The God Delusion and Alister E McGrath

24 October 2007

He is a former atheist who studied physics and biochemistry, Professor of Historical Theology at Oxford University, and in recent times he's been a leading critic of Richard Dawkins and his runaway best-seller, The God Delusion. Alister McGrath has just been in Australia helping the Evangelicals brush up on their arguments against The God Delusion.

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

Stephen Crittenden: Welcome to the program.Today we revisit Richard Dawkins' runaway bestseller 'The God Delusion'.

Richard Dawkins: I believe that the question of the existence of God or Gods, supernatural beings, is a scientific question, whereas other scientists will say it's nothing to do with science, science and religion occupy two quite separate majesteria and don't overlap. I think they do overlap, I think they both attempt to answer the same kinds of questions. The difference is that religion gets the answers wrong.

Stephen Crittenden: Richard Dawkins, the author of 'The God Delusion', recorded during a debate at Oxford University hosted by Ravi Zacharaias Ministries.

'Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on Theology'. That's Terry Eagleton in his savage review in the TLS.

Well today we meet another of Dawkins' most articulate critics, Alister E. McGrath, Professor of Historical Theology at Oxford University, a former atheist who studied biochemistry and physics before coming to Christianity. He's the author of many books including two on Dawkins, one, 'The Dawkins Delusion - Atheist fundamentalism and the denial of the divine'. He's just been in Australia, helping Evangelicals brush up on their anti Dawkins apologetics, and I began by asking him why he thinks there's been such a rash of neo-atheist bestsellers lately.

Alister E. McGrath: Well I think part of the reason is this very deep feeling in atheist circles that religion ought to have disappeared a very long time ago. Ian McKewan, who wrote 'Atonement' and many other very interesting books, actually wrote about this just last year. He said, Look, back in the '70s we all thought religion was settled, it was done, it was dusted, it was on its way out, and that was the end of the matter. And it is still here and if anything, it's actually becoming more important in people's lives and in the public arena.' So I think there's this real sense of anger and frustration and in fact in some sources, despair, that religion is still such a major influence in the world today. So I think this rash of books reflects this sense of anger that something that should have disappeared a long time ago is still here. And of course it's been catalysed by 9/11, and Dawkins' book and Harris' book and many other books of course, have been catalysed by that signal event.

Stephen Crittenden: Interesting if 9/11 is such a catalyst, that Dawkins makes so little of Islam, even when he's writing about religious violence. He's really focusing much of this book on Christianity, isn't he?

Alister E. McGrath: Well he is, and I think that in many ways Dawkins finds that he can't criticise Islam directly because that would be politically really quite dangerous, and therefore he prefers to concentrate on soft targets, and there's no softer target than Christianity, so he and these other writers seem to be focusing on Christianity as being the easy target. It's really been very well received in certain parts of the public, because there is this very deep sense of alienation from what the Christian church has been saying. So I think his ideas have fallen on fertile ground, even though I'd want to say his ideas really need to be challenged, because they are in many ways I think very inadequate.

Stephen Crittenden: Let's talk about some of the specific arguments in 'The God Delusion', that you've been refuting. The key idea is Dawkins' view that the natural sciences lead to atheism, that they make belief in God impossible. You say science leads not to atheism but to agnosticism.

Alister E. McGrath: That's right. If it leads anywhere; and the point I try to make is actually the natural sciences can be interpreted in an atheist way and certainly Dawkins gives that perspective. But of course there are many, many scientists who are Christians, people like Owen Gingerich, who's Professor of Astronomy at Harvard, or Francis Collins, who directs the Human Genome Project. And my real concern is that Dawkins seems to be wanting to say that if you're a real scientist, you cannot be a religious believer for that reason. That there is this fundamental tension between science and faith. And I want to say that the history of the thing just doesn't back him up on this point.

