Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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103 of 116 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Pretty Polarising: Atheist Or Believer, This Book Won't Change Your Stance, 17 Dec 2007
So, having really enjoyed the celebrated work to which this book is a counter, I thought I'd give Dawkins's nemesis's book a try. After all, it's easy to choose to listen to someone who's arguing from your side; the challenge is to hear the counter arguments respectfully.
I'll give the professor his due; he has a measured approach that makes him far more charming a narrator than is Dawkins. The latter tends to go for the jugular, and I can envision him red-faced, pounding his keyboard at times.
Professor McGrath wisely lets Dawkins hang himself at times; when Dawkins is silly enough to use absolutes ("all religion is evil"), attention is drawn to it.
Nonetheless, writing a rebuttal to this book should also prove easy. After all, whilst it's true that Dawkins deliberately extracted bad bits of the Bible, it's still the case that they are in it, irrespective of whether there heppen to be good bits too.
Likewise, one of the most striking pages of Dawkins's work describes the god that is mentioned in the Old Testament using very negative adjectives based on accounts contained therein. McGrath's answer to that is "I don't believe in a god like that." That may be the case, but it doesn't change the fact that the stories that Dawkins read to come up with such a description are there, and so the professor's rebuttal is not effective.
I don't know. It's hard not to automatically side with the person who espouses one's own opinion, of course, in which case I'd be with Dawkins. But when all is said and done, this is not a cut-and-dried debate, and there is much that is worthwhile in the riposte. I would say, though, that Dawkins didn't totally undermine the case for a god; he undermined the case for organised religion. In a similar vein, professor McGrath's book is more a defence for the religious that Dawkins attacked with such zeal, rather than a matter of making "God" much more a viable concept for me.
This is only a short book. I'm not sure that I'd recommend it, just because there's nothing to it. Anyone that reads Dawkins's work can see that he's aggressive. Reasonable people are well aware that there are fanatical atheists that are just as zealous as their believing equivalents; we don't need to buy a book to realise this.
I'm glad that I bought this book just because I like to practice what I preach, about listening to both sides of the argument. It didn't dissuade me from my own stance at all, but I'm sure for those who share the author's opinions and beliefs, it will come as a welcome defence to Dawkins's affront.
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29 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Good Rough Draft of Ideas - where's the rest of the book?, 18 Nov 2007
To Alistar McGrath's credit he got me thinking a bit about some counter-arguments to Richard Dawkin's book 'The God Delusion'. He is a very good intellectual writer and puts forth a few good ideas such as - some beliefs may not be proven but justifiable (especially considering that half the world believe in some God), the relevance of a world view, and how evolution is not regarded as being incompatible with religious beliefs. He also tries to provide a balance to some of Dawkins very strong views about the role in which religion plays in our every day lives and how it impacts society. Unfortunately, he never follows through and hence leaves the reader wanting. He does make it clear up front that he did not want to write a detailed book that counters against every anti-religion point that Dawkins makes in TGD but that is precisely what I was hoping he would do (perhaps not with a 400 page book, but with something a bit more than a short high level essay). Like it or hate it, 'The God Delusion' puts forth some very powerful arguments against religion and the perceived irrational thinking that accompanies it. Dawkins does not don kid gloves and attacks religion very aggressively in his book - which was his intention. He was not looking to publish a politically correct book. Hence a strong rebuttal would have been appropriate and potentially very interesting - especially from somebody of McGrath's intellectual caliber. I am an atheist but continue on my quest for answers and I have a good appreciation for rational counter-argument. This was McGrath's opportunity to put forth some solid rebuttals but it doesn't happen. He stops well short of a full rebuttal to almost all of the issues raised by Dawkins so he lost his opportunity to persuade otherwise - which I assume was the reason for publishing the Dawkins Delusion in the first place. In short - had potential but fails to deliver.
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580 of 751 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Shallow, bland and hopelessly confused , 10 Jul 2007
Richard Dawkins' recently published and controversial book "The God Delusion" marks a significant departure from his popular scientific writing on evolutionary biology. It is a sustained and sometimes hostile attack on religious institutions and religious belief. Given the combative tone of the book, it is not surprising professional theologians like Alistair McGrath feel the need to respond. The blurb tells us that "McGrath subjects Dawkins' critique of faith to rigorous scrutiny" and that his response to Dawkins is "exhilarating and meticulously argued." A reviewer says McGrath "Addresses the conclusions of The God Delusion with the devastating insights of a molecular biologist turned theologian".
Unfortunately, McGrath falls well short of the comprehensive refutation of Dawkins we are led to expect. Whereas "The God Delusion" is a muscular, bare knuckle kind of a book, McGrath's response is little more than a list of counter-assertions based on poor analogies and bad logic.
