p.107)
Cornwell's seraph put these words into Dawkins's mouth when it is perfectly clear from the text that Dawkins is attributing that naïve view to the US Supreme Court that decided that children from the Amish community need not have a proper education.
The seraph, with extraordinary effrontery, then holds up the Amish as paragons of resource conservation. In this respect, the Amish and the Unabomber (remember him?) have a lot in common. His manifesto begins: `The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.' If one really wants to preserve the Amish lifestyle, why not consign it to the Epcot Centre in Disneyworld? There is a museum, `Blists Hill Victorian Town', at Ironbridge in Shropshire UK, the cradle of the Industrial Revolution. Costumed people greet visitors and point out primitive aspects of their ancestors' lives. But they take off their costumes and return to a proper life in the evenings. The Amish children do not have this choice.
In his preface, Cornwell is explicit that he intends `...not so much to pick a fight...as to offer a few `grace notes'...and...glosses in the interests of sharper logic, closer insight, and factual accuracy' (DA p. 18). Well, phooey! If logic equals caprice, insight equals obfuscation and factual accuracy equals willful misrepresentation, then he's on target. His seraph is facile, ethereal and dishonest. If you read Darwin's Angel, you will find a travesty of Dawkins's views and, if you accept Cornwell's misrepresentations, you will find yourself very badly informed by his perversions. Dawkins is vulnerable in several areas: the supposed evolutionary value of religion, the nature of `evidence', and the diverse nature of faith, for example. He draws no distinction between `reasonable faith' and `blind faith' and his reasoning for conflating them, particularly in relation to terrorism, is incomplete. If you want to be able to refute Dawkins's arguments, you would be wiser to buy The God Delusion instead and make your own judgements.
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81 of 120 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
These dogmatists, they don't like it up 'em!, 25 Sep 2007
This is a small book, printed on thick paper with big margins - which sounds like a criticism, but, since it makes its case succintly, stylishly and, for the most part, carefully, really functions as a dig at Richard Dawkins' big book, The God Delusion, which brims with ideas apparently cribbed from stage 1 philosophy notes - the implication being that a more careful and detailed exposition would be lost on the sort of reader who was impressed with Richard Dawkins' original arguments.
Cornwell's book strikes just the right tone - faintly amused and rather derisive of Dawkins' great foray into religious studies: treating a dogmatic zoologist as a serious entrant in the philophy of religion would be to afford him too much respect: a courtesy Dawkins himself wouldn't extend for a moment if confronted with a dogmatic religious fundamentalist wishing to discuss biology (famously, Dawkins refuses to even debate such people).
Cornwell is also wise not to get dragged too far into the merits of the issue (i.e., whether there actually is a God) and instead spends his few pages more profitably remarking that, whatever ones position on that question, Dawkins' arguments simply can't carry the day, unless you really want them to.
That's important because Cornwell can therefore carry along skeptics like me, who don't personally subscribe to religious belief, but still find Dawkins' dogmatic essentialism a crashing bore.
Along the way Cornwell makes some thumping scores and while, as other reviewers have noted, he may misconstrue Dawkins' arguments in a couple of places, they don't really make a difference and, in any case, for a Dawkinite to make that protest really is to call the kettle black. The scores he does make are doozies, and one in particular stood out: Dawkins' support for Martin Rees' rebuttal of the Anthropic Principal by means of the "multiverse" - the suggestion that there are many universes, co-existing like bubbles of foam, in a "multiverse", and only one of these universes needs to have the right "bye-laws" to sustain evolved life. Of course, that's a moronic idea, and Cornwell shows admirable restraint in his derision: "there are no more observable data for this "suggestion" than the positing of [Bertrand Russell's hypothetical] miniature teapot circumnavigating the earth". Quite.
In other words, Richard Dawkins is prepared to resort to unfalsifiable, non-causal explanations when it suits him, along with the best of the theists he decries.
