Joanna Collicutt McGrath

A thin defense of PC religion

I have zero sympathy for Dawkins's worldview or his anti-religious harangues, but I can't give McGrath's book much of a recommendation. One might reasonably expect that by reading McGrath's reply you'd learn a lot about Dawkins's arguments but that simply isn't the case. He uses this book's hundred or so pages to tell us more or less that Dawkins's arguments aren't worth responding to. Yet McGrath does find the room to make fun of Dawkins for, of all things, thinking that Paul wrote Hebrews and to speculate that _The God Delusion_ was written as a last gasp attempt by Dawkins to bolster his waning faith in atheism. This is just silly.

I don't know of a good alternative to recommend to those wanting a solid critique of Dawkins, but I just finished reading _C.S. Lewis: Essay Collection and other Short Pieces_ and I can't imagine that a theist armed with Lewis's ideas would find Dawkins very troubling at all. Besides having the clear advantage over McGrath in style, Lewis defends a full-blooded Christianity and is unafraid to grapple with the thorny issues.… (plus d'informations)

I did not read Dawkins's The God Delusion (though I did hear much about it when it came out and I have read some of Dawkins's other titles as required reading in college).

I thought this book did a good job of presenting the distilled version of Dawkins's arguments (what his points in The God Delusion are) along with evidence for or against those points. The authors were fair in their assessments of Dawkins's arguments and not afraid to say they agreed with him on a few points (such as religious violence being bad) though that did not stop them from pointing out flaws in his arguments.… (plus d'informations)

Although I have not read The God Delusions, I did find the McGrath's rebuttal to one of Dawkins' most famous and contested works interesting and useful in rebutting points that flow from or originate from readings of Dawkins' book.

The Dawkins' Delusion? is much shorter than Dawkin's book, and in around one hundred pages succinctly rebuts and deconstructs Dawkins' arguments. The McGrath's book also rightly accuses Dawkins of turning into the very fundamentalist he loathes: for Dawkins has abandoned his rationality and impartiality that science brings to adopt an ironically fundamentalist viewpoint vis-à-vis atheism.

Of course, this book will be subject to its own controversy as any book about such a subject would. Nevertheless, this is a handy book to further debunk the already-stale argument that faith and science are not compatible.… (plus d'informations)