http://www.nybooks. com/articles/ 19775

A Mission to Convert
By H. Allen Orr

Richard Dawkins
The God Delusion
by Richard Dawkins
Houghton Mifflin, 406 pp., $27.00

Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: The Evolutionary Origins of
Belief
by Lewis Wolpert
Norton, 243 pp., $25.95

Evolution and Christian Faith: Reflections of an Evolutionary Biologist
by Joan Roughgarden
Island, 151 pp., $14.95

Scientists' interest in religion seems to come in waves. One arrived
after the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859. Another
followed in the 1930s and 1940s, inspired by surprising revelations
from quantum mechanics, which suggested the insufficiency of
conventional physical theories of the universe. And now scientists are
once again writing about religion, apparently provoked this time by the
controversy surrounding intelligent design.

During the last year, a number of popular books on religion by
scientists or philosophers of science have appeared. Daniel Dennett
kicked things off with his Breaking the Spell (2006), an investigation
into the possibility of a science of religion. Reviewing evolutionary,
psychological, and economic theories of the origin and spread of
belief, Dennett covered much ground but reached few conclusions. In the
last few months, three prominent scientists—all biologists—have
published their own books on belief. Richard Dawkins, the Charles
Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford
University, has given us The God Delusion, an extended polemic against
faith, which will be considered at length below.

Lewis Wolpert, an eminent developmental biologist at University College
London, has just published Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast, a
pleasant, though rambling, look at the biological basis of belief.
While the book focuses on our ability to form causal beliefs about
everyday matters (the wind moved the trees, for example), it spends
considerable time on the origins of religious and moral beliefs.
Wolpert defends the unusual idea that causal thinking is an adaptation
required for tool-making. Religious beliefs can thus be seen as an odd
extension of causal thinking about technology to more mysterious
matters. Only a species that can reason causally could assert that
"this storm was sent by God because we sinned." While Wolpert's
attitude toward religion is tolerant, he's an atheist who seems to find
religion more puzzling than absorbing.

Joan Roughgarden, on the other hand, is sold on religion. An
evolutionary biologist at Stanford University and a recent convert to
Christianity, she attempts in Evolution and Christian Faith both to
explain evolutionary biology to fellow believers—laying out what is
known, what is speculative, and what is unknown—and to discuss what the
Bible has to say on matters relevant to evolution. These are ambitious
aims, particularly for so brief a book, and Roughgarden' s own
views—that, as she writes, "what evolutionary biologists are finding
through their research and thinking actually promotes a Christian view
of nature"—are not supported by sufficiently detailed arguments.

1. Among these books, Dawkins's The God Delusion stands out for two
reasons. First, it's by far the most ambitious. While Wolpert and
Roughgarden preach to the choir—each has his or her own audience,
rationalist and religious, respectively— Dawkins is on a mission to
convert. He is an enemy of religion, wants to explain why, and hopes
thereby to drive the beast to extinction. Second, Dawkins has succeeded
in grabbing the public's attention in a way that other writers can only
dream of. His book is on the New York Times best-seller list and he's
just been featured on the cover of Time magazine.

Dawkins's first book, The Selfish Gene (1976), was a smash hit. An
introduction to evolutionary theory, it explained a number of deeply
counter-intuitive results, including how an apparently self-centered
process like Darwinian natural selection can account for the evolution
of altruism. Best of all, Dawkins laid out this biology—some of it
truly subtle—in stunningly lucid prose. (It is, in my view, the best
work of popular science ever written.) While Dawkins has published
several other popular books on Darwinism, he has, in recent years,
turned to larger issues. In such works as Unweaving the Rainbow (1998)
and A Devil's Chaplain (2003), he's explored our sense of wonder before
the natural world and, increasingly, the tension between science and
religion.

His new book continues this last theme. Dawkins clearly believes his
background in science allows him to draw strong conclusions about
religion and, in The God Delusion, he presents those conclusions in
language that's stronger still. Dawkins not only thinks religion is
unalloyed nonsense but that it is an overwhelmingly pernicious, even
"very evil," force in the world. His target is not so much organized
religion as all religion. And within organized religion, he attacks not
only extremist sects but moderate ones. Indeed, he argues that rearing
children in a religious tradition amounts to child abuse.

