Dawkins’ God: Genes, Memes and the Meaning of Life by Alistair McGrath
I bought this book last week to read on the train back to Leicester. I thought to get it as I thought it would be nice to read something negative about memes. Most of the books I’ve read on memes are pro-memetics, but so far I haven’t been fully convinced. The front cover also promised that it would be a challenging read:
In this remarkable book, Alistair McGrath challenges Dawkins on the very ground he holds most sacred – rational argument – and disarms the master.
Francis Collins, Director of the Human Genome Project.
On the back cover are some other good quotes:
A tour de force
Simon Conway Morris, Cambridge University
A devastating critique
David N. Livingstone, Queen’s University, Belfast
A wonderful book…This is scholarship as it should be – informed, feisty and terrific fun. I cannot wait to see Dawkins’ review of Alistair McGrath’s critique.
Michael Ruse, Florida State University
I wish I’d got that book. That book sounds like fun. The book between those covers was rather limp in comparison. McGrath closes his book by saying the discussion barely scratches the surface of Dawkins’ claims and that much more work needs to be done. So it’s depressing when the final quote on the back from the Times Higher Education Supplement reads:
McGrath has written a brilliant book, and it is difficult to think that his exposition of Dawkin’s writings and their religious implications will ever be better stated, explored and criticized.
It’s not an awful book but it’s patchy. It fits into five chapters. The first looks at the Dawkins in a social context to give some idea of what McGrath is going on about in the rest of the book. The second is the social context of Paley, the guy who thought up the Blind Watchmaker idea and Darwin. These two opening chapters are not bad. They’re well written, polite and generous to Dawkins but don’t give ground where McGrath thinks Dawkins is wrong. They don’t set the imagination on fire, but they’re reasonable starting points. However even early on there’s a sense of fudge in the argument. McGrath argues that Paley came at end of an outdated mechanistic theology and wasn’t an issue in the theology of Darwin’s day. And also that Darwin was influenced by Paley. I’m not sure to what degree the two statements are coherent.
McGrath does well in pointing out that Dawkins’ assertion that Science and Faith are in conflict is simply contradicted by the observational evidence. There are many scientists of faith and they don’t find any problem in reconciling the two. This sets things up nicely for chapter three which tackles the issues of faith. Unfortunately this is where it collapses.
It starts well McGrath argues that Dawkins attacks the extreme of religion as typical of the mainstream. I can agree with that. Fundamentalists are not typical of Christianity. He goes on to argue that faith isn’t blind and corrects a mis-reading of Tertullian by Dawkins. McGrath’s conclusion is that Dawkins has created a parody of faith which he attacks. Faith, for McGrath, is about following the evidence. I can almost grant that but, if you think about it, it falls down.
Looking back to earlier times, as an example, relics like saint’s heads were bought out to convince the mass of the truth. This would suggest that McGrath is right – ignore the problem of many saints having multiple heads for now – evidence is being used to inspire faith. Except what do we have faith in? Jamie Whyte points out we don’t have faith that alcohol makes you drunk. This is subject to proof. You can get evidence to support your case and have a great time doing so. He anything which there’s evidence for isn’t subject to faith. So where is the faith in McGrath’s universe? McGrath’s redefinition of faith as evidence-based reasoning does render it immune to Dawkins’ attacks, but Dawkins isn’t attacking evidence-based reasoning. What word would McGrath use to describe the justification for not eating meat on a Friday?
Surprisingly, for someone with a PhD in molecular Biophysics, he also misunderstands what science is in coping with radical theory change. Science, he argues is unreliable because it can never be certain its right. What we believe to be true today could be radically re-written by new discoveries. He’s right about the provisional knowledge of reality, but clearly wasn’t very Ph when he got his D. The state of knowledge of the cosmos has increased immensely over the past two hundred years. The scientific method, however, has remained pretty static. Philosophy of Science has moved on, but the scientific method it criticises is the same for Galileo as it is for Gary in the biology lab next door. It’s the same scientific method which is used to justify those radical theory changes. You can talk about the social nature of science if you like, but when the next major paradigm shift comes, the language of justification will be the same as for the previous revolutions.
Chapter four is a bit of distraction. It tackles memes and McGrath comes out with the usual objections which memeticists themselves have been raising. For instance he argues that memes are weak because they cannot be seen in the way genes can. Well neither can consciousness, but that’s not stopped Psychology departments springing up all over the world. More serious is that Dawkins, in my opinion presents an open goal with the concept of God as virus. McGrath’s objection is that virus is emotive language and that’s not nice. Me, if I were defending religion, I’d point out that Dawkins also makes big play of religion being inherited vertically. You tend to be the same religion as your parents. Therefore if it is a contagion, this would suggest that religion has some positive benefits for the host. This is somewhere where Dawkins could be taken on his own ground, but McGrath misses it.
It’s a muddled book. As well as faith, McGrath declares criticism about the Trinity off-limits, not because the Catholic church is on the fringe of Christianity, but because it’s a “cheap-shot”. He also not very clear on what he’s defending religion or Christianity. Some of his defences flatly contradict the notion of a Christian god, while others appeal to the utility of believing in one.
Ultimately the biggest mess is that McGrath has turned his back on science, but hasn’t realised it. The giveaway is in Chapter Three. He argues that Dawkins insistence that God needs to be explained makes no sense because God could be a fundamental attribute of the universe. God doesn’t need to be explained, he just is. This shows that McGrath has no idea of how Physicists treat fundamental particles. Take the electron as an example. This currently appears to be a fundamental particle – it’s not made from other things – but physicists are still trying to explain it. At CERN they’re opening a new accelerator to fling beams of electrons round at high speeds to smash them into their anti-particles – positrons – to see what happens. McGrath seems to assume that if we found God at the bottom of the universe we’d bask in awe and then go home.
A real scientist would say “Hmm… I wonder how he’d react if we stuck him in a narrow tube and smashed him into his anti-particle near the speed of light. Oi! Dave! You got any of that Satan left?”
Clearly written, but ironically McGrath exhibits the same tunnel vision that he criticises Dawkins for. —–
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