Darwin's Angel: An angelic riposte to The God Delusion [Paperback]

 

 

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This book has a good contents comprising a preface and chapters (1. A summary of Your Argument; 2. Your Sources; 3. Imagination; 4. Beauty; 5. What is Religion?; 6. Is God Supernatural?; 7. Celestial Teapots; 8. God's Simplicity; 9. Theories of Everything; 10. Dawkins versus Dostoyevsky; 11. Jesus, the Jews, and the "Pigs"; 12. Dawkins's Utopia; 13. Fundamentalism; 14. Is Religious Education Child Abuse?; 15. Life after Death; 16. Religious People Less Clever than Athiests?; 17. Does Our Moral Sense Have a Darwinian Origin?; 18. The Darwinian Imperative; 19. Religion as a Bacillus; 20. Does God Exist?; 21. Being Religious and Acknowledgements). An index, endnotes, footnotes or bibliography of references have been omitted.

I bought this book because of the subtitle, An Angelic Riposte To The God Delusion, I reall wanted to read a riposte to the God Delusion because of some of the material I have read associated with that book about memetics, ie culture and ideas reproducing themselves in a viral fashion through mimicry, I felt really needed a reply or at the very least a learned deconstruction.

In this respect this book disappoints, chapters are short, a couple of pages at most, with block quotations from Dawkins and others, some of which do comprise logical inferences from the more absurd or facetious points Dawkins has made and which I dont believe have been misrepresented here. For instance Dawkins suggestion that the abscence of religious individuals from academic or learned science circles and intelligence.

However, while it is definitely better than some religious replies to Dawkins, not holding creationist, biblical literalist or other perspectives and therefore not mirroring the pretty myopic or blinkered perspective of Dawkins himself, it can feel like a "Dearest Foe" read. In fairness I guess it is a riposte and doesnt aim to develop its points.

It isnt what I would consider a very spiritual book either, less than other historically researched books by Karen Armstrong on God, Religion and Scripture and definitely much less than books by CS Lewis such as Mere Christianity.

The writing style and pace can mean its a bit of a struggle, some points stop short, some are laboured, I had a feeling that the author felt some sort of urgency and a need to let no point go unanswered. In the main I felt it roundly sumed up a lot of what there is in Dawkins to dislike, without really providing persuasive counterpoints or really undermining his theorising. It certainly does showcase some really bitter athiesm and anti-theism but then if you want that you could read Dawkins first hand.

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.

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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1.0 out of 5 stars you couldn't make it up
This book is hilarious. The author clearly very learned(he thinks) has never once used his brain cells to reason out an argument. Read more

Published 1 month ago by definiteskeptic

4.0 out of 5 stars An intelligent and measured 'riposte'.
I have just finished reading 'Darwin's Angel' having read Dawkins' 'The God Delusion' a couple of years ago. Read more

Published 22 months ago by P. Brown

5.0 out of 5 stars Genuinely brilliant
I am not a theist, or religious. But this book is great. Like Alister Mcgrath's book 'Dawkin's God', Cornwell is not trying to convince his readers that God exists. Read more

Published on 18 Jan 2010 by Mr. Bde Wall

5.0 out of 5 stars Elegant and measured
I came to this book after reading Cornwell's autobiography which is burned through with honesty. Darwin's Angel is an elegant challenge to the fevered imagination of Professor... Read more

Published on 8 Aug 2009 by Erasmus More

2.0 out of 5 stars Boring
I naively expected some rational and genueinly critical arguments against the God Delusion. There are none. Read more

Published on 6 July 2009 by S. Arif

5.0 out of 5 stars A Must Read for Believers & Non-Believers
Cornwell's work always erudite has never been better than this eloquent, measured and enjoyable deconstruction of "The God Delusion". Read more

Published on 5 July 2009 by Leoman

1.0 out of 5 stars Supercillious nonsense
This book is written as reply to Richard Dawkins' excellent, if heavy-going book "The God Delusion". Read more

Published on 3 July 2009 by Peter Piper

2.0 out of 5 stars Convoluted and confusing
I bought Darwin's Angel because, not wishing to be considered fixed in my views, I wanted something to offset The God Delusion, which I found pretty well unarguable. Read more

Published on 13 Jun 2009 by A. R. Griew

1.0 out of 5 stars Angelic Speciousness
Religious belief is essentially subjective, and it is difficult task to justify an alternative to the objective view that, if there was ever a benevolent, omniscient, omnipotent... Read more

Published on 24 Feb 2009 by John Rudkin

1.0 out of 5 stars Riposte into own foot
Oh dear.

One has to wonder why Cornwell has chosen not to attack Dawkins' genuine arguments but wilful misrepresentations of them. Read more

Published on 19 Jan 2009 by D. A. Laturner

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