Some of you may be wondering: "Does God exist?" Fortunately, Richard Dawkins has written a new book, The God Delusion, that addresses precisely this question. As it turns out, the answer is: "No, God does not exist." (Admittedly, Dawkins reached his conclusion before the Cards won the World Series.) Nevertheless, there remains a spot of controversy -- it would appear that Dawkins's rhetorical force is insufficient to persuade some theists. One example is provided by literary critic Terry Eagleton, who reviewed The God Delusion for the London Review of Books. Eagleton's review has already been discussed among some of my favorite blogs: 3 Quarks Daily, Pharyngula, Uncertain Principles, and the Valve (twice), to name a few. But it provides a good jumping-off point for an examination of one of the common arguments used against scientifically-minded atheists: "You're setting up a straw man by arguing against a naive and anthropomorphic view of `God'; if only you engaged with more sophisticated theology, you'd see that things are not so cut-and-dried." Before jumping in, I should mention that I have somewhat mixed feelings about Dawkins's book myself. I haven't read it very thoroughly, not because it's not good, but for the same reason that I rarely read popular cosmology books from cover to cover: I've mostly seen this stuff before, and already agree with the conclusions. But Dawkins has a strategy that is very common among atheist polemicists, and with which I tend to disagree. That's to simultaneously tackle three very different issues:
Does God exist? Are the claims of religion true, as statements about the fundamental nature of the universe?
Is religious belief helpful or harmful? Does it do more bad than good, or vice-versa?
Why are people religious? Is there some evolutionary-psychological or neurological basis for why religion is so prevalent?
All of these questions are interesting. But, from where I am sitting, the last two are incredibly complicated issues about which it is very difficult to say anything definitive, at least at this point in our intellectual history. Whereas the first one is relatively simple. By mixing them up, the controversial accounts of history and psychology tend to dilute the straightforward claim that there's every reason to disbelieve in the existence of God. When Dawkins suggests that the Troubles in Northern Ireland should be understood primarily as a religious schism between Catholics and Protestants, he sacrifices some of the credibility he may have had if he had stuck to the more straightforward issue of whether or not religion is true. Right out of the gate, Eagleton bashes Dawkins for dabbling in things he doesn't understand.
