Be careful whom you insult
I guess there is a certain bravery (or at least bravado) in telling a very large number of people, many of whom are very smart, that they are all idiots.
That's what Richard Dawkins has done in his runaway bestseller The God Delusion, and, strangely enough, some of the very smart people are starting to respond. Unfortunately, it turns out that the bravado and vehemence of Dawkins's attack on Christianity (and all manner of God-belief) is not quite matched by the quality of his argument.
Mega-brain philosopher Alvin Plantinga, writing in Books and Culture, has this to say:
Now despite the fact that this book is mainly philosophy, Dawkins is not a philosopher (he's a biologist). Even taking this into account, however, much of the philosophy he purveys is at best jejune. You might say that some of his forays into philosophy are at best sophomoric, but that would be unfair to sophomores; the fact is (grade inflation aside), many of his arguments would receive a failing grade in a sophomore philosophy class. This, combined with the arrogant, smarter-than-thou tone of the book, can be annoying. I shall put irritation aside, however and do my best to take Dawkins' main argument seriously.
Plantinga goes on to show that Dawkins uses arguments that you could drive the Queen Mary through, and just for good measure concludes with a stinging return of serve on the inconsistency of Dawkins's own philosophical position (naturalism and Darwinism).
Dawkins isn't the only militant atheist who's been banging his drum lately, nor the only one to be taken to the woodshed by a Christian reviewer. David B. Hart's review of Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon is one of the most devastating book shreddings I have ever read. After quoting a speech by the Bellman in Lewis Carroll's ‘The Hunting of the Snark’, Hart says:
The entire passage is a splendid specimen of Carroll's nonpareil gift for capturing the voice of authority—or, rather, the authoritative tone of voice, which is, as often as not, entirely unrelated to any actual authority on the speaker’s part—in all its special cadences, inflections, and modulations. And what makes these particular verses so delightful is the way in which they mimic a certain style of exhaustive empirical exactitude while producing a conceptual result of utter vacuity.
Perhaps that is what makes them seem so exquisitely germane to Daniel Dennett’s most recent book, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. This, I hasten to add, is neither a frivolous nor a malicious remark. The Bellman-like almost all of Carroll’s characters is a rigorously, even remorselessly