4 Sermon for Matins: 'Dawkins and The God Delusion'

Four sermons against The God Delusion by the Reverend Dr Nicholas Sagovsky, Canon Theologian of Westminster Abbey

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Sermon 1
Sermon 2
Sermon 3
Sermon 4

Reposted from:
http://www.westminster-abbey.org/voice/sermon/archives/070204_dawkins1.htm

Dawkins and The God Delusion: 1

During February I shall be preaching each Sunday at Matins. I had been working out a nice little series of sermons on a subject that interested me (never mind you!) but then everywhere I went I seemed to see Richard Dawkins' book The God Delusion.1 I am told it has been in the Amazon top ten since it was published. Clearly, lots of people are reading it, just as a year ago lots of people saw Dawkins' television programme 'The Root of All Evil?. Dawkins must be the best-known and most articulate critic of Christianity, indeed of all religious belief, writing in English today. This is a challenge a Christian like myself cannot ignore, so over the next four weeks I plan to discuss the four reasons he says people are religious, and to try to respond to the critique of religious belief in The God Delusion.

Though I had been aware of the book for some time, I didn't immediately buy it. Some years ago I tried to read The Selfish Gene2and failed. As it happens, Dawkins and I went to the same school so we had the same school chaplain, who is clearly identifiable in The God Delusion, and I presume we had the same biology teacher, who was furious when I got an A in A level biology. He said I didn't know any biology but just knew how to pass exams. My experience with the Selfish Gene undoubtedly proved him right.

But The God Delusion isn't about biology. It's a searing attack on religion and a searing attack on the God who is worshipped in monotheistic religions. As an attack on religion, it might have been better entitled The Religion Delusion. As an attack on God, it is very much the Western God (the God of Aristotle and of some of the Hebrew Scriptures, so some of the Christian, Jewish and Muslim Scriptures) who is in the line of fire. Dawkins is passionate about the damage done by belief in God and clearly wants to stop it.

There is much here to agree with. The trouble is he goes over the top. So, he writes, 'Imagine, with John Lennon, a world with no religion. Imagine no suicide bombers, no 9/11, no 7/7, no Crusades, no witch-hunts, no Gunpowder Plot, no Indian partition, no Israeli/Palestinian wars, no Serb/Croat/Muslim massacres, no persecution of Jews as 'Christ-killers', no Northern Ireland 'troubles', no 'honour killings' ... . Imagine no Taliban to blow up ancient statues, no beheadings of blasphemers, no floggings of female skin for the crime of showing an inch of it ... ' (pp. 2-3). And so on. Dawkins specifically rejects making religion the 'root of all evil'. Nevertheless, he comes close to blaming religion for most of the conflicts in the world, and slides gently into blaming God. On the other hand, his belief that atheism causes no such evils passes silently over the anti-religious persecutions of the French and Russian revolutions, the enormous sufferings of Christians and Jews in Soviet prison camps, and of the Chinese people in the Cultural Revolution.

The book has received mixed reviews. There is a good deal to criticise about it as a book written in a popular style for a popular market, but it is at the same time a serious and powerful critique of religious belief which throws down the gauntlet, in particular to theologians. In a series of sermons, I can't do more than sketch a response to Dawkins, but I hope that what I can say helps to show there are powerful arguments to be put on the other side, that it is possible to be religious without being irrational, that we can (indeed we must) learn from Dawkins' critique but we don't have to accept everything he says.

Dawkins chooses his ground very carefully. He outlines four functions of religion, which he lists as explanation, exhortation, consolation, and inspiration, in that order. I shall discuss each of these over the next four weeks, but it seems obvious to me you can't give a satisfactory account of religion without taking into that account the nature of the god or gods that are worshipped. Different religions have different pictures of God, so different religions don't all serve the same function or functions. Dawkins gives an inadequate and partial account of the God that Christians worship. If he had given a fuller account he would have had to give a different and fuller account of the functions of the Christian religion, for instance in inspiring Christians to fight for justice and confront oppression - but we shall come to that. What I want to discuss this morning is Dawkins claim that a primary function of religion is explanation.

