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Richard Dawkins - The God Delusion

I'm more than a little cautious these days when it comes to accepting the words of thinkers — even brilliant ones, like Dawkins — when they're delivered outside the area of their expertise. Richard Dawkins is an ethologist and an evolutionary biologist, but he is not a philosopher — as I had the misfortune of learning when I showed an essay Dawkins had written about the nature of truth (published in A Devil's Chaplain) to my girlfriend, who has studied philosophy. The hour and a half talk regarding truth, post-modernism and cultural relativism that followed doesn't bear repeating, and though I still don't know where I stand on the issue, I have learned to tread lightly.

Having said that, Dawkins is a brilliant scientist: The Selfish Gene, The Extended Phenotype, The Blind Watchmaker and Climbing Mount Improbable are absolute must-reads, both for the knowledge contained within and for his accessible, entertaining writing style. The God Delusion is a different beast, however, to his other books, even the not quite so scientific ones — it is, principally, a philosophical treatise, a rebuttal of religious faith. If you're at all like me, then, yes, it does seem a lot like kicking someone when they're down because — and I don't know how to put this gently — religious faith doesn't really have a leg to stand on. You don't, after all, need a Dawkins to neutralise the impotent argument of Pascal's Wager or to point out that, just because science can neither prove nor disprove the existence of god, it doesn't follow that the possibility of either must, therefore, be equiprobable, etc.

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