I still think there is room for a book taking an expressly non-religious (and therefore non-defensive) line - that the scientific realism that Dawkins insists on is indefensible; that there is room on the planet for religious, literary, scientific and moral stories to sit alongside each other - that they need not (and given their different applications, cannot) get in each others way: the late Stephen Jay Gould got closest to that with his appeal for religious-scientific detente in "Rocks of Ages", and the late Richard Rorty, especially in "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature" and "Philosophy and Social Hope" had a thing or two to say about it, too.
Nonetheless, this volume (perhaps once in paperback) has much to recommend it.
Olly Buxton
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65 of 101 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
With angels like these, who needs demons?, 13 Sep 2007
It would be hard to find a better illustration of the old proverb that one shouldn't judge a book by its cover than this latest offering from John Cornwell; for the cover of Darwin's Angel is really rather beautiful and worth looking it. Sadly, any hope that its contents may be equally rewarding is destroyed from the very first sentence, which confidently informs the reader that "One of the most beautiful conceits of mortal wit is the idea of the angel; for angels exemplify, symbolise, and render intelligible the dynamic mental capacity known as imagination." (They do WHAT?)
Assuming that you are able either to untangle that particular piece of mangled logic or to put it aside as unimportant and press on regardless, the rest of the book continues in much the same vein.
Cornwell pounces on every instance in The God Delusion where Dawkins has dared to pronounce on the nature of religion, and gleefully proclaims it to be not what the religious believe at all. He does this, however, with more predictability than clarity, for having ploughed through the entire book I am left none the wiser as to what he thinks the religious really do believe. It would appear that they believe whatever they are able to imagine (which of course varies from believer to believer), and that we should respect their imagination by acknowledging that it's just possible that it may have hit on something resembling the truth. On this basis, I see little option but to conclude that there are roughly 6 billion deities alive and active in today's world and that there's precious little point in thinking about any of them, since any conclusions we reach will be wrong in 5,999,999,999 out of 6,000,000,000 cases.
The angel in Cornwell's book, it must be said, displays a surprisingly spiteful streak and I felt that Richard Dawkins had been rather unfortunate in having this particular seraph assigned to him as his guardian. Would you feel your reputation and wellbeing were in safe hands when entrusted to someone who regularly went considerably out of his way to show you in the worst possible light? Who consistently twisted and distorted your words, actions and motives? Who felt no compunction in resorting to frequently repeated personal jibe and insult? And who patently hadn't read your book (or at least, not with any intention of understanding it) before attempting to demolish it publicly? (And, moreover, who was so inept, that he failed, even then?)
No, this angel is mean-spirited, snide, ungenerous, sneaky and, one suspects, downright dishonest. His outbursts of barely comprehensible evasion, self-justification and defamation might almost be comical (but for their signal lack of warmth, humanity or truth), but they hardly form a coherent or credible response to a well reasoned, logically impeccable argument, such as can be found in The God Delusion.
This angel is also strikingly insular. Despite his ability to "ring the earth in a trice", it would appear that he prefers to remain in the polite confines of the theology reading room at Jesus College, Cambridge. Certainly he has not ventured to the USA recently, for he regularly asserts that the fundamentalist religion decried by Dawkins only exists in a small minority of believers, and that the majority of religionists accept evolution and a non-literal interpretation of the Bible without demur. This is one angel who really should get out more.
Cornwell is an ex-seminarian, and it is impossible to escape the impression that he has spent so much of his life contemplating his navel that all his thoughts now get caught up in the swirling vortex of it, landing dizzy, confused and incompletely digested in his gut, where they mingle with bile and re-emerge later in the only biologically possible form via the only biologically possible route.
Darwin's Angel is a perversion of language, intellect, integrity, decency and, in all likelihood, religion too. Nevertheless I have given it 2 stars: one because the cover really IS rather lovely, and the other because, as an atheist, I take my consolations where I realistically can and it is, at least, mercifully short.
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