Campus Connection

The pre-eminent Oxford biologist, Richard Dawkins, gained fame with his critically acclaimed book The Selfish Gene some 20 years ago. Since then he has been the foremost champion of the notion of the self-perpetuating gene, i.e. genes use us in order to propagate more genes. So when I discovered he had “objectively and scientifically” tackled the biggest subject of all with The God Delusion, I was eager to get my hands on it. As a scientist, I approached the book with some skepticism. It has always been a belief of mine that science cannot explain or account for the existence of a higher being. And it is exactly that notion that Dawkins implores the reader to re-think. Why can’t science be used to explain the existence of God when it has been used to explain, often elegantly, the wonders of the natural world?

 

From the outset there is an underlying scornful tone to the book, largely directed at those behemoths of organized religion: Christianity and Islam. And therein lies the major criticism I have for the book. It reads more like an essay on the downfalls of religious institutes and their politics (an exhaustively documented topic) than a deconstruction of the existence of God, or the “God hypothesis.” Dawkins goes to great lengths to highlight the divisiveness of organized religion, the oppression of women, and the inconsistencies of the Old and New Testaments, while veering away from the central question of the book--does God exist? An expectation of scientific writing is brevity, and in that regard The God Delusion is conspicuously lacking.

 

Dawkins uses the first chapter to suggest that Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking and other eminent intellects are, in fact, atheists, thus implying in one swoop he is on equal footing with such great scientific minds and uses this declaration ultimately to lend credence to his atheistic beliefs.

 

Later, but not soon enough, and all too briefly, the book gets to the heart of his argument: evolution. Dawkins argues that for Darwin’s theory of natural selection to hold true, it makes more sense for a supreme being (God) to come last in the evolutionary chain. Assuming a god came first and before him there was nothing, he would have to be “irreducibly complex,” Dawkins argues, which, he suggests, flies in the face of Darwin’s evolutionary dogma. He later concedes that the probability of life “sparking” from the “primordial soup” of Earth’s early life is extremely low. However, taken into context with the sheer vastness of the universe with its many galaxies and solar systems, that probability suddenly becomes realistic, thus precluding the requirement of godly intervention. As compelling as these arguments for the origin of life are, Dawkins completely neglects the question of the origin of the universe. It is largely agreed upon in the scientific community that the universe began with the big bang, followed by an expansion of the universe that is still continuing today. Where did the energy and matter come from to explain the big bang? Can this be explained scientifically, or is this where God intervened? Questions such as these remain to be answered.

 

Overall, the book is refreshingly thought-provoking, compelling, and offensive all at the same time, which is obviously why it has been so popular. However for this reader, there were no earth-shattering revelations or truly logical, convincing arguments laid out in The God Delusion.