Dawkins returns again and again to religion as explanation. Clearly, as a biological scientist (he is an ecologist), explanation means a great deal to him; and the Christian right, who are one of his main targets, do hold onto their beliefs, and especially to the account of creation in the Book of Genesis, as a means of explaining how the universe and this world in particular came into being.

But many religious people do not. We gladly concede the power and the duty of science to offer explanations of the universe that can answer questions like, 'Where have we come from?' and 'How does this or that natural process work?'. It has taken Christians several hundred years to learn this. Painfully, we have learnt that the premises of Christian Faith and the premises of science are different, but complementary.

The premises of science are that human beings can investigate and find out all sorts of things about the world which we can organise into a reliable body of knowledge. We distinguish between natural science, or the natural sciences (such as physics and chemistry) and human science, or the human sciences (such as sociology and anthropology). The natural sciences study the natural world (actually, they study the natural universe) and the human sciences study everything to do with what is specifically human. There is, of course, another branch of knowledge, which is usually referred to as the Arts or Humanities, and there is much debate about the kind of knowledge we can gain through the study of the Arts: history or languages or literature. Clearly, such knowledge is not scientificin the sense that the knowledge in physics or chemistry is scientific - it doesn't depend on experiment. But it is knowledge. And there is another kind of knowledge again, which looks like scientific knowledge but doesn't depend on experiment: that is mathematics.

The point I am making is that there are different kinds of knowledge, which are related but distinct. If you misunderstand the kind of knowledge on offer in a discipline you will misunderstand the whole discipline. This is what Dawkins does with religion. He thinks that religion is about explanation, and that the explanations religious people offer as to why the universe and this world are as they are are very bad explanations. Though I would not say that religion has nothing to do with such explanation, and would have to acknowledge that in the past the only explanation for the big questions people had about their lives were religious explanations, I would argue that the Christian belief which most Christians hold has very little do with the kind of explanation that Dawkins is talking about.

Being a Christian for me is much more like being a character in The Complete Works of Shakespeare than a scientist in a laboratory. The reason Shakespeare is so popular is that he knows so much about the human condition. Through his poetry and his plays he shows us why people do things, and what certain human actions may lead to. He has an extraordinary intuition: how on earth did he know so much about people and the world? But what he had was not scientific knowledge. There is truth in Shakespeare but it is not scientific truth. We can find explanations in Julius Caesar as to why Caesar falls, or in Hamlet as to why Hamlet is in an agony of indecision, or in King Lear as to why Lear ends up a penniless outcast - but these are not scientific explanations. The explanations in religious belief are much more like this than scientific explanations - and we need such explanations better to understand all sorts of truths about being human. This is why a research scientist will work in the lab all day and in the evening go to see A Winter's Tale.

Dawkins has a good deal to say about the Bible, both about Genesis (and especially the way Genesis gets mis-used by creationists to explain how creation came about), and about some of the bloodier and more shocking parts of the Old and New Testaments. He has relatively little to say about Jesus and the New Testament. But this is where the Christian Faith begins, and everything else follows from this. In this sense the New Testament is like a play of Shakespeare: like a Shakespeare play, it is clear that it comes from a different time when there was a different worldview. But also like some of the best-loved plays of Shakespeare, it has a central character whose life and death engages us completely - so completely that we, as it were, become not just spectators, but participants in the action. We say, 'You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God'; we say 'Crucify him;' and we say, 'My Lord and my God'. And as we do so, we find new, Jesus-centred explanations as to why we experience life the way we do. Not scientific explanations, but not irrational either.

Of course, there are tensions at the interface between religious and scientific knowledge. These days, we rightly ask about the genetics of Jesus and about the things that happen in the brain when people practise their religion. Dawkins is right passionately to ask why religions that preach peace so often produce violence and to insist that we must resist the destructive power of simplistic religion, before it destroys us all. But the answer is not to try to abolish religion altogether. Nor wrongly to classify what religious belief is all about and then attack it as pseudo-science. Christianity begins with Jesus Christ and his summons to discipleship. Everything else in the Christian religion flows from that.

1 Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (London: Bantam, 2006).

2 Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, new edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).