Dawkins's book begins with a de????ion of what he calls the God
Hypothesis. This is the idea that "the universe and everything in it"
were designed by "a superhuman, supernatural intelligence. " This
intelligence might be personal (as in Christianity) or impersonal (as
in deism). Dawkins is not concerned with the alleged detailed
characteristics of God but with whether any form of the God Hypothesis
is defensible. His answer is: almost cer-tainly not. Although his
target is broad, Dawkins discusses mostly Christianity, partly because
this faith has wrestled often with science and partly because it's the
tradition Dawkins knows best (he was reared as an Anglican).

The first few chapters of The God Delusion are given over to
philosophical matters. Dawkins summarizes the traditional philosophical
arguments for God's existence, from Aquinas through pre-Darwinian
arguments from biological design, along with the traditional arguments
against them. In a later chapter entitled "Why There Almost Certainly
Is No God," Dawkins himself plays philosopher, presenting the chief
argument of his book. The God Hypothesis, he tells us, is close to
"ruled out by the laws of probability. " Dawkins's demonstration
involves what he calls the Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit. This is his
variation on a standard creationist argument. By tweaking that argument
in a clever way, Dawkins claims it now leads to a conclusion that's the
opposite of the traditional creationist one.

The creationist argument works like this. Living things are enormously
complex. Even the simplest of present-day organisms, like bacteria, are
far more complicated than anything found in the nonliving world. All
organisms carry genes, built from a replicating molecule like DNA
(which is itself very complex). But DNA alone doesn't make an organism.
Organisms also possess many different proteins (each, in turn, made of
amino acids), as well as other molecules that help make structures like
cell membranes. Moreover, all these parts must be arranged in just the
right way: membranes on the outside of the cell and DNA on the inside,
and so on. Creationists argue that the idea that such organized
complexity could arise by natural means—without the intercession of a
designer mind— is absurd. In particular, they argue that the
probability that life could assemble itself spontaneously is extremely
close to zero. To dramatize this, they suggest that thinking life could
arise by natural means is like thinking a tornado could tear through a
junkyard and assemble a Boeing 747. Such an event is not, strictly
speaking, impossible but it's so extraordinarily unlikely that it is,
according to creationists, unworthy of serious consideration. [1]

Dawkins's variation on this argument involves a judo-like move in which
he turns its logic against itself. In particular, Dawkins claims that
rejecting natural means to explain life and instead invoking a designer
God leaves us with a hypothesis that's even more improbable than the
naturalistic one:

A designer God cannot be used to explain organized complexity because
any God capable of designing anything would have to be complex enough
to demand the same kind of explanation in his own right.
In short, only complicated objects can design simpler ones; information
cannot flow in the other direction, with simple objects designing
complicated ones. But that means any designer God would have to be more
complex —and thus even more improbable— than the universe he was
supposed to explain. This argument, Dawkins concludes, "comes close to
proving that God does not exist": the God Hypothesis has a vanishingly
small probability of being right.

The latter half of The God Delusion is partly devoted to Dawkins's
discussion of religion as practiced. Not surprisingly, he finds little
good to say about it: religion for him is the root of much evil and its
disappearance from the world would be an unmitigated good. Religion, he
tells us, is certainly not the source of our morality (indeed the God
of the Old Testament is, he claims, nothing short of monstrous) and
believers are no better morally than nonbelievers; in fact they may be
worse. Dawkins regales us with tales of Christian cops who threaten to
beat up an atheist; presents statistics on the higher rates of crime in
regions that are religious; and argues that, when considering
religiously inspired violence and terrorism, "we should blame religion
itself, not religious extremism—as though that were some kind of
terrible perversion of real, decent re-ligion." Late in his book,
Dawkins defends a faith-free morality and provides his own, secular,
Ten Commandments. (For example, "Do not indoctrinate your children" and
"Enjoy your own sex life (so long as it damages nobody else).")