Stephen Crittenden: Indeed, is that one of the biggest weaknesses in Dawkins' book, that he doesn't acknowledge the role of the churches and religious believers in the history of science: the Jesuits in astronomy and seismology, and medicine, for instance; or the fact that the Big Bang theory was first proposed by a Belgian priest. And of course the general public doesn't know all that much about this history either.

Alister E. McGrath: Well that's right. I mean Dawkins has this very simplistic idea that science and religion have always been at war with each other, and he says only one can win, and let's face it, it's going to be science. But the history just doesn't take into that place. The history suggests that at times there has been conflict, but at times there has been great synergy between science and religion and many would say that at this moment, there are some very exciting things happening in the dialogue between science and religion. What Dawkins is offering is a very simplistic, slick spin on a very complex phenomenon. It's one that clearly he expects to appeal to his readers, but the reality is simply not like that at all.

Stephen Crittenden: There's one particularly outrageous moment in his book where he talks about the great scientist Gregor Mendel, and suggests that he became an Augustinian monk in order to support his scientific research. I'm not sure how he could know that.

Alister E. McGrath: I think this is Dawkins' rewriting of history to suit his own agendas, to be frank.

Stephen Crittenden: You say another of Dawkins' main ideas which is an extension of his first, is that belief in God leads to an impoverished experience of the world, compared with science.

Alister E. McGrath: Well that's right. And we find this in 'The God Delusion', we also find it in earlier writings as well. And his basic argument is that if you believe in God, then somehow when you're looking at the natural world, you do not see it in a satisfactory or pleasing or aesthetically enriched way, as an atheist such as himself. And again, I find it very difficult to understand, well I was going to say 'this argument', but actually it's just a series of assertions, and the reality simply isn't there. One of the points I make is that - for example - if you're a Christian and believe in God as creator, then there is this real desire to want to study nature, because you believe that by studying God's works, you have an enhanced appreciation of God who made these things in the first place. In other words, by studying what God has done, you have an increased appreciation of who God is. And I don't really see any sense of appreciation of that in Dawkins' writings. And of course it's very important for another reason, and that is that many Christians say 'Look, if I were to study nature in depth, I would have an enhanced appreciation of who God is, therefore I am going to become a natural scientist and study nature in greater detail, because that gives me an enhanced appreciation of God'. Belief in God, if anything, is a motivating factor for wanting to undertake science.

Stephen Crittenden: It seems obvious, on the other hand, that religion - I mean this is almost too obvious to say - that religion has indeed been in retreat before science, as science has answered more and more questions about the physical world.

Alister E. McGrath: Well I would certainly agree with that. And I think one of the issues we have here is that in the past, religious people have very often overplayed their hand, and said in effect, 'Look, we can tell you everything'. And then science has begun to encroach on that, and they had to retreat. What I'd want to say is - and I think many would agree with this - that science is wonderful when it comes to explaining the relationships we observe in the material world. But there are bigger questions of meaning and value. In other words, why are we here? What's the purpose of life? And I'd want to say very clearly that science actually can't answer those questions, and in fact if science does answer those questions, it's gone way beyond its legitimate sphere of authority.

Stephen Crittenden: Indeed, I think in your lecture you quote the late Stephen J. Gould who is much more respectful of the boundaries between science and religion, as separate canons of knowledge.

Alister E. McGrath: Well that's right. Stephen J. Gould makes this point very forcibly in this book 'Rocks of Ages'. He says, 'Look, if science pretends to answer these questions, it's really gone beyond its limits', and there are many others. Peter Medawar, who won the Nobel Prize for Medicine some years ago, says exactly the same thing in his book 'The Limits of Science'. Now when it comes to questions of meaning, science can't answer these questions. So we need I think to be aware that science has its limits, and that's one of the reasons why I think science and people who believe in God need to talk to each other, because I think there can be a great cross-fertilisation in this area.

Stephen Crittenden: Would you agree that a big part of the problem for Christianity in particular, is that it built much of its doctrinal foundations according to the world view of Aristotle, which was partly a scientific paradigm but the Aristotelian paradigm has long since been superseded.