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Reposted from:
http://www.westminster-abbey.org/voice/sermon/archives/070211_dawkins2.htm

Dawkins and The God Delusion: 2

Through the month of February in the sermons at Matins I am responding to a book that has been continuously in the bestseller lists since it was published last year: Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion. Dawkins' book is a searing attack on belief in God, developing points made in his television programmes 'The Root of All Evil?'. He outlines four functions of religion, which he takes apart one by one.

The first is explanation. Last week, I spoke about the different sorts of explanation that are associated with different types of knowledge. I argued that, though in the past, and still amongst some evangelical Christians, Christianity has been expected to provide an explanation about what the universe is, and where we have come from, for many of us this is not what Christianity is all about. We don't expect the Bible to give us an explanation of the origin of the universe or of our species. I suggested that being a Christian is rather like being a character in The Complete Works of Shakespeare: the Complete Works, because The Complete Works contains different plays with different characters in different situations. This is a bit like the way we have different religions in the world, and each religion, like each play, has its own world-view.

To be a Christian is, then, a bit like being a character in a Shakespeare play. As we read Scripture, we are drawn into seeing the world as though we were ourselves a character in the Scriptural narrative. When we read the Gospels, it as though we say, 'You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God'; we say 'Crucify him;' and we say, 'My Lord and my God'. And as we do so, we find new, Jesus-centred explanations as to why we experience life the way we do. So, there is a sense in which our Christian faith does help us explain who we are and what we are, but not in the scientific sense that is so important for Dawkins.

This brings me to Dawkins second function of religion, which he calls exhortation. Dawkins thinks religion gives us moral exhortation, telling us how to behave and how not to. Much of that religious exhortation he abhors. Here again, religious people can agree that religion does have a key role in passing on teaching about how we ought to behave. And that certain features of the morality carried in the past by religion are rightly to be rejected today. When Christians in this country faced up to the cruelty of the slave trade, they came to see it was incompatible with some of the fundamental tenets of the Christian faith. But this took time, and for a hundred years Christians argued vigorously on both sides of the debate: in America it brought them to civil war. As an Anglican Christian I would hope to maintain a questioning attitude towards the morality that comes to us through our religious tradition. In our religious tradition we have the secure ground we need both for moral commitment and for moral exploration. For a Christian, the central moral value conveyed by our religious tradition - never to be rejected - is quite simply that of love (interpreted particularly in the light of forgiveness and reconciliation). The question is how that cashes out today in a rapidly changing world. It is striking that Dawkins has virtually nothing to say about love, and certainly not about an ethic of love.

Dawkins' lack of discussion of what is central to Christian morality comes about, I think, because he separates morality and religion. He discusses morality before he discusses religion. For him, Darwinian theory explains why we feel moral obligations towards those close to us which we do not feel towards strangers (we share the same genes) and why we feel that we should not steal from or lie to members of our own group (the group or tribe that lives this way is more likely to survive). Dawkins argues that such instincts go very deep indeed.

He also argues that there are advantages for religions which promote this kind of morality. Just as there is competition among genes and among species, there is competition among religious ideas and cultural practices. He doesn't consider the possibility that some of those that thrive do so because they convey a particular truth or truths. For Dawkins, to look for truth in religion is to fall prey to a delusion.

Dawkins gives a characteristically functional account of religion, looking at what religions can do for their adherents. However, right at the heart of his project is his determination to show the advantage of believing in no religion at all. The atheist, he argues, is free from the delusions promoted by religious belief, and can therefore function better in the world. The atheist can espouse a vigorous and challenging morality untrammelled by the teachings of religion. To argue this, Dawkins must separate morality from religion, in the hope that religion will drop away. Religionless atheists, he says, can be just as moral in their own way as believers.

I would see things differently. I would argue that for humans the origins of morality and the origins of religion are absolutely interwoven. Significantly, Dawkins does not define what he means either by religion or morality. The root of the word religion lies in the Latin word religio - meaning 'that which binds'. A religion is a collection of beliefs and practices which binds together a society. It is in principle shared: you can't have a private religion with a membership of one. Since all human societies seem in the past to have believed in God or the gods, religion has been associated with belief in God or the gods. The key point though is that to practise a religion is as much to do certain things as to believecertain things. The religion carries the beliefs, affirming and reinforcing them as the religion is practised. In the West today we tend to separate out morality and beliefs and to make one of the other optional; in the religious life the two go together.