For example, in Chapter 1 (p.3), McGrath attacks Dawkins' view that faith in God is infantile and little better than believing in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy. According to Dawkins, such childish beliefs are abandoned as soon as we are capable of evidence-based thinking. McGrath thinks Dawkins is not entitled to the analogy. He says "How many people do you know who began to believe in Santa Claus in adulthood? Or who found belief in the Tooth Fairy consoling in old age?"(p.3). He goes on to say, "Those who use this infantile argument have to explain why so many people discover God in later life..."
McGrath's argument here is unconvincing. For the child, a belief in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy is not irrational, because the available evidence supports that belief. The mince pie was eaten, the sherry glass was empty, there was sixpence under the pillow and the parents told the child it was true. What would be irrational would be to go on believing in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, when the child knows who really ate the mince pie, drank the sherry and put the sixpence under the pillow. Indeed, the essence of a delusion is that it is "a belief held in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary and that is resistant to all reason". And this is precisely why Dawkins thinks his analogy is appropriate. For him, belief in God is no different from a belief in Tooth Fairies or Santa Claus and those who continue to hold such beliefs are - by definition - deluded. The straightforward reason not to believe in these things is that there is no evidence for them. As to why some people convert to a belief in God in later life, surely the explanation is blindingly obvious; they are nearing the exit.
Later (p.9) McGrath addresses the problem of the "infinite regress". According to Dawkins, the problem for theologians is that in order to explain the presence of specified complexity in the world around us, they postulate an even more complex being - God - who they claim created the world. Dawkins thinks this is a futile strategy, because you then have the problem of explaining how such a complicated being could arise, or to use a slightly different metaphor, who designed the Designer? Darwinian theory, on the other hand, has no need of a Designer. Its great strength lies in the fact that it explains how mind-boggling complexity can arise out of primeval simplicity. McGrath takes issue with this argument, because he says that in reality science faces the same infinite regress as religion. To illustrate, he says "...the holy grail of natural sciences is the quest for the `grand unified theory' - the `theory of everything'. This theory would "...explain everything, without itself requiring or demanding an explanation". But if Dawkins' argument was credible, "this great scientific enterprise could be dismissed with a seemingly profound, yet in fact trivial question: What explains the explainer?" In other words, McGrath is arguing that science is no better off than religion, because even if there were such a thing as a "theory of everything" (TOE), science would then have to explain what gave rise to that theory.
Once again, McGrath's is unpersuasive. Firstly, if he is referring to an infinite temporal regress, then for the scientist this need not be a problem. According to Big Bang cosmology, the Universe came into existence about 15 billion years ago and at the same moment space and time came into existence. There is no logic in asking what came before Big Bang, because given that time did not exist prior to this event, such questions are meaningless. Hence, for the scientist the problem of the infinite regress does not actually arise.
Secondly, the majority of scientists working in this field - even if they believe a TOE is possible - do not claim that it would be the final answer to how the Universe began. Instead, they think of it in the much more modest sense of a theory that can explain the properties of all the fundamental particles and the forces by which they interact and influence one another. Such a theory would provide a complete account of the physical world as we understand it, but would by no means explain how that world, or the laws which govern it, came into existence in the first place. Indeed, many scientists would say that this is not even a scientific question, since it does not come within the purview of scientific methodology. Actually McGrath concedes this point, when later in the book (p.18) he quotes with approval Sir Peter Medawar's view that there are limits to science and that no conceivable advance in science would empower it to answer such questions as How did everything begin? So on the one hand McGrath accuses scientists of seeking a "holy grail" theory which they claim would explain everything - including itself - yet later in the book he maintains that it is a characteristic feature of good science that it does not make such claims. I think he is hopelessly confused about this.
But the key issue is clear. The difference between the scientific and the religious world view, can be summarized in a single word: doubt. Science is an endless series of conjectures and refutations, based on empirical observation. Accordingly there is no certainty in science - there are only temporary, probabilistic statements. As the great theoretical physicist Richard Feynman said, "I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure of anything".
If doubt is the defining feature of science, religion, on the other hand, has no doubts. It does not evaluate competing theories because it does not admit of any competing theories. Its central hypothesis - that God exists - is certain. A perfect example of this occurs in the "Dawkins Delusion" when McGrath states that he "...writes as a Christian, who holds that the face, will and character of God are fully disclosed in Jesus of Nazareth" (p.46). Now it is precisely this kind of utterance Dawkins insists is delusional: he would want to know on what possible evidence McGrath could base such a claim? Yet McGrath makes no attempt to justify it, which suggests that he is more interested in affirming his prior religious convictions than engaging in a genuine debate about the rational basis for religious certainities.
The "evidential gap" which separates the religious and scientific worldview is what ultimately lies at the heart of the debate between atheists and believers. Yet it is precisely this which "The Dawkins Delusion", for all its lofty ambitions, fails to address. Put simply, McGrath is always sharpening the tools, but never doing any cutting.
Dr WDAshton
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