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Darwin's Angel

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Darwin's Angel (ISBN 9781846680489) is one of several books published in response to Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion (2006). It is written by John Cornwell and subtitled An Angelic Riposte to The God Delusion.

Cornwell runs a Public Understanding of Science programme at Jesus College, Cambridge, and has written many reviews of religious and scientific books, including the previous work of Dawkins. He has had very high regard of Dawkins writing, and has referred to him as "one of the most brilliant living natural historians", but Cornwell finds the God Delusion harmful in its failure to tackle the problem of extremism and wrong on many important issues.[1]

Summary

In this book, Cornwell adopts the persona of the Guardian Angel of Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel, who is now looking after Richard Dawkins. He pens a letter to Dawkins in 21 short chapters.[2]

  1. A Summary of your Argument suggests that Dawkins regards all claims about God's existence as "the exclusive province of science and reason"
  2. Your Sources suggests that the book is "as innocent of heavy scholarship as it is free of false modesty" with the main reliance being on self-quotes and ignoring anyone of the calibre of James, Durkheim, Weil, Buber, Rahner, and that the genre is indicated by the endorsements from writers of fantasy fiction, popular science, pop music and conjuring tricks.
  3. Imagination suggests that Dawkins "sounds as though he would substitute a series of case-notes on senile dementia for King Lear" and takes things too literally.
  4. Beauty suggests that Dawkins misunderstands the links between Beauty, Creativity and Faith, and suggests he studies George Steiner's Real Presences or others like Blake, Arnold, T. S. Eliot and Lewis.
  5. What is Religion suggests that Religion is not a set of scientific statements and that Dawkins should study Durkheim or other sociologists of religion.
  6. Is God Supernatural? claims that Dawkins's image of God is "A Great Big Science Professor in the Sky", which is not what most theists believe in, and that the idea that believers are encouraged not to understand the Trinity is refuted by the many books in Divinity Faculties trying to do this.
  7. Celestial Teapots suggests that the comparison with celestial teapots is misplaced because there are prima facie, albeit inconclusive, grounds for believing in God.
  8. God's Simplicity suggests that Dawkins imagines that God is an object but this is not at all how theologians think about God, and he finds it ironic that Dawkins, having declined to study theology at all, complains that theists have made no attempt to answer his objections.
  9. Theories of Everything suggests that Stephen Hawking and others now acknowledge the impossibility of a "Theory of Everything" because of Gödel's Theorem.
  10. Dawkins versus Dostoyevsky suggests that Dawkins mistakenly attributes the nihilistic views of Ivan Karamazov to Dostoyevsky[3]
  11. Jesus, the Jews and the "Pigs" suggests that Dawkins relies on a single source [4] for his assertion that "the moral consideration for others" in Judaism and Christianity was originally intended to apply only to a narrowly defined in-group, and that reading the relevant texts would disabuse him of this error[5].
  12. Dawkins's Utopia suggests that Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Hitler all used "science as an ideology combined with militant atheism"[6] and that Stalin's atheism was a crucial feature of his entire ideology, and that whereas neither science nor atheism necessarily leads to violence, nor does religion. Critics have pointed at the flaws in this section, noting that Hitler not only did not endorse atheism, but carried out measures to stamp it out along with Christianity.
  13. Fundamentalism suggests that it is hard to define the term, but an important distinction is between pluralist/democratic societies and totalitarian/fundamentalist ones that do not allow for disagreement, and that it is important to distinguish between the most tolerant forms of faith and that of the suicide bomber. He claims that "the question is not whether you accept the content of people's faith; it is whether you accept the right of people to adopt freely chosen beliefs, within the law, without insult or persecution"[7] and that it is a striking category error to confuse creationism and the "doctrine of creation"[8]
  14. Is Religious Education Child Abuse? questions whether anyone would really trade child abuse for being brought up in the religion of a child's parents, and whether it is right to ridicule the Amish when a living testimony to the advantages of frugality and simplicity could be very important, especially in the USA.
  15. Life After Death suggests that most religious believers hope for this,[9] that the atheist "philosopher's" view Dawkins quotes is not much help[10], and that Dawkins has misunderstood Yeats.[11]
  16. Religious People Less Clever than Atheists? suggests that scientific eminence does not guarantee sound judgement in other fields, that Dawkins and some other scientists are prejudiced against religious believers, and asks whether "by 1920 50% of all Nobel Prizewinners in the natural sciences were Germans" proves that Germans at that time were cleverer than all other nations?
  17. Does our Moral Sense have a Darwinian Origin? suggests that there is far more to morality than the simple points discussed.
  18. The Darwinian Imperative suggests that Darwinian attempts to "explain" religion are simplistic: there is no agreed definition of religion and the idea that (eg) Cathedrals are "useless" ignores the many social functions they actually perform.
  19. Religion as a Bacillus suggests that, while Dawkins abhors the "bio-political" ideas of Nazi Germany, describing all religious believers as infected with a virus that is harmful to society has deplorable overtones[12].
  20. Does God Exist? suggests that "why is there something rather than nothing?" is a quest for meaning and sense which Dawkins ridicules because he doesn't understand it[13][14] and that "the ludicrous anthropomorphic deity that rightly appals" Dawkins is not the God in whom most Christian theologians believe.[15]
  21. Being Religious suggests that this is not a question of factual beliefs but a personal relationship and quest based on prayer and love.

