4. Putting aside these philosophical matters, Dawkins's key empirical
claim—that religion is a pernicious force in the world—might still be
right. Is it? Throughout The God Delusion, Dawkins reminds us of the
horrors committed in the name of God, from outright war, through the
persecution of minority sects, acts of terrorism, the closing of
children's minds, and the oppression of those having unorthodox sexual
lives. No decent person can fail to be repulsed by the sins committed
in the name of religion. So we all agree: religion can be bad.

But the critical question is: compared to what? And here Dawkins is
less convincing because he fails to examine the question in a
systematic way. Tests of religion's consequences might involve a number
of different comparisons: between religion's good and bad effects, or
between the behavior of believers and nonbelievers, and so on. While
Dawkins touches on each, his modus operandi generally involves
comparing religion as practiced —religion, that is, as it plays out in
the rough-and-tumble world of compromise, corruption, and incompetence—
with atheism as theory. But fairness requires that we compare both
religion and atheism as practiced or both as theory. The latter is an
amorphous and perhaps impossible task, and I can see why Dawkins
sidesteps it. But comparing both as practiced is more straightforward.
And, at least when considering religious and atheist institutions, the
facts of history do not, I believe, demonstrate beyond doubt that
atheism comes out on the side of the angels. Dawkins has a difficult
time facing up to the dual facts that (1) the twentieth century was an
experiment in secularism; and (2) the result was secular evil, an evil
that, if anything, was more spectacularly virulent than that which came
before.

Part of Dawkins's difficulty is that his worldview is thoroughly
Victorian. He is, as many have noted, a kind of latter-day T.H. Huxley.
The problem is that these latter days have witnessed blood-curdling
experiments in institutional atheism. Dawkins tends to wave away the
resulting crimes. It is, he insists, unclear if they were actually
inspired by atheism. He emphasizes, for example, that Stalin's
brutality may not have been motivated by his atheism. While this is
surely partly true, it's a tricky issue, especially as one would need
to allow for the same kind of distinction when considering religious
institutions. (Does anyone really believe that the Church's dreadful
dealings with the Nazis were motivated by its theism?)

In any case, it's hard to believe that Stalin's wholesale torture and
murder of priests and nuns (including crucifixions) and Mao's
persecution of Catholics and extermination of nearly every remnant of
Buddhism were unconnected to their atheism. Neither the institutions of
Christianity nor those of communism are, of course, innocent. But
Dawkins's inability to see the difference in the severity of their
sins— one of orders of magnitude—suggests an ideological commitment of
the sort that usually reflects devotion to a creed.

What of the possibility that present-day churchgoers are worse morally
than those who stay away? They might be. Indeed C.S. Lewis, in perhaps
the most widely read work of popular theology ever written, Mere
Christianity, conceded the possibility. Emphasizing that the Gospel was
preached to the weak and poor, Lewis argued that troubled souls might
well be drawn disproportionately to the Church. As he also emphasized,
the appropriate contrast should not, therefore, be between the behavior
of churchgoers and nongoers but between the behavior of people before
and after they find religion. Under Dawkins's alternative logic, the
fact that those sitting in a doctor's office are on average sicker than
those not sitting there must stand as an indictment of medicine.
(There's no evidence in The God Delusion that Dawkins is familiar with
Lewis's argument.)[5]

In any case, there are some grounds for questioning whether Dawkins's
project is even meaningful. As T.S. Eliot famously observed, to ask
whether we would have been better off without religion is to ask a
question whose answer is unknowable. Our entire history has been so
thoroughly shaped by Judeo-Christian tradition that we cannot imagine
the present state of society in its absence. But there's a deeper point
and one that Dawkins also fails to see. Even what we mean by the world
being better off is conditioned by our religious inheritance. What most
of us in the West mean—and what Dawkins, as revealed by his own Ten
Commandments, means—is a world in which individuals are free to express
their thoughts and passions and to develop their talents so long as
these do not infringe on the ability of others to do so. But this is
assuredly not what a better world would look like to, say, a
traditional Confucian culture. There, a new and improved world might be
one that allows the readier suppression of in-dividual differences and
aspirations. The point is that all judgments, including ethical ones,
begin somewhere and ours, often enough, begin in Judaism and
Christianity. Dawkins should, of course, be applauded for his attempt
to picture a better world. But intellectual honesty demands
acknowledging that his moral vision derives, to a considerable extent,
from the tradition he so despises.[6]

5. One of the most interesting questions about Dawkins's book is why it
was written. Why does Dawkins feel he has anything significant to say
about religion and what gives him the sense of authority presumably
needed to say it at book length? The God Delusion certainly establishes
that Dawkins has little new to offer. Its arguments are those of any
bright student who has thumbed through Bertrand Russell's more popular
books and who has, horrified, watched videos of holy rollers. Dawkins
is obviously entitled to his views on God, ballet, and currency
markets. But I doubt he feels much need to pen books on the last two
topics.

