Orr, Allen - A Mission To Convert (book review of The God Delusion)

03/02/2007

The New York Review of Books, Vol. 54 Num 1 January 11, 2007

Author is critiquing Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion as the most ambitious and the most public of the recent publications by biologists and philosophers in the area of the science of evolution as it relates to religion and the belief that a creator is necessary for the explanation of life.

Dawkins, author argues, has written a fantastic book in The Selfish Gene, but The God Delusion is much less. The major issue from author is that Dawkins doesn't really engage with some of the intricate reasoning from theology. Author claims Dawkins can't distinguish 'unitarians from abortion clinic bombers'.

Dawkins presents 'the ultimate argument' against creationism that is couched in non-deistic terms: Intelligent Design demands an intelligent designer, but the designer needs to be more complicated than the design. Therefore the designer needs to have been designed by an even more intelligent designer, thus an infinite regress. Of course infinite regress might be avoided by a 'brute fact' of an earlier designer. Any claim that stipulating a brute fact is unscientific should have to account for the 'brute fact' of 'matter' and 'laws of nature', author claims.

Dawkins also makes an empirical claim; that religion has made our world worse, not better. He cites crime rates, persecution, terrorism, and the closing of children's minds, etc. Most of the evidence, author claims, is anecdotal. Author replies that most of the history of the 20th century has been an experiment in institutional atheism and has shed a lot of blood. Author also argues that religion is worse compared to what. Most of our value/moral and aesthetic judgments come from a society that is deeply shaped by Judeo/Christian teachings, so this is a problem of circularity. Dawkins' ethical claim looks a lot like Mill's Harm Principle, which, author argues, wouldn't be the ideal in a traditional Confusion culture, which would suppress individualism.

Author's final argument is that Dawkins is making a big stink over a particular part of history that pitted the church against Darwinism and science. Believers might have said 'so what?' and we wouldn't see this conflict as important. Of course saying they have nothing to do with each other is over-simplistic, but Dawkins is also over-simplistic with his book.


Daniel Dennett replies to Orr in 'The God Delusion' Letter to the Editors, The New York Review of Books, Vol. 54 Num 3 March 1, 2007.

Orr replies, and Dennet replies again on a Blog.