The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

The God Delusion
Richard Dawkins
Bantam Press 2006

(Clicking on this image will take you to Fishpond.com where you can purchase the book online)

My review starts with a question about Doctor Who, which is in the end, one of the points which I found really interesting in the book. Did you know that Richard is married to Lalla Ward? She played the spunky and intelligent blonde Romana on Dr Who, a female Time Lord, who journeys with the Doctor for some time before being replaced by the spunky and intelligent Adric, a male companion for the Doctor.

Anyhow, my question is: If the companions of Dr Who can be male or female, why is the Doctor always regenerated as a male? Time Lords can be female, right? Doctor doesn’t imply a gender, right? So what hasn’t it been done?

You might argue that this is a stupid question to begin a review of this book, except that I reckon that if this question had been the bee in Dawkins’ bonnet he could have written substantially the same book, but replaced the concept of “religion” with the concept of “gender”.

The basic premise of the book is that a biological scientific approach can hypothesise that faith or religious impulse is associated with a primary biological drive, which, if reason is applied, is no longer necessary for human survival. Thus, holding onto and promoting faith to the levels which produce the violence, conflict and dis-ease which are evident in religious communities today, is ridiculous. I get this, and would be interested in Dawkins’ view on a whole raft of issues which could have the same critique applied to them: gender, sexuality, monogamy, the quest for wealth and ownership of possessions, anger, jealousy, the need to subdue, the need to gossip, the quest to dominate your non kin group (apply your own pet peeve here).

But beyond this basic premise, Dawkins gets angry and argues that all promotion of faith or religion is dangerous and abusive and needs to be dealt with - now. He argues that the nature of faith places it in fundamental opposition to science and the understanding of that which is around us, which our ever evolving brains are able to explore.

Yikes. Here is where I start to get uneasy – Dawkins argues passionately and moves into philosophical territory without caution. A simple example is his illustration of a woman swathed in a burka as representing the burden of faith and belief in the world. Darwin, he argues, metaphorically ripped away a burka when he moved understandings of biological science into the era of evolutionary theory.

What I see is that he describes the “unhappy spectacle” of a woman swathed in a shapeless burka. Sorry? Who is unhappy? Has he talked to women in burkas? What did they say? The scientific world of post Darwinian understanding, while exciting, carries with it its own social, cultural and behavioural burdens. This is only acknowledged by Dawkins in a series of propositions about religion or faith which he answers in a manner that makes the final part of the book an excruciating read. It’s the kind of text which I was given as a student and asked to investigate the way language and imagery can be used to disguise the lack of cogent argument.

I was mostly disappointed in this book because I had expected so much more, but what I got was quasi philosophical populism. Lots of histrionic and entertaining language – not much new under the sun.

For this reason, I found the attempts to rebut Dawkins theologically kind of bizarre. Why bother? Dawkins doesn’t talk academic theology, he’s talking about his distress about the state of the world.

This is the way the book should be read, not as a serious attempt to name religion as an otiose biological impulse, nor as a serious exploration of the biological imperative to faith. (The best critique of the book as science I have read is by H Allen Orr in the New York Review of Books, at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19775.)

If Dawkins wants to make a difference, he might use his fantastic communication skills to start dealing with the really serious questions about human behaviour which lead to the propensity of fanatical rejection of “the other”. A nice pop introduction to that area would be to pose a challenge to Doctor Who fans to accept a female incarnation when David Tennant’s time is up!