All religions have some kind of ritual. In religious ritual what is being enacted is a whole way of experiencing the world. It is enacted symbolically - often with the use of dance, chanting, music, and readings from sacred texts. The use of symbolic materials like water, fire, or food and the sharing of symbolic meals is, of course, common, as is the practice of sacrifice. Because these ritual acts are done together, the people are bound together, and the values that they share are reinforced - just as I am reinforcing Christian teaching by preaching this sermon in a liturgical context now. Dawkins is right to point to the importance of exhortation, but this central function of religion would be better described by a word like affirmation or even performance.

In response to Dawkins' attack on religion, we might well ask what happens when you take away from society the belief that God or the gods exist. Dawkins argument is that this sets us free; mine that it sets us adrift. This is not as such an argument that God exists, but it is an argument for the link between religion and morality. I would argue that much of the social breakdown we currently see reflected in the rising numbers of those imprisoned, or the breakdown of marriage, can ultimately be traced to the lack of shared religious belief binding society together, and that not to have this social bond is indeed a serious loss.

Dawkins does us all a service by challenging much that is wrong about religion: for instance its appalling propensity for violence. However, the answer to the failures of religious believers is not to abolish religion but to repent of these failures and to learn from our mistakes.

Dawkins does his cause a disservice by misdescribing the relation between religion and morality: it is not that religion reinforces a pre-existent morality; rather that each religion empowers its adherents to act in society according to its own distinctive morality (which may well overlap with the morality of other religions, as with the 'golden rule' to treat others as you would have them treat you. This is common to all the major monotheistic religions.) In the case of Christianity, the morality which we struggle to enact is based upon the teaching of Jesus, who constantly challenges the religious values of his own time: 'You have heard that it was said, "You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy." But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven. (Mt 5: 43-5)'

This key aspect of Christianity is completely missing from Dawkins argument. Christians have to acknowledge that from the outside Christianity can be seen as a religion which performs and affirms certain moral values, some of which Dawkins does not like or understand. From the inside, it contains a critique of religion, because religion so easily becomes self-satisfied, legalistic and violent. Jesus was a great religious teacher - precisely because he warned so strongly of the perils of religion. Dawkins too warns us of the perils of religion, but fails to engage with the positive message of Jesus, in which is the promise of Life.

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Reposted from:
http://www.westminster-abbey.org/voice/sermon/archives/070218_dawkins3.htm

Dawkins and The God Delusion: 3

Richard Dawkins' book, The God Delusion, has been continuously in the bestseller lists since it was published last year. It continues to make waves and to promote discussion. Dawkins' book is a searing attack on belief in God. It clearly invites a response from someone like myself who despite all that he has to say, continues to believe.

It is not easy to respond in a measured way to Dawkins' polemic. He is rightly outraged at the damage that religion has done to many people: one of the most attractive features of the book is his underlying passion to do away with all that harms and oppresses vulnerable human beings, especially children and women. He is, however, a ferocious debater, and can never resist making a point in the most provocative way. This makes him relatively easy to read, but difficult to pin down in argument. His points are often telling, but by and large they do not engage with anything - not anything - that is to be said on the other side of the argument. His underlying passion for truth and human liberation is immensely attractive; however, the way he goes about his mission - and it is a mission - is at times needlessly and distractingly offensive.

I am not myself competent to discuss Dawkins' earlier work in which he expounds a modern understanding of evolution, bringing together Darwinian theory with what we know about the origins of the universe, the origins of life and our contemporary understanding of genetics. However, I tried two weeks ago to discuss what Dawkins had to say about explanation, which is so important to his understanding of what science is all about. He seems to think 'explanation' is equally important for religious belief, but the religious people I know are content to leave scientists to explain the origins of the universe and the origins of life. We expect something different from our religious faith.