The reason Dawkins thinks he has something to say about God is, of
course, clear: he is an evolutionary biologist. And as we all know,
Darwinism had an early and noisy run-in with religion. What Dawkins
never seems to consider is that this incident might have been, in an
important way, local and contingent. It might, in other words, have
turned out differently, at least in principle. Believers could, for
instance, have uttered a collective "So what?" to evolution. Indeed
some did. The angry reaction of many religious leaders to Darwinism had
complex causes, involving equal parts ignorance, fear, politics, and
the sheer shock of the new. The point is that it's far from certain
that there is an ineluctable conflict between the acceptance of
evolutionary mechanism and the belief that, as William James putit,
"the visible world is part of a more spiritual universe." Instead, we
and Dawkins might simply be living through the reverberations of an
interesting, but not especially fundamental, bit of Victorian history.
If so, evolutionary biology would enjoy no particularly exalted pulpit
from which to preach about religion.

None of this is to say that evolutionary biology cannot inform our view
of religion. It can and does. At the very least it insists that the
Lord works in mysterious ways. More generally, it demands rejection of
anything approaching biblical literalism. There are facts of
nature—including that human beings evolved on the African savanna
several million years ago—and these facts are not subject to
negotiation. But Dawkins's book goes far beyond this. The reason, of
course, is that The God Delusion is not itself a work of either
evolutionary biology in particular or science in general. None of
Dawkins's loud pronouncements on God follows from any experiment or
piece of data. It's just Dawkins talking.

We should not, though, conclude that there's no debate whatever to be
had between science and religion. The view championed by Stephen Jay
Gould and others that the two endeavors are utterly distinct and thus
incapable of interfering with each other is overly simplistic. There
have been, and likely will continue to be, real disagreements between
legitimate science and authentic religion. Some of the issues involved
are epistemological (Do scientific and religious claims simply begin
with different premises, the first material-ist and the second not?),
and others ethical (Where do we draw the line between what medicine can
accom-plish and what it should be allowed to accomplish?) . These
questions are difficult and might well merit extended discussion
between scientific and religious thinkers. But if such discussions are
to be worthwhile, they will have to take place at a far higher level of
sophistication than Richard Daw-kins seems either willing or able to
muster.

Notes
[1] Most evolutionary biologists would argue that we do not need to
explain anything as complex as present life to explain the origin of
life. We need only explain how a self-replicating molecule could arise.
Given such a molecule, natural selection can operate and complex life
could then evolve. Although the details are difficult and the case is
not proved, there is reason to believe that the origin of life may have
involved a replicating molecule called RNA. According to this theory,
this RNA was able to replicate by itself —without the assistance of any
proteins or other molecules. See James P. Ferris, "From Building Blocks
to the Polymers of Life," in Life's Origins: The Beginnings of
Biological Evo-lution, edited by J. William Schopf (University of
California Press, 2002), pp. 113–139.

[2] For more on this, see Dawkins's interview at Salon.com
(www.salon.com/ books/int/2006/ 10/13/dawkins/ index .html).

[3] For an interesting look at Sagan's thought, see Richard C.
Lewontin's "Billions and Billions of Demons," The New York Review,
January 9, 1997.

[4] T.S. Eliot: "The unbeliever starts... as likely as not with the
question: Is a case of human parthenogenesis credible? and this he
would call going straight to the heart of the matter." (From Eliot's
introduction to Pascal's Pensées, Dutton, 1958.)

[5] Even when comparing believers and nonbelievers, Dawkins is
curiously silent on one of the best-known differences. Believers give
far more to charities—even nonreligious charities— than do secularists.
See, for instance, the Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey
(www.cfsv.org/ communitysurvey/ results.html) .

[6] Dawkins would likely respond that his moral vision derives from
either biological or cultural evolution, i.e., from the spread of
"memes," his putative unit of cultural evolution. I suspect that
biological evolution has endowed us with a rough moral sense; but this
can't explain the kind of differences between Judeo-Christian and
Confucian cultures noted above. As for memes, I see no difference
between saying that my morals derive from, say, Christianity and saying
that my brain hosts a "Christian morality meme." In any case, most
scientists do not accept Dawkins's theory of memes. Lewis Wolpert's
reaction in his new book is typical: "Just what a meme is, and how it
is distinguishable from beliefs, I find difficult... . There is no
distinction made between memes relating to belief and knowledge.
Moreover, no mechanism is proposed for the so-called replication of
memes, or what they are selected for."