Reviews and comments

  • Peter Stanford in The Independent suggested that "Cornwell has done an excellent job in providing a book that should, in an ideal world, be sold taped to every copy of The God Delusion as an essential corrective".[20] Dawkins responded in a letter to The Independent titled "Do you have to read up on leprechology before disbelieving in them?"[21]
  • Anthony Kenny in The Tablet wrote that Cornwell adopts the attitude of a rooftop sniper, watching for some particularly implausible or outrageous claim made by Dawkins. He notes that both Cornwell and Dawkins fail to observe the prime rule of intellectual debate, that one should attack the opponent's arguments, not his personality. Kenny goes on to say that neither The God Delusion nor Darwin's Angel "provides the reader with sufficient grounds for a reasoned conclusion" about God's existence.[22]
  • A profile of Darwin's Angel in New Scientist by Amanda Gefter criticised Cornwell for confusing two meanings of "religion" demarcated in The God Delusion and for holding one religion in higher esteem than any other, and suggested that both books are part of a modern debate that is suffering from the fact that no one definition of religion is concentrated on by both sides.[23]
  • In a review in the TLS, John Polkinghorne commends Darwin's Angel for its "gently ironic" tone and its "style ... of modest discussion, which all makes for an enlightening read."[24]

Dawkins' response

Darwin's Angel is listed on the RichardDawkins.net website as one of several "fleas" following The God Delusion.[25]

According to Dawkins, the book contains a number of inaccurate portrayals of what he actually said. Dawkins questions whether these are "honest mistakes or willful mendacity".[26] He suggests six examples where his writing has been quoted out of context or otherwise misrepresented. For example, in The God Delusion, Dawkins discussed the claims that if there is no God, then everything is permitted, and wrote that "it is widely believed that Dostoevsky was of that opinion, presumably because of some remarks he put into the mouth of Ivan Karamazov." Cornwell has taken this to mean that Dawkins also supports this interpretation, and suggests that Dawkins has misread Dostoevsky. Dawkins writes that it should be obvious from the words "widely believed" and "presumably" that he was in fact distancing himself from that view.[26] Cornwell also suggests that Dawkins would have been in favour of Social Darwinism when in A Devil's Chaplain Dawkins claims to have explicitly condemned such views and says no one supports such ideas anymore.[26]