Dawkins next uses the word exhortation to describe the ways in which religious belief encourages us to adhere to certain moral teachings. Clearly, there is a point here, and sermons often have just this function of exhortation. But, again, what he says does not hit the nail on the head. The religious people I know would use a word more like 'affirmation' or 'performance' to describe the link between religion and morality. In our liturgy, especially the liturgy of the eucharist, we enact symbolically the story that lies at the heart of the Gospel narrative, and in doing so we affirm the Gospel values by which we seek to live. We are encouraged to live by those values because we share in the performance of the liturgy: being a Christian is not so much a matter of being exhorted to follow certain moral rules, but of living a certain kind of life, a life which reflects something of the life of Christ.

Taken together, the third and fourth words Dawkins uses to describe the central functions of religion come much nearer to what I would understand by being a Christian. They are consolation and inspiration. Dawkins thinks we find consolation by believing in an imaginary God. But the word he uses skews the argument. The word consolation has come to mean the sort of comfort we receive when something is irretrievably lost, and it can also have a sense of second-best, as when we talk of a 'consolation' prize. In the past Christian belief has consoled, and it continues to console, people who believe that the Christian teachings about life after death and about the nature of God are true: that these teachings give a secure foundation for the hope that 'death is swallowed up in victory'. The word I, as a Christian believer, would use for the way Christian belief does indeed console in the face of fear or loss is comfort. And I would link that with the power to strengthen the believer, as when the Holy Spirit is called the Comforter. Dawkins has a great deal to say about the way religious belief motivates people to do violent things, but nothing to say about the power of religion to strengthen the religious in resisting evil, nothing about the courageous witness of a Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Mother Maria Pilenko, an Oscar Romero or a Janani Luwum -all of them commemorated on the West Front of this Abbey church..

Dawkins' final value is inspiration. By the time he comes to this (which for me is pretty close to the heart of the matter) he has completely taken his eye off the ball, so he writes less than two pages, and those are entirely about the inspiration he thinks is to be found in science and in atheism. This is pity because I would have liked to have heard his account of the relation between religious belief and Chartres Cathedral, or Beethoven's music (the sublimity of which he mentions in passing, p. 86), or T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets. 'Inspiration' is a word I would certainly associate with the experience of contemporary religious believers. For the Christian believer, the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth and of his early followers is truly inspiring. The very word reflects the experience of God 'breathing' new life into the believer. Through religious belief we can be inspired to live life in a wholly new way.

Before coming to my own word for the way a Christian believer experiences their own religion, I would, however, make two comments on Dawkins' approach. I have already commented on the way in which Dawkins sets out to attack belief in God, but spends much of his time attacking religion. He slides from one to the other - which is why I have spent so much time on what religion is about for the Christian believer. However, we should note that the God Dawkins attacks is above all a supernatural being. So far I have not talked about the 'supernatural' since the way this term is now used is so misleading as to what Christians believe about God and the way God works. I shall return to the question of the supernatural in next week's sermon.

One of the things that Dawkins most hates and fears about religion is its propensity for violence. Because religion 'binds' people together it creates insiders and outsiders, and all too often the insiders want violently to overcome the outsiders so that they can extend the reach of their religion. At least in Christianity, right at the heart of its teaching and life, there is a critique of violence. When Jesus was crucified he did not respond violently, but prayed 'Father forgive them, for they know not what they are doing.' In the same way, Stephen, the first Christian martyr is depicted dying with words of forgiveness and trust on his lips. Amongst the things the Early Church remembered and passed on about Jesus was that 'when he was reviled, he did not revile in return; when he suffered, he did not threaten; but he trusted himself to him who judges justly' (1 Pet 2:23). If those of us who are Christians lived and died a bit more like this, Dawkins would have less reason to generalise about the hatreds that religion engenders.

Dawkins is crystal clear that his real target, so far as religion is concerned, is extremism, whether Christian or Islamic. However, since he sees the potential for extremism in all religions, he will accept no defence of moderate Christianity or moderate Islam over against the extremist variety. He thinks the moderate practice of religion is dangerous because it can always revert to extremism. So, it is important to stamp out religion of all sorts, and what monotheistic religions have is common is their belief in the existence of a supernatural being in the name of whom human beings go on doing untold damage.