As you may have noticed, Dawkins when discussing religion is, in
effect, a blunt instrument, one that has a hard time distinguishing
Unitarians from abortion clinic bombers. What may be less obvious is
that, on questions of God, Dawkins cannot abide much dissent,
especially from fellow scientists (and especially from fellow
evolutionary biologists). Indeed Dawkins is fond of imputing ulterior
motives to those "Neville Chamberlain School" scientists not willing to
go as far as he in his war on religion: he suggests that they're guilty
of disingenuousness, playing politics, and lusting after the large
prizes awarded by the Templeton Foundation to scientists sympathetic to
religion.[2] The only motive Dawkins doesn't seem to take seriously is
that some scientists genuinely disagree with him.

Despite my admiration for much of Dawkins's work, I'm afraid that I'm
among those scientists who must part company with him here. Indeed, The
God Delusion seems to me badly flawed. Though I once labeled Dawkins a
professional atheist, I'm forced, after reading his new book, to
conclude he's actually more an amateur. I don't pretend to know whether
there's more to the world than meets the eye and, for all I know,
Dawkins's general conclusion is right. But his book makes a far from
convincing case.

2. The most disappointing feature of The God Delusion is Dawkins's
failure to engage religious thought in any serious way. This is,
obviously, an odd thing to say about a book-length investigation into
God. But the problem reflects Dawkins's cavalier attitude about the
quality of religious thinking. Dawkins tends to dismiss simple
expressions of belief as base superstition. Having no patience with the
faith of fundamentalists, he also tends to dismiss more sophisticated
expressions of belief as sophistry (he cannot, for instance, tolerate
the meticulous reasoning of theologians) . But if simple religion is
barbaric (and thus unworthy of serious thought) and sophisticated
religion is logic-chopping (and thus equally unworthy of serious
thought), the ineluctable conclusion is that all religion is unworthy
of serious thought.

The result is The God Delusion, a book that never squarely faces its
opponents. You will find no serious examination of Christian or Jewish
theology in Dawkins's book (does he know Augustine rejected biblical
literalism in the early fifth century?), no attempt to follow
philosophical debates about the nature of religious propositions (are
they like ordinary claims about everyday matters?), no effort to
appreciate the complex history of interaction between the Church and
science (does he know the Church had an important part in the rise of
non-Aristotelian science?), and no attempt to understand even the
simplest of religious attitudes (does Dawkins really believe, as he
says, that Christians should be thrilled to learn they're terminally
ill?).

Instead, Dawkins has written a book that's distinctly, even defiantly,
middlebrow. Dawkins's intellectual universe appears populated by the
likes of Douglas Adams, the author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the
Galaxy, and Carl Sagan, the science popularizer, [3] both of whom he
cites repeatedly. This is a different group from thinkers like William
James and Ludwig Wittgenstein— both of whom lived after Darwin, both of
whom struggled with the question of belief, and both of whom had more
to say about religion than Adams and Sagan. Dawkins spends much time on
what can only be described as intellectual banalities: "Did Jesus have
a human father, or was his mother a virgin at the time of his birth?
Whether or not there is enough surviving evidence to decide it, this is
still a strictly scientific question."[4]

The vacuum created by Dawkins's failure to engage religious thought
must be filled by something, and in The God Delusion, it gets filled by
extraneous quotation, letters from correspondents, and, most of all,
anecdote after anecdote. Dawkins's discussion of religion's power to
console, for example, is interrupted by the story of the Abbott of
Ampleforth's joy at learning of a friend's impending death; speculation
about why countries, such as the Netherlands, that allow euthanasia are
so rare (presumably because of religious prejudice); a nurse who told
Dawkins that believers fear death more than nonbelievers do; and the
number of days of remission from Purgatory that Pope Pius X allowed
cardinals and bishops (two hundred, and fifty, respectively) . All this
and more in four pages. Gone, it seems, is the Dawkins of The Selfish
Gene, a writer who could lead readers through dauntingly difficult
arguments and who used anecdotes to illustrate those arguments, not to
substitute for them.

