The God Delusion
by Richard Dawkins
and
Letter to a Christian Nation
by Sam Harris
Two closely related books that I happened to read in a short time.
Richard Dawkins has spent most of a splendid career writing about Darwinian evolution: The Blind Watchmaker, Climbing Mount Improbable, The Ancestor's Tale, and of course the trailbreaking The Selfish Gene. In recent years--and maybe long before I joined the fan club--he's focused on the widely accepted hypothesis that life and all creation is the continuing work of a supernatural being. Spoiler alert: He concludes that the hypothesis is wrong.
The God Delusion now puts the hypothesis right at the center. For seven thousand years, that we know of, people have followed gods, giving them enormous powers and indefinitely extended lives, petitioning them to prosper our crops and blight our enemies', deriving from them authority to run other people's lives at gunpoint. Dawkins examines longstanding ideas in the light of what's said about these gods, what they are held to say about themselves, and what can in the end be inferred on the basis of evidence.
Oh dear:
- We may not be capable of absolute certainty, but we can perfectly well build knowledge on what we observe
- Scientific thought and investigation have yielded an explanation for the beginning of the universe and the development of life
- It doesn't include supernatural beings
- While some Christian leaders hold that the specious "design" of living things points to the existence of a designer, they don't go to the next step: the needed complexity of the designer points to a designer at a yet higher level of complexity, and so forth (i.e., if there's one god then there is a hierarchy of them, the designer of our universe being not the highest but the lowest in rank)
- The observed process of evolution is powerful and subtle enough to have generated all living things
- It's strong and refined enough to have created our moral and ethical sense without reference to anything supernatural, too
- Arguments for the existence of gods collapse on close scrutiny
So Dawkins is promoting atheism? He might reply, paraphrasing James Garner's gunfighter character, "Just as hard as I can." His book is aimed chiefly to closeted atheists and agnostics who have never thought of themselves as belonging to a largeish group or one whose members have anything much to talk about.
That's the contrast with Sam Harris' "letter," addressed to a fundamentalist American Christian. The book is shorter and plainer than Dawkins', and it's quite likely it will be burned first of the two. Harris doesn't try to convert anybody; he just explains why he is not a believer and why it does such great harm when Christians hold the American nation to be founded on, and unified by, their faith. (Others duly come in for criticism, too, but with one exception, no other religion is currently claiming it should assimilate all of us.)
"Plainer," I said. Harris' style of argument is so plain that it's disorienting. Reading the first paragraph--
You believe that the Bible is the word of God, that Jesus is the Son of God, and that only those who place their faith in Jesus will find salvation after death. As a Christian, you believe these propositions not because they make you feel good, but because you think they are true. Before I point out some of the problems with these beliefs, I would like to acknowledge that there are many points on which you and I agree. We agree, for instance, that if one of us is right, the other is wrong. . . . We agree that to be a true Christian is to believe that all other faiths are mistaken, and profoundly so. . . .
--I found myself recoiling: Wait a minute, can he say that? Thirty or forty years ago I did some volunteer work for a radical-free-speech radio station whose transmitter got bombed (an event reworked in my second-favorite episode of WKRP in Cincinnati). The manager gave a statement to the press beginning, "Last night criminals bombed KPFT's transmitter." I had the same reaction, wait, can he openly call them criminals? Of course the people who did the act were criminals, not alleged criminals, since it's against the law to set off a bomb and destroy property. But I'd grown so accustomed to pussyfooting reporters and editors (oh yes, even in 1970 it was the law of the land that you couldn't defame a person by naming him guilty till the jury said so, and even by 1970 hacks had extended the rule to protect people not named at all) that Larry's careful and exact statement rocked me back on my heels. And so did Sam Harris' opening: It took me a moment to read it again and realize, he isn't setting up a straw man, he's addressing someone who by definition holds precisely those views.
Plain talk is so strong and so out of fashion that it elicits a useful response: a good, close, analytical second reading. And Harris talks this plainly from start to finish. The "letter," a scant 90 pages long, walks the "Christian nation" through its canon of beliefs and shows bluntly why none of the customary rubrics--"The Wisdom of the Bible," "The Power of Prophecy" and so forth--under which those beliefs are explained is really applicable. The book is a little tour de force.
I recommend both Dawkins' comprehensive work and Harris' more tightly focused one to anybody who's thinking about gods, or even just one of them, and whether to accord them any place in the universe.
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Books and plays:
Science and Technology
The God Delusion/Letter to a Christian Nation