As a Christian, I must accept the criticism that, whatever good has come through religion, religion has also legitimated an appalling amount of violent and repressive human action. As a follower of Jesus Christ, however, I find in his life, death and resurrection the dynamic that breaks the terrible cycles of violence in which so many human beings are immersed. In the crucifixion we may see the glorification, even the legitimation, of extreme violence - as I thought might be the case with Mel Gibson's film of the Passion, which is why I did not watch it - or we may see the one great act of self-offering and victimisation that has the potential to break the cycle of violence in which we are all enmeshed. For the Christian, it is the cross that comforts - it tells us there is no depth of human suffering that is beyond the reach of God in Christ - and it is the cross that inspires, because in the death of Christ we see an unparalleled enactment of what it means to live and die without bitterness, with trust, forgiveness and hope.

For the Christian, it is above all in the eucharist that the death of Christ is enacted and affirmed; the eucharist is 'performed' through the sharing of bread and wine: 'As often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes' (1 Cor 11:26) But the real reason we do this is not so that we can remember the death of Christ in the past, however consoling or inspiring that death may be, but because of the presence of the Risen Christ with us now. Not surprisingly, this sense of the presence of the Risen Christ in the midst, which is the key to Christian life, and to the Christian belief in a living God, is wholly absent from Dawkins' book. This is why Dawkins never once (I think) uses the word joy, nor does he use the word which for me which would best describe what being a Christian is all about: celebration.

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Reposted from:
http://www.westminster-abbey.org/voice/sermon/archives/070225_dawkins4.htm

Dawkins and The God Delusion: 4

Over the last four weeks I have been discussing Richard Dawkins' book The God Delusion which has been consistently in the bestseller lists since it was published last year. It is a searing attack on belief in God and on religion. In the first three of these sermons I discussed what Dawkins sees as the four key functions of religion: explanation, exhortation, consolation and inspiration. I tried to show why I think he gives a pretty thin account at least of what it means be a Christian, and to sketch what would for me be a better description of Christianity - putting the emphasis on celebration. I now want to show why I think Dawkins gives a pretty thin account of reality, against which we should be warned.

It is not Dawkins poor description of religion, but what he says about God, which poses the most fundamental challenge to believers. Dawkins defines what he describes as 'The God Hypothesis' in this way: that 'there exists a super-human, supernatural intelligence who deliberately created the universe and everything in it, including us' (p. 31). His own view is that 'any creative intelligence, of sufficient complexity to design anything, comes into existence only as the end product of an extended process of gradual evolution'. There you have the key opposition he sets up in his book: on the one side, a God who is superhuman and supernatural and who deliberately created everything, and, on the other, 'an extended process of gradual evolution' which may or may not - Dawkins clearly thinks not - have produced a 'creative intelligence' sufficiently complex to design us.

The word I want to focus on is 'supernatural'. For Dawkins, the God in whom he doesn't believe is a 'supernatural intelligence'. Even though the term is central to his argument, Dawkins doesn't discuss or define what he means by supernatural - which leaves me to think he has no idea how the word has been used by Christians who have used it to talk about God.

When people like Dawkins use the word 'supernatural' these days, they tend to mean something which is contrary to the natural. They also tend to assume everybody knows what we mean when we talk about the 'natural' - and that, whatever else the supernatural may be, it is different to the natural. The supernatural then comes to mean something more like the unnatural or the irrational. So, some people may choose to believe there are supernatural beings such as angels or fairies, but others think this is simply stupid - and whether you believe or not is not a matter of hard evidence: it's a matter of gut feeling. In popular usage, the supernatural is associated with ghosts, poltergeists, and things that go bump in the night, rather than with any serious attempt to understand the nature of reality.

In the same way, 'miracles' are seen as supernatural events which create wonder because they run counter to the laws of nature. Whereas science is based on the belief that there are consistent rational, natural laws, and if we know them we can predict or explain lots of things about the world scientifically, the supernatural is seen as that which runs contrary to the natural. It cuts across or disrupts the natural - but if that happens lots of times, as, say, with unexpected results from a scientific experiment, we must then look for a way of explaining those results scientifically, that is from within the realm of the natural. The supernatural is left to plug the gaps in our scientific knowledge: this is how we get left with a 'God of the gaps'.