References

  1. ^ "A great debate for heaven's sake". Cambridge Evening News. Retrieved 2007-10-05.
  2. ^ The summaries here are quotes or direct paraphrases from the relevant chapters of Darwin's Angel.
  3. ^ However Dawkins in his response to this book has clarified that when he wrote "It is widely believed that Dostoevsky was of that opinion, presumably because.."(TGD p 227) he was signalling his own scepticism at the notion that Dostoevsky himself held these views". See Dawkins Response
  4. ^ A part-time social anthropologist called John Hartung who allegedly considers anti-Semitism to be "an understandable racial response to the determined genocidal doctrines of the Jews"Darwin's Angel p. 83 - Cornwell cites Harting's views from an article published in Ethology and Sociobiology which is apparently available here
  5. ^ Cornwell cites in particular the Parable of the Good Samaritan
  6. ^ Darwin's Angel p 86
  7. ^ DA p 97
  8. ^ ibid. p 98
  9. ^ Anthony Kenny argues that this is theologically unsound. Christians don't just hope for an afterlife, Christians "affirm in the creeds belief in a final judgement, a resurrection of the body, and an everlasting life."
  10. ^ DA p 112-3. Dawkins in his response objects to the inverted commas in "philosopher", as the argument was attributed to Derek Parfit. More importantly, Dawkins objects that this section has been taken out of context.
  11. ^ The Yeats poem referenced by Dawkins ("To My Heart, Bidding It Have No Fear") advocates magic and theosophy, not rationalism
  12. ^ DA p 141-145. Cornwell specifically cites Dr Gerhard Wagner who wrote of the völkisch body being in need of cleansing, while the language of "immunity" and "radical therapy" became routine
  13. ^ DA pp152-153. Cornwell quotes with approval Wittgenstein's "not how the world is, but that it is, is the mystical" and Martin Rees's "The preeminent mystery is why anything exists at all. What breathes life into the equations of physics, and actualised them in a real cosmos? Such questions lie beyond the real of science however, they are the domain of philosophers and theologians." His logic was criticised in The God Delusion, Chapter 2, NOMA, by Dawkins with the quip: "But why the chaplin? Why not the gardener or the chef?", after which he attacked the how-why question distinction referred to by Rees.
  14. ^ Antony Kenny: Dawkins is right, however, to reject the question "why is there something rather than nothing?" This is a misbegotten query, if only because it is impossible to give sense to "there is nothing". It is not the mere existence of the universe that raises the demand for a cause: it is its coming into existence. But Dawkins cannot merely shrug off the causal question, since he believes that the universe did come into existence at a point of time measurably distant in the past.
  15. ^ Anthony Kenny finds problems in this conception of a completely non-anthropomorphic God, and wonders to what extent it denies "what traditional theologians undoubtedly believed, namely that there is literally a divine intellect and a divine will, and that God is literally omniscient and omnipotent."
  16. ^ Darwin's Angel: An Angelic Response to the God Delusion, 1 Sept 2007.
  17. ^ Christopher Howse, "What Richard Dawkins makes of Jewish morals", Daily Telegraph 8 Sept 2007. In particular he in complains about the alleged misrepresentation of Jesus' teaching about loving your neighbour based on a 1995 article by an associate professor of anaesthesiology, and expresses concern about the antecedents and implications of "religion as a virus".
  18. ^ Madeleine Bunting The smallest signs of retreat The Guardian 6-Sept-2007
  19. ^ FT Magazine Dec 8/9 2007 The Year in Books p37.
  20. ^ Peter Stanford The Independent 14_Sept-2007 Doubts about Dawkins
  21. ^ "Do you have to read up on leprechology before disbelieving in them?". Richard Dawkins, published in The Independent. 2007-09-17. Retrieved 17 September 2007.
  22. ^ Anthony Kenny in The Tablet 13-Sept-2007 Argument not always angelic
  23. ^ Review: An angelic riposte to the God Delusion by John Cornwell - 22 September 2007 - New Scientist Space
  24. ^ John Polkinghorne "The truth in religion" TLS October 31, 2007
  25. ^ "The fleas are multiplying". www.RichardDawkins.net. Retrieved 2007-09-12.
  26. ^ a b c Dawkins, Richard. "Honest Mistakes or Willful Mendacity". www.RichardDawkins.net. Retrieved 2007-09-10.
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