Dawkins Only Knows: The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins
When I was in college, my favorite quote on religion came from Sigmund Freud's Civilization and its Discontents: “The whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life.” That sentence neatly summed up both my views on the subject and the disdain I felt for those who used faith as a crutch. I'm older now, and while I still don't believe, I've seen religion do things for people I didn't have the eyes to see then. The subject - how religion works and what it does for people - has lost none of its fascination, and I came to Richard Dawkins' latest book hoping for additional insight.
The book jacket describes Dawkins as the impressive-sounding “Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science” at Oxford University. I know from reading The Selfish Gene and Climbing Mount Improbable that he has a deep understanding of evolution and the ability to explain it to laypeople like myself with breathtaking eloquence. His illustration of how the eye evolved independently in several different species in Climbing Mount Improbable – which confronted directly a central doubt raised by creationists and stomped it like an unarmed narc at a biker rally – clarified the process of evolution in my mind like nothing I've read before or since. But his understanding of the "public," especially in matters like science and religion, seems a bit shakier.
The God Delusion is Dawkins' attempt to promote rationality and prod the religious to question their commitment. He presents the idea of a knowing, omnipotent god as a hypothesis to be tested, offers some of the better-known arguments for His existence, and then refutes them all in a chapter called "Why There Almost Certainly is No God." His basic argument relies on some musings on probability, the overwhelming evidence of evolution by natural selection, and the problem of "Who designed the designer?" From there, Dawkins examines where religion might come from, the purposes it serves for people, and whether religion is the foundation of morality.
Unlike the measured, painstaking approach I enjoyed in my previous readings of his work, The God Delusion is closer to a rant, leaping from one subject to the next (he's constantly raising points divergent from the subject at hand and cutting them short with "I'll talk more about that in Chapter 7"), offering highly questionable support for his arguments (way too many dodgy websites referenced – the story about Pat Robertson connecting Hurricane Katrina to Ellen Degeneres hosting the Emmys is presented as truth, with questions about its veracity relegated to a footnote), and dispensing a series of smug putdowns interspersed with more tempered analysis. It is, in the early going, striking how offhandedly Dawkins can toss out insults. He treats Rural America with particular scorn; for instance, Fred Phelps, the whacko preacher who tours the country with his "God Hates Fags" merch, is trotted out as if he is anything but a marginalized figure to illustrate the incompatibility of Christianity and homosexuality. The book can feel bloggy, almost as if he's been dragged into the mud too many times and now has trouble exiting it. Dawkins can seem so blinded by his extreme dislike of religion that he's allowed his emotions to erode his rhetorical facility. Even a committed atheist like yours-truly will often find himself wincing at some of the cheaper shots.
The chapters on the “Why?” of religion are among the book's weakest. Reading The God Delusion I kept thinking of The Apostle, the film directed by Robert Duvall dealing with the redemption of a deeply flawed Southern Pentecostal pastor. A recurring mantra in the film is that when Jesus walks with you, there is no reason to be afraid. The film brings this notion to life; a belief in religion gives people the power to do things they wouldn't be able to otherwise. The Apostle was, for me, the equivalent of Dawkins' chapter on the evolution of the eye in Climbing Mount Improbable. After seeing it, I felt like I understood on a new level the appeal religion holds for people. Dawkins acknowledges this force, although he rightly points out that this power can be directed toward destruction as well as good ends. He is stalwart in his opinion that whatever good religion has brought to modern society (the role of the church in the American civil rights movement is always the go-to example in this discussion) is far outweighed by the misery it has caused. The theories Dawkins proposes for why religion has attained its position in culture range from compelling (a Freudian reading of religion as an authority-craving state of arrested emotional development) to muddled (Dawkins invented the idea of the meme, but his attempt to view religion in that context seems half-hearted). The biggest problem with this section of the book, however, is the distance he seems to feel from the subjects of inquiry; a deep exploration of faith requires far more empathy than he musters here.
And yet, no matter how much Dawkins seems willing to sacrifice the high ground in his takedown of religion, as the book proceeds, some of his better impulses take over. It grows more enjoyable and more thought-provoking as it progresses, and ultimately the shape of his argument begins to make some kind of sense. Perhaps this is a deliberate rhetorical strategy: staking out a position so far to one side – calling for the end of religion, ridiculing believers – and then pulling back so that his more realistic goals come into view. When the mud-slinging dies down, it appears that what Dawkins is really trying to do is carve out a cultural space for atheists and encouraging them to join in public discussions as atheists. Throughout the book he compares the position of non-believers – in the United States, especially – with that of homosexuals 50 years ago. It’s an analogy that only goes so far (when is the last time you heard about an atheist-bashing?), but it is true that atheism is still barely respectable in public discourse and politics. It’s almost impossible, for example, to imagine someone who says flat-out that there is no God holding any sort of important public office in the United States, despite the number of people who might be sympathetic to that position.
By the last chapter, Dawkins begins to indulge his lyrical impulses and the book becomes admirable, almost wondrous, as he probes the improbable nature of existence, the varieties of perception, and the looming reality of death. It's a neat trick, really, that after so many wince-inducing passages and questionable citations he can finish with such clear and convincing images and make the book seem much better than it actually is. Dawkins remains a stirring advocate for the primacy of scientific inquiry and an all-around mensch, but the laborious process of reaching this closure means The God Delusion is far from his best work.
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