Alister E. McGrath: I think down the ages, Christian theologians have very often assumed that the scientific consensus of their day, whenever that was, was self-evidently correct, and so in the Middle Ages, they thought Aristotle basically was saying what was right. But of course the real difficulty then is that as time progressed, this was shown not to be the case. And it wasn't that Christian theology was wrong, it was that it had built too much on this unsatisfactory foundation. And so there's this constant process of revision. We thought this was secure, it turned out not to be; let's reconstruct. And certainly this is one of the points I'd want to make in response to Dawkins. The point really is that down the ages, science very often has built on what it assumed were absolutely secure foundations in the science, but the science has moved on, leaving Christian theology in a difficult position. Theology shouldn't have done that in the first place, that's the key point here.

Stephen Crittenden: You know it's occasionally been remarked to me that doctrines like the doctrine of the Trinity, or the doctrine of Transubstantiation, only really make sense to an Aristotelian.

Alister E. McGrath: Well I think certainly that's true of transubstantiation. The doctrine of Trinity I think one could give a very good argument that actually it's rigorously grounded in what we found for example in the Bible. It's making clear the very complex framework of who God is and how God acts that we find in the Bible, but certainly there's no doubt Aristotle has had an impact in some areas, and we need to look at that and critique that.

Richard Dawkins: There's a chapter on children, and what I regard as the abuse of children, which is the assumption, without the child's consent, that the child inherits the religion of its parents, and I've described that as a form of child abuse. I have been criticised for attempting to be dictatorial and to, as it were, steal your children away and prevent you from bringing them up Christian, or whatever it is. That's not my view at all. What I'm about is not stealing children, but raising consciousness. Raising consciousness in the same way as the feminists raised our consciousness to sexed language. There is no law, nor should there be, against talking about one man, one vote. But when you hear the phrase 'one man, one vote', many of us will sort of wince a little bit, we're a little bit uneasy about that phrase. It ought to be 'one person, one vote'. Similarly, if you hear the phrase 'Christian child', or 'Muslim child', you ought to flinch, because there is no such thing as a Christian child, there is only a child of Christian parents. It's presumptuous and I think abusive to label a child with the religion of its parents.

Stephen Crittenden: Is one of the problems for the Dawkins approach, and perhaps also for some of his religious opponents, that he, that they, lack a theory of culture?

Alister E. McGrath: Well certainly Dawkins has a theory of culture, and it could be summarised very briefly, and science tells us what is right. Science is the supreme cultural authority. And of course that is a very interesting statement, but there are many who would want to raise anxieties about precisely this point. Many would say that science actually is creating problems, for example, in relation to the enormous damage that's been done to the environment. Many would say that science has made things possible that has ended up by damaging the environment. So I think there's a real need to begin to re-evaluate the role of science, not idolising it, but simply saying while it has an important role to play, it needs to be critiqued, it needs to be challenged, it needs to be supplemented with alternative perspectives, especially ethical perspectives.

Stephen Crittenden: Well indeed. I guess what I was getting at there is that without a proper theory of culture, Dawkins doesn't really understand the ethical and sociological dimension of religion. I'm talking about his idea that belief in God arises from a meme. That's a sort of anti-culture idea, a sort of biological theory of culture. I'm also thinking of his view that bringing up children in a religious tradition is a form of child abuse. That almost sounds like culture is something alien.

Alister E. McGrath: Well that's certainly a very fair point, and indeed one of the major criticisms I'd make of 'The God Delusion' is that he doesn't seem to be able to distinguish between belief in God, religion, world views and culture. These are very important distinctions to make, and certainly you mentioned this idea of the meme, which plays a very significant role in Dawkins' book 'The God Delusion', and really the key point here is that Dawkins seems to think that his idea of the meme explains away belief in God, that somehow you can give a biological explanation of why people believe in God and that shows it is wrong, it can be disposed of. And of course the point you've made is a good one. Actually there are very important cultural reasons why people believe in God, because there's a cultural mandate to think about these things, to begin to evaluate the evidence for belief in God and then if there is a God to begin to express that belief in certain cultural ways. For example, ways of behaviour, rituals, actions and so forth. And again, I don't see Dawkins really engaging with that, which gives I think his critique of religion a real vulnerability at that point.

