The God Delusion (Dawkins)

Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers (Allen)

Here is another of our occasional book previews or 'metareviews', reviews of reviews of books of interest to the progressive community. PA needs book reviewers so if any of our readers would like to review any of the works previewed here please contact me at

THE GOD DELUSION by Richard Dawkins, Bantam, 406pp., reviewed by Terry Eagleton in London Review of Books, 19 October 2006.

Terry Eagleton really puts down Dawkins, not so much for being an atheist as for not knowing much about what he is criticizing. He compares Dawkins to a person holding forth on biology who has only read the Book of British Birds.

Dawkins' book is an attack on religion, but Eagleton complains that Dawkins' view of religion is crude and reductionist to the extent of practically identifying religion with fundamentalism. Eagleton takes up a large part of his review (critique) putting forth a rarefied version of Christian theology which only a minute number of ultra-intellectual college dons in theology would subscribe too. Dawkins is faulted for not taking this type of theology into account.

Here is an example from Eagleton. This is the meaning of the Christian doctrine of the Resurrection. 'The Christian faith holds that those who are able to look on the crucifixion and live [whatever that means--tr], to accept that the traumatic truth of human history is a tortured body, might just have a chance of new life-- but only by virtue of an unimaginable transformation in our currently dire condition.' This is baloney. The Resurrection is a promise of a future life after our physical death not a transformation in our current condition, dire or otherwise. Dawkins may be excused for not considering this type of revisionist academic Christianity which does not represent the actual beliefs of 99.9% of people who consider themselves Christians.

Eagleton also says, contra Dawkins, that 'It was the imperial Roman state, not God, that murdered Jesus.' This is not the traditional view, as we all know, and has only become popular as a result of the Holocaust. And why did the Roman state do Jesus in? Eagleton says, 'because the Roman state and its assorted local lackeys and running dogs [and who might these be?--tr] took fright at his message of love, mercy and justice, as well as at his enormous popularity with the poor, and did away with him to forestall a mass uprising in a highly volatile political situation.' What bunk! Pilot said he could find no fault with Jesus and wanted to let him go-- the imperial Roman state was not in the least frightened by him. This kind of revisionism is just an attempt to extricate Christianity from its own sordid anti-Semitic past.

Eagleton agrees, however, that the fundamental Christian beliefs 'may be no more plausible than the tooth fairy.' He just doesn't like the fact that Dawkins doesn't discuss it. He says that Dawkins attacks 'faith' but he himself has 'faith in science. Dawkins is faulted for not mentioning 'the horrors that science and technology have wreaked on humanity' while dwelling on the misdeeds of religion.

Eagleton overlooks the fact that the horrors of religion come with the territory as fundamentalism is based on the complete acceptance of a faith based belief while science seeks proof and is willing to abandon its positions based on evidence that can be publicly agreed to-- i.e., Christians and Muslims may kill each other for the greater glory of God but they both have to use the same science to make the weapons to do so. It is not science and technology that have wreaked horrors on humanity, but their misuse by people. Did modern medicine wreak horrible experiments in death camps or was it Dr. Mengele?

The only solid ground I can see Eagleton standing on in his attack on Dawkins' view that God is an illusion and that we would better off without it, is that Dawkins thinks religion is the primary factor in the problems facing humanity when in fact it is secondary. Dawkins, Eagleton writes, 'thinks... that the ethno-political conflict in Northern Ireland would evaporate if religion did, which... betrays just how little he knows about it.' If this is Dawkins' view he is incredibly naive and simple minded and this alone would probably mean his book is also.

Eagleton says, 'Dawkins quite rightly detests fundamentalists; but as far as I know his anti-religious diatribes have never been matched in his work by a critique of the global capitalism that generates the hatred, anxiety, insecurity and sense of humiliation that breed fundamentalism. Instead, as the obtuse media chatter has it, it’s all down to religion.'

Dawkins' outlook, then, appears to be a shallow rationalism which won't give you much of an idea about what is really at issue. Save yourself the time and effort of going through 400 plus pages of Dawkins. You can get the whole lowdown on God by reading Part I of Spinoza's Ethics and it is only about 36 pages long.

MORAL MINORITY: OUR SKEPTICAL FOUNDING FATHERS by Brooke Allen, Ivan R. Dee, 235 pp., reviewed by George F. Will in The New York Times Book Review for Sunday, October 22, 2006.

This is an interesting book that should, but won't, put to rest the idea that the US was founded as a 'Christian' nation. As we know, zillions of so-called Christian conservatives make this claim, revealing their complete ignorance concerning the history and the values which founded this nation. They simply read their current benighted views back into the past to try and get some credibility for opinions otherwise lacking any.

Will says Brooke selects six of the most important founders (Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison and Hamilton) to support her thesis that it was Deism not Christianity which informed the religious consciousness of the founders. Deism is the view that there is a God who created the world (they accepted the design argument) but then he left it to its own devices. Maybe there is an after life, they hoped so. God is not a 'person' in the human sense and Jesus was a very nice guy but that was all.

Today they would probably all be atheists and agnostics, having been enlightened by Darwin I think, due to the advance of scientific understanding since the 18th Century.

Will gives some of the author's evidence for her views. Washington was mostly silent on the topic of religion, didn't take communion and on his deathbed had no ministers present and no prayers said.

Adams is quoted: 'phylosophy looks with an impartial Eye on all terrestrial religions.' Will also reproduces a comment made by Adams to one of his correspondents with reference to what would have happened had they been with Moses and 'God' revealed to them the doctrine of the Trinity: 'We might not have had the courage to deny it, but We could not have believed it.' Will tells us that Adams was a Unitarian. (In practice Unitarians can believe whatever they want, as liberal Anglicans can nowadays).

Jefferson advocated investigating the truth of religion (specifically Christianity) and if, as a result, the investigation 'ends in a belief that there is no god, you will find incitements to virtue in the comforts and pleasantness you feel in its exercise, and the love of others which it will procure you.'

Madison was not in favor of having a chaplain for the Congress and thought the need for religious belief was due to 'an innate appetite,' as Will puts it. 'The mind prefers,' Madison wrote, 'at once the idea of a self-existing cause to that of an infinite series of cause & effect.'

There is no mention of 'God' in the Constitution of the United States. When Alexander Hamilton was asked why he answered: 'We forgot.' And Will also reports that the treaty that ended the war with the pirates of Tripoli (1807), a treaty remember has the force of law just as the Constitution, which the Senate 'unanimously ratified' contained the following statement saying the US government 'is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.'

So that should be that. Will writes that, 'America's founding owes much more to John Locke than to Jesus.' It’s too bad the views of Thomas Paine were not also discussed. While Will, an ultra-conservative ideologue thinks this book 'occasionally goes too far,' he admits that it 'is a wonderfully high-spirited and informative polemic....' This looks like a good book to read and enjoy.