By RICHARD DAWKINS
Added: Sun, 11 Feb 2007 00:00:00 UTC

Reposted from Letters to the Editor The Times:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/debate/letters/article1368831.ece


Sir, Alister McGrath (Faith, Feb 10) has now published two books with my name in the title. If I seem "grumpy", could it be because a professor of theology is building a career riding on my back? It is tempting to quote Yeats ("Was there ever dog that praised his fleas?") and leave it at that. I will, however, dignify his article with a brief reply.

McGrath imagines that I would disagree with my hero Sir Peter Medawar on The Limits of Science. On the contrary. I never tire of emphasising how much we don't know. The God Delusion ends in just such a theme. Where do the laws of physics come from? How did the universe begin? Scientists are working on these deep problems, honestly and patiently. Eventually they may be solved. Or they may be insoluble. We don't know.

But whereas I and other scientists are humble enough to say we don't know, what of theologians like McGrath? He knows. He's signed up to the Nicene Creed. The universe was created by a very particular supernatural intelligence who is actually three in one. Not four, not two, but three. Christian doctrine is remarkably specific: not only with cut-and-dried answers to the deep problems of the universe and life, but about the divinity of Jesus, about sin and redemption, heaven and hell, prayer and absolute morality. And yet McGrath has the almighty gall to accuse me of a "glossy", "quick fix", naive faith that science has all the answers.

Other theologies contradict the Christian creed while matching it for brash overconfidence based on zero evidence. McGrath presumably rejects the polytheism of the Hindus, Olympians and Vikings. He does not subscribe to voodoo, or to any of thousands of mutually contradictory tribal beliefs. Is McGrath an "ideological fanatic" because he doesn't believe in Thor's hammer? Of course not. Why, then, does he suggest I am exactly that because I see no reason to believe in the particular God whose existence he, lacking both evidence and humility, positively asserts?

Richard Dawkins, FRS, Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science, University of Oxford

TAGGED: BOOKS, FLEAS, RICHARD DAWKINS