Stephen Crittenden: Now one of the most interesting areas in his book I think is the section in his book that deals with the links between religion and violence. Because after all, if you're right, and 9/11was the trigger for the book in the first place, this really gets to the heart of the matter.

Alister E. McGrath: Yes, there's no doubt that the most persuasive part of the book is where Dawkins argues that religion seems to have this innate propensity to lead to violence. In other words, if you believe in God, you are much more likely to be a violent person than if you don't believe in God. And I think personally, that's one of the reasons why the book has had such an impact in Australia because you are nervous about violence, nervous about extremism, and Dawkins offers an extremely simplistic answer to those concerns: it's caused by religion, get rid of religion and these things go away.

Stephen Crittenden: And you're saying the public basically believes that.

Alister E. McGrath: Certainly some of them would like to believe that. And I think that's one of the reasons why the book is having such an impact. There are many who would say Look this simply rests on a misunderstanding of what religion is all about, and I'd be one of those. But certainly there are those who would be sympathetic to Dawkins and therefore perhaps have been a little less uncritical of the book at this point, than they ought to have been.

Stephen Crittenden: It's interesting that in Dawkins' book 'The Selfish Gene' from the mid-1970s which is the book where he coins the term 'meme', we get Dawkins the social Darwinist, who suggests that selfishness and violence comes from our biology, and yet here he is in this book blaming it all on religion. It seems like an interesting contradiction.

Alister E. McGrath: Well it's an intriguing transition and certainly in the book 'The Selfish Gene' he seems to say all these things are genetically programmed. But then right at the end of the book he says, 'Well somehow we can rise above this'. But I'd want to challenge him at this point I think and say Look, I have no doubt that some people who are religious, have done some very bad things, but I'd want to make a counterpoint very forcibly. And that is, this is not typical of religion. This is the fringes being presented as though they're the mainstream. And we saw that in his television program, 'The Root of All Evil', which many of your listeners may have seen, where he presented some extremists as if they were mainliners, and I think that's a very serious misrepresentation. I want to make it clear, I have no doubt there are some very weird religious people who might well be dangerous, but those of us who believe in God, know that, and we're doing all we can to try and minimise their influence. The centre needs to be reaffirmed, and Dawkins does not help us do that at all.

Stephen Crittenden: No. On the other hand, it's true isn't it, that there's a very strong powerful view in popular culture about the churches, and their history. It may be a caricatured view that starts with the Inquisition and includes the Crusades and so on, it's a very one-sided view of course, but it's very, very deep in the culture.

Alister E. McGrath: That's right. And Dawkins is able to point to this narrative of violence, the Crusades, the Inquisition.

Stephen Crittenden: What can the churches do about that?

Alister E. McGrath: Well I think there are two things they can do. One is they can make sure the other side of the story is told. They can talk about the narrative of violence in atheism in the 20th century, for example in the Soviet Union, where there were a whole series of absolutely abominable events, which again reflected the imposition of atheism on a fundamentally religious people, and that needs to be said. But against that, we need to make this point, that does not mean that all atheists are evil, it certainly doesn't. Just as the fact that some religious people do violent things, does not mean that all people who believe in God do these things.

Stephen Crittenden: Well indeed there's a tendency isn't there, on the part of some of the churches to pick up from Stalin, for example, and say You see, this all came out of the Enlightenment, the Enlightenment itself is the enemy.

Alister E. McGrath: Well that is an important point that does need to be considered, and certainly Dawkins in the book, 'The God Delusion', does give a very uncritical view to modernism. If you look at this critique of postmodernity, there is no awareness that modernity created a mindset which actually led to oppression of those who did not conform to its ideology. So there is an issue there I think.