Dawkins seems to think that because religious people believe 'God can do anything' we must approve of this way of talking about the supernatural: he seems to think Christians believe that, as a supernatural being, God created the natural world but can trump the natural any time he wants. However, most religious people I know would see this as a complete misunderstanding of the way we look at things. We would say that the laws of nature are trustworthy precisely becausethat is how God made them, and that God did not embed consistency in the material universe to override it irrationally or when it suited him - or us - to do so.

Right at the heart of the questions raised by Dawkins lies the need for a better understanding of what believers have in the past meant by the word supernatural. It's not a word Christians use much now, precisely because it suggests a way of thinking such as the one Dawkins attacks. For Thomas Aquinas, perhaps the key Christian thinker about the relation between the natural and the supernatural, the supernatural does not run counter to the natural, but is the condition of the natural being there at all. It is that without which there would not be a natural world. His word for it is grace, and it would be absurd to think that for Thomas grace ran contrary to nature. For us, a less misleading word than supernatural is 'metaphysical', which has Greek rather than Latin roots, and more clearly indicates the continuity between the physical world and that by which it is constituted.

One key word that Christians have used to talk about the metaphysical is 'spirit'. This is because an account of reality in purely material terms has seemed to religious believers so inadequate. It's a question of how you to speak about what constitutes the universe. Is the universe just 'stuff' or does our experience of love and beauty, goodness and truth, suggest there is some intelligent organising principle at work for which we need another sort of language, a language that goes beyond or transcends the language which describes mere stuff? Is that which constitutes the universe, this world, our bodies and our minds, just stuff, or does it add up to something more - something which could reasonably be seen as the product of a creative intelligence? This is the nub of the so-called argument from design, which, says Dawkins, Darwin blew out of the water (p. 79). But he doesn't stop to explain precisely how.

If I were to talk about God as a supernatural creative intelligence, I would not at all intend by that to describe realities or processes which cut across, subvert or overrule the natural. I would be trying to talk about realities or processes which help us better understand what constitutes the natural. It's rather like trying to describe a human being. You can describe the sort of hair she has, the colour of her eyes, the colour of her skin, the kind of clothes she wears, the job she does and so on - but if you do not talk about her character you won't have talked about her as a person, as a whole. We need a word like 'character' (even though you can't see or touch a character) to talk about what makes this human being herself, to speak about the depth of her humanity. In the same way, for Christians, to speak about the depth of Jesus's humanity, we need the language of spirit or of divinity. To speak about the depth of nature we need the language of supernature, metaphysical language.

The response of some philosophers, and of scientists like Dawkins, to this sort of talk has been to say with the philosopher Laplace, '"I have no need of that hypothesis". I stick to facts. I don't indulge in wild flights of fancy and speculation. I don't need to appeal to the existence of a supernatural God to help me understand or account for the natural world.'

And the response of Christians (and of poets and painters and musicians) is, time and again: 'If you don't talk in terms of spirit or of God, how well can you say you have understood or entered into the richness and complexity of the world?'

The issue then is not whether or not there is a realm of the supernatural separate from additional to the natural, recognisable only when it cuts into or across the natural, but whether the language associated with the supernatural - the language of spirit and of the miraculous - helps us describe the world we inhabit in a way that complements the language of evolution and natural selection which Dawkins uses. Having now read Dawkins' book twice, I find I am very happy for him to use the language of evolution and natural selection to answer the questions of natural science. But I think there are other questions - questions such as 'What is living really all about?' or 'What makes an admirable human being? or 'What constitutes Art?' or 'Who am I?' - for which he has no answer, and for which a different kind of language is needed - the language we have traditionally called 'metaphysical'.

And once you have made that key move, once you have admitted the importance of metaphysical language, the language of spirit, of purpose, of goodness, and love, you have admitted the possibility that religious language and even religious thinking might have something to offer. What it talks about may not be all delusion. The real reason for opposing Dawkins' account of everything is not because the supernatural God he doesn't believe in exists - I think we could agree that he doesn't - but because the world-as-it-is points to metaphysical realities of which he says nothing.