Reposted from http://www.theage.com.au/news/book-reviews/the-god-delusion/2006/11/24/1164341383277.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1

Thanks to Lee Holmes from the Atheist Foundation of Australia

The God Delusion
Barney Zwartz, reviewer
November 24, 2006

As a former philosophy tutor, I would have hated to have Richard Dawkins in my class.

As a former philosophy tutor, I would have hated to have Richard Dawkins in my class. Most tutors have met his sort: the loud, opinionated, supercilious student who shouts down other views without actually listening, who stands in awe of his own cleverness when everyone else can see that it is simply an immature over-confidence.

Dawkins may well be a brilliant scientist (I'm not competent to judge), and is certainly intelligent and articulate. He is not nearly as good a philosopher as he supposes, and when it comes to religion he is simply a bigot. He is on a relentless crusade against religion in any form, but cannot see that his own scientistic materialism is as much a dogmatic form of fundamentalist faith as those he despises.

In The God Delusion, Dawkins argues that evolution has removed the need for a God hypothesis to explain life, and advances in physics may soon do the same for the universe. Further, the existence of God is a proper question for science, and the answer is no.

Religion, he says, is a by-product of evolution. Children are gullible and generally believe their parents because that's good for the human species (so teaching them religion, he asserts, is a serious form of child abuse) and/or it's like falling in love, which perpetuates the species. Similarly, evolution has hard-wired altruism into us, and that's why we are moral.

One can see how Dawkins became the poster boy of militant atheism. He's lively and entertaining, often witty, and collects great quotes. Here's one from Dawkins himself: "The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it, a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully."

Here's one from Ambrose Bierce: "To pray: to ask that the laws of the universe be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner, confessedly unworthy."

And facts, for example, that every time we drink a glass of water, the odds are good that we will imbibe at least one molecule that passed through the bladder of Oliver Cromwell.

So he's an attractive champion for atheistic fundamentalists. But he never escapes a vicious circularity: because there is no God, nothing that could count in God's favour can be accepted; another explanation must be found. I can't think of anything Dawkins would accept as evidence, miracles, for example, he would write off as hallucination or some other psychological dysfunction.

On nearly every page, I found myself wanting to argue, not just with his arguments (or mere assertions), but with the often slipshod or superficial way he puts them. He probably doesn't intend to caricature religion so wildly, but he seems to assume that because there can be no argument for religion his profound ignorance of theology and philosophy is irrelevant. To Dawkins, all faith is blind faith, whereas science is brave, noble, true, free of assumptions and cultural conditioning, and solely responsible for progress, the triumphant onward march of mankind (in which his faith is touchingly blind). He seems unaware that here he is fighting a doomed rearguard action for modernism in a world that has good reason not to trust science and technology as he does. It's the blinkered optimism of the long-discredited logical positivists and A.J. Ayer.

It baffles me that people like Dawkins can believe that if we could just rid the world of religion we would also rid it of prejudice, hypocrisy, violence and exploitation. People are prejudiced and exploitative not because they are religious but because they are human: secularists are no better, and often worse. Dawkins of course, disagrees: there are very few atheists in prisons, he suggests.

He lambasts arguments for God on the basis of probability, but unblushingly claims there are "very probably" alien civilisations "whose superhuman powers make them godlike beyond the imaginings of theologians".

He is spectacularly inept when it comes to the traditional philosophical arguments for God, such as the cosmological, the ontological and the arguments from design. (He wonders that Bertrand Russell could find the ontological argument hard to disprove; Dawkins himself can dismiss it with a couple of sneers.)

The proofs are "easily exposed as vacuous" he says, and the argument for design is the only one still in use. Both assertions are simply false. This would be like me, a non-scientist, claiming that Newtonian physics are no use today because Einstein and quantum physics proved them wrong.

That same capacity for facile undergraduate muddle-headedness emerges when he considers the Gospels: they are fiction from start to finish, composed late, and unreliably transmitted. Sorry Richard, reading Bart Ehrman doesn't make you competent to pronounce. I'd like to make a couple of Olympian pronouncements of my own: "scientific" and "rational" are not synonyms; to describe something is not to explain it; and faith is not necessarily blind, as the scientific disciplines themselves demonstrate.

Dawkins is so dismissive and often so skewed or superficial that he doesn't make much contact with Christians like me. Real challenges to theism certainly exist, but he tends to skate over the top. He is at his best and most likeable when his deep love for science and enthusiasm for sharing it, his evangelical zeal, I'm tempted to say, come to the fore. And he does produce some interesting new arguments from natural selection.

But as Terry Eagleton noted in The London Review of Books, Dawkins is predictably silent about the horrors that science and technology have wreaked: "Yet the Apocalypse is far more likely to be the product of them than the work of religion. Swap you the Inquisition for chemical warfare."

I imagine this book's main contribution will not be to reach the unconverted, as he hopes, but to provide more bullets for atheists to fire. Or one could read him simply for informative entertainment, like a bigoted Bill Bryson. It may be too harsh a judgement, but not by much, to cite the comment once attributed to Dr Johnson: "This book is both good and original, but the parts that are good are not original and the parts that are original are not good."

Barney Zwartz is Age religious affairs editor.