3. One reason for the lack of extended argument in The God Delusion is
clear: Dawkins doesn't seem very good at it. Indeed he suffers from
several problems when attempting to reason philosophically. The most
obvious is that he has a preordained set of conclusions at which he's
determined to arrive. Consequently, Dawkins uses any argument, however
feeble, that seems to get him there and the merit of various arguments
appears judged largely by where they lead.

The most important example involves Dawkins's discussion of
philosophical arguments for the existence of God as opposed to his own
argument against God, which he presents as the intellectual heart of
his book. Considering arguments for God, Dawkins is care-ful to recite
the many standard objections to them and writes that the traditional
proofs are "vacuous," "dubious," "infantile," and "perniciously
misleading." But turning to his own Ultimate Boeing 747 argument
against God, Dawkins is suddenly uninterested in criticism and writes
that his argument is "unanswerable. " So why, you might wonder, is a
clever philosophical argument for God subject to withering criticism
while one against God gets a free pass and is deemed devastating?

The reason seems clear. The first argument leads to a conclusion
Dawkins despises, while the second leads to one he loves. Dawkins, so
far as I can tell, is unconcerned that the central argument of his book
bears more than a passing resemblance to those clever philosophical
proofs for the existence of God that he dismisses. This is unfortunate.
He could have used a healthy dose of his usual skepticism when deciding
how much to invest in his own Ultimate Boeing 747 argument. Indeed, one
needn't be a creationist to note that Dawkins's argument suffers at
least two potential problems. First, as others have pointed out, if he
is right, the design hypothesis essentially must be wrong and the
alternative naturalistic hypothesis essentially must be right. But
since when is a scientific hypothesis confirmed by philosophical
gymnastics, not data? Second, the fact that we as scientists find a
hypothesis question-begging— as when Dawkins asks "who designed the
designer?"— cannot, in itself, settle its truth value. It could, after
all, be a brute fact of the universe that it derives from some
transcendent mind, however question-begging this may seem. What
explanations we find satisfying might say more about us than about the
explanations. Why, for example, is Dawkins so untroubled by his own
(large) assumption that both matter and the laws of nature can be
viewed as given? Why isn't that question-begging?

Exercises in double standards also plague Dawkins's discussion of the
idea that religion encourages good behavior. Dawkins cites a litany of
statistics revealing that red states (with many conservative
Christians) suffer higher rates of crime, including murder, burglary,
and theft, than do blue states. But now consider his response to the
suggestion that the atheist Stalin and his comrades committed crimes of
breathtaking magnitude: "We are not in the business," he says, "of
counting evils heads, compiling two rival roll calls of iniquity."
We're not? We were forty-five pages ago.

Dawkins's problems with philosophy might be related to a failure of
metaphysical imagination. When thinking of those vast matters that make
up religion—matters of ultimate meaning that stand at the edge of
intelligibility and that are among the most difficult to articulate—he
sees only black and white. Despite some attempts at subtlety, Dawkins
almost reflexively identifies religion with right-wing fundamentalism
and biblical literalism. Other, more nuanced possibilities— varieties
of deism, mysticism, or nondenominational spirituality— have a harder
time holding his attention. It may be that Dawkins can't imagine these
possibilities vividly enough to worry over them in a serious way.

There's an irony here. Dawkins's main criticism of those who doubt
Darwin—and it's a good one—is that they suffer a similar failure of
imagination. Those, for example, who argue that evolution could never
make an eye because anything less than a fully formed eye can't see
simply can't imagine the surprising routes taken by evolution. In any
case, part of what it means to suffer a failure of imagination may be
that one can't conceive that one's imagination is impoverished. It's
hard to resist the conclusion that people like James and Wittgenstein
struggled personally with religion, while Dawkins shrugs his shoulders,
at least in part because they conceived possibilities— mistaken ones
perhaps, but certainly more interesting ones— that escape Dawkins.