Stephen Crittenden: Yes but I'm making the opposite point. I'm suggesting that if the churches want to talk to the culture in a convincing way, criticising the whole of the Enlightenment for Stalin is exactly the same kind of thing we're criticising Dawkins for doing.

Alister E. McGrath: I quite agree. I mean there's a real problem here that you can make a valid criticism at points, but that doesn't mean you can throw the whole thing out because of that flaw and certainly you can't just reject the Enlightenment, because in one respect it went way off course. Certainly Dawkins has this rhetoric of exaggeration. 'Look, here's a problem, abolish it, and the problem goes'. No. There is a problem, but it can be reformed and renewed, and the key point for the churches is to remember that they have in the figure of Jesus of Nazareth, an extremely important resource for critiquing any use of violence. Remember Jesus did no violence, he had violence done to him. That's very different. We're to be more like Jesus in the way we behave as churches and that would really transform the situation.

Richard Dawkins: Given that right and wrong is a very difficult question anyway, once again what on earth makes you trust religion to tell you what's right and wrong? I mean if you do trust religion, where are you going to get it from? For goodness' sake don't get it from the Bible, at least not from the Old Testament, and certainly aspects of the New Testament have very agreeable vibes for us today, but how do we decide which of those are agreeable and which are not? It is the case that since we are all 21st century people, we all subscribe to a pretty widespread consensus of what's right and what's wrong. Nowadays we don't believe in slavery any more, we don't believe in child labour, we don't believe in physical violence in the home, there are all sorts of things that people used to believe in and no longer do, and that is a general consensus which we all share to a greater or lesser extent, whether or not we are religious.Now if you look at the Bible, either the Old or New Testament, you can pick and choose verses of the Bible which chime in with that decent moral consensus that we all share, and you can say Oh well, this comes from the Bible; this comes from the Bible. But of course you'll find plenty of other bits in the Bible which are simply horrendous by today's standards. So something other than religion is giving us this general moral consensus, and I haven't time to go into what I think it is, but whatever else it is, it's not religion. And if you try to cherrypick your Bible or your Qu'ran, your Holy Book, whatever it is, you can find good bits and you can throw out bad bits, but the criterion by which you do that cherrypicking has nothing to do with religion.

Stephen Crittenden: Richard Dawkins, the author of 'The God Delusion', who says there are certain things we used to believe in but no longer do, therefore our ethics must come from somewhere other than religion. And who seems to be saying that what's in the Bible and the Qu'ran, has to do with religion, but how you read the Bible or the Qu'ran has nothing to do with religion.My guest is Professor Alister E. McGrath. Alister the church seems more on the back foot than ever on this point of where values comes from. It sometimes seems to me that part of what's going on is that this is a very vibrant time for biology in particular, and we're seeing the kind of youthful exuberance of a new biological paradigm, as the biotech revolution gets under way. And religion creates a lot of problems for science at this particular time. It seems to me that one of the things that perhaps we've allowed scientists to get away with is the idea that science creates value.

Alister E. McGrath: I think that's a very important point. And actually Dawkins and I, I think, agree at one point on this. Because Dawkins is very, very clear that rightly, science cannot tell us what is right or wrong. In other words, that those who science creates a system of values are misunderstanding what science is all about. And I think we do need to challenge science at this point and say Look, the fact that something can be done, doesn't make that good in itself, that by doing something new, we very often open the door to possibilities that cannot be changed, that might actually be destructive. There's a real concern there. And certainly I want to affirm that science offers us many very good things. For example, better medical procedures. But we all know the dark side, that science is able to make available new methods of mass destruction that really can be enormously dangerous for humanity. So I think we need to be deadly realistic about what we're talking about here.

Stephen Crittenden: Are the churches also perhaps on the back foot here? We've been through a period where there's been so much debate particularly about sexual politics and sexual morality, people are less inclined than ever to take their values from what the churches say.

Alister E. McGrath: I think the real difficulty is that we need values at this time more than ever. And the churches perhaps are feeling discouraged about trying to get their values heard in this secular culture. And very often the problem for the churches is that their values are simply heard to be No, to this, No, to that. That we need to really present Christian values in a positive, engaging way and say Look, it's not about negation, don't do that, it's trying to say Look, here is an understanding of who we are as human beings, but what our role is here on earth and in the light of that there are certain things we should be doing, and certain other things we need to be much more critical of. And we need to sell this big picture, not just individual Nos to this, that and the other, but rather a powerful, persuasive, compelling view of human identity, which enables us to show that there are certain things we should be doing, and certain things also that we should not.

Stephen Crittenden: It's often seemed to me that the Darwinian world view does raise many difficult questions for religion, but perhaps the most interesting questions aren't the ones to do with whether God exists and whether God created the universe, but the questions about whether God is a loving God, the questions about the nature of good and evil.

Alister E. McGrath: I'd agree with that. I think certainly Darwinism does raise many questions, not just for Christians, but for all of us. One of the big questions debated in the late 19th and early 20th century was this. Look, Darwinism presents us with a narrative which is about the strongest winning out. Can we transfer that to society as a whole, and say Look, let's let the strong win. And you can see that Darwinism does pose a challenge, not simply to some Christian values, but to some values that are deeply embedded in civilisation as a whole. And the real question is this. Do we just say Well Darwinism may help us understand what's happening in nature, but that does not have an impact on the way we ought to behave, either as Christians or simply as good citizens. And that certainly to me is a very important point. Darwinism is articulating a value system which if it were to be applied rigorously, would I think lead to the weak being marginalised, set to one side, so that the strong can simply overwhelm everyone else.

Stephen Crittenden: A last question, Professor McGrath, is there a sense perhaps in which you and Dawkins share the same premises? You both come out of an English empirical philosophical tradition. Perhaps you as an Evangelical are just as caught up with propositions and proof as he is?

Alister E. McGrath: Well Dawkins and I are both men of faith. We both believe certain things to be true, and we know we can't prove them. Dawkins I think has perhaps an exaggerated sense of what he can show, but certainly when you look at him rigorously, he is a man of faith who believes certain things, that cannot actually be demonstrably so. And he and I both believe that we are telling the truth, and we both believe also that if we are right, this has a major implication for the way people live their lives.

Stephen Crittenden: Is it perhaps a trap for Christianity though, in this kind of argument, when it's at its most propositional?

Alister E. McGrath: Yes, it is. And the real difficulty is that very often we have a very abstract debate about propositions, when really what Christians ought to be doing is talking about the capacity of the Gospel to change people's lives, truly and really. The key point for me is not just that Christianity is true, but that it is real, that it has this capacity to change people's lives. That's not an abstract idea, but is a living reality, and that's very different.

Stephen Crittenden: Thank you very much for joining us on the program.

Alister E. McGrath: It's been my pleasure.

Stephen Crittenden: Alister E. McGrath is the Professor of Historical Theology at Oxford University. His books include 'The Twilight of Atheism', 'Dawkins' God - Genes, Means and the Meaning of Life', and 'The Dawkins Delusion'.Thanks this week to our producers, Hagar Cohen and John Diamond.

And speaking of atheist violence in the 20th century, next week we're taking a look at the Spanish Civil War, which saw the murder and martyrdom of more than 7,000 priests, bishops, brothers and nuns. 498 of them are about to be beatified in Rome.Goodbye now, from Stephen Crittenden.

GuestsAlister McGrathProfessor of Historical Theology at Oxford University McGrathPublisher: Blackwell PublishingTitle: The Twilight of AtheismAuthor: Alister McGrathPublisher: Random HousePresenterStephen CrittendenProducerHagar Cohenhttp://www.abc.net.au/rn/religionreport/stories/2007/2068794.htm