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The God Delusion (Part 1)
The God Delusion (Part 1)
“If this book works as I intend, religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put it down.” –Richard Dawkins, Preface to The God Delusion
For those of you who have not heard of him, Richard Dawkins is the best-selling author of many books, which include The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, and the book of discussion in this article, The God Delusion. The inside flap of the book claims Dawkins as “the world’s most prominent atheist” who will, “assert the irrationality of belief in God and the grievous harm religion has inflicted on society, from the Crusades to 9/11.” I have heard atheist circles claim his arguments as “brilliant” and have been told that Christians, “fear him and his reasoning more than they fear their imaginary friend God.” Maybe you are wondering, “Why would you take the time to read 374 pages of somebody attacking God?” I did for a couple reasons. First, atheist circles are making a big deal of this book (as I stated above). This made me very curious as to what the “brilliant” arguments were that Dawkins was putting forth. The second reason I chose to read the book was to let other Christians know what he was saying, without having to take the time to read through it, which is why I am writing this article. It is very possible that you will encounter an atheist while witnessing, who throws information from this book at you. I hope that this ‘review’ will provide you with the answers to those possible objections. With that said, let’s jump in.
I will say right off the bat, I did enjoy the book. This probably shocks me as much as it shocks you. Recently, I also took the time to read Sam Harris’ book The End of Faith, which came with huge recommendations from Dawkins. I found Harris’s book repetitive and poorly written. If Dawkins was recommending it, how much better could his book possibly be? Quite a bit in my opinion. Does that mean I found his arguments convincing, or even reasonable? Not at all. Actually, I agreed with almost nothing Dawkins said. But, I did think it was well written, passionate, and for the most part, interesting.
Perhaps the most quoted portion of The God Delusion is this sentence, which appears on page 31:
“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all of 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.”
You don’t have to know the meaning of these words to realize one thing: Dawkins has a very strong view towards God. He specifies in this sentence that this is his view of the “God of the Old Testament”, but Biblically, this is his view of the God of the entire Bible, not just the Old Testament. Hebrews 13:8 says that God (Jesus Christ), “is the same yesterday, today, and forever.” I found this interesting, because later in the book, Dawkins refers to Jesus with almost a sense of respect. He tells his readers:
“Well, there’s no denying that, from a moral point of view, Jesus is a huge improvement over the cruel ogre of the Old Testament. Indeed Jesus, if he existed (or whoever wrote his script if he didn’t) [I will discuss this comment later in the article] was surely one of the great ethical innovators of history.”
He goes on to say,
“But the moral superiority of Jesus precisely bears my point. Jesus was not content to derive his ethics from the scriptures of his upbringing. He explicitly departed from them, for example when he deflated the dire warnings about breaking the Sabbath.”
Dawkins then goes on to quote Mark 2:27. To quote this scripture to make the point that Jesus completely dismissed the Old Testament, or “departed from them [the scriptures of his upbringing]” is nothing short of poor hermeneutical practice. What was the context of this scripture? Jesus was talking to the Pharisees (see verse 24). The whole point of this scripture was to tell how Christ showed the Pharisees (men who were supposedly experts on scripture) that they were ignorant of what it actually taught. Ironically enough, Jesus references the Old Testament in His response to the Pharisees. He says, “Have you never read what David did when he was in need and he and his companions became hungry; and how he entered the house of God in the time of Abithar the high priest, and ate the consecrated bread, which is not lawful for anyone to eat except to the priests, and he also gave it to those who were with him?” (Mark 2:25-26). John MacArthur points out in his Bible commentary (which I highly recommend):
"According to 1 Samuel 21:1, Ahimelech was the priest who gave bread to David. Abiathar was Ahimelech’s son, who later was the high priest during David’s reign."
Jesus referenced the Old Testament to prove His point! But, does Dawkins mention that to his atheist readers who you can almost guarantee will not pick up a Bible and check his reference? No, he jumps right to verse 27, which says, “The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath,” Again, we turn to MacArthur’s commentary,
"God instituted the Sabbath to benefit man by giving him a day to rest from his labors and to be a blessing to him. The Pharisees turned it into a burden and made man a slave to their myriad of man-made regulations."
Let’s do a quick summary. Dawkins quotes Jesus Christ in an attempt to say Christ rejected the Old Testament, but he fails to tell his readers that Jesus referenced the Old Testament in His point to the Pharisees. In addition to that, the scripture he does reference he uses to make a point that the verse does not say. Jesus was stating that the Pharisees were using the Old Testament teaching wrongly, not that it was a poor rule that should be thrown out because it came from the Old Testament. Unfortunately, this sort of “scripture twisting” appears frequently in The God Delusion.
Scripture is not the only topic Dawkins twists in order to make a point. In his section entitled “Secularism, the founding fathers and the religion of America” he opens by saying:
“It is conventional to assume that the Founding Fathers of the American Republic were deists [actually, that is not true at all. Most of the Founding Fathers were Bible believing Christians, not deists]. No doubt many of them were, although it has been argued that the greatest of them might have been atheists.”
That is true; many do argue and claim that the Founding Fathers were atheists. But I have also seen people argue today that the world is flat. Simply because something is argued, does not make it true. No one who has studied American history can honestly make the argument that our “greatest” Founding Fathers were atheists. Still, Dawkins goes on,
“But whatever their individual religious views in their own time, the one thing they collectively were is secularists”
Secularism can be defined as, “a system of political or social philosophy that rejects all forms of religious faith and worship.” Secularist? The argument can firmly be made that if it wasn’t for Christianity, our country would not even exist. It appears that of all the Founding Fathers, Jefferson is Dawkins’s favorite. More than once, he quotes Jefferson saying things such as, “Christianity is the most perverted system that ever shone on man”. I am not saying Jefferson was a Christian, but I do think Dawkins quoting him in the manner he did was nothing short of dishonest. He fails to mention things Jefferson said such as:
“The doctrines of Jesus are simple, and tend to all the happiness of man.”
“Of all the systems of morality, ancient or modern which have come under my observation, none appears to me so pure as that of Jesus.”
And, the sure to be controversial,
“I am a real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus.”
Again, I am not arguing that Jefferson was a Christian, I do not know. But I do know that the manner in which Dawkins quotes him (and many of the other Founding Fathers) is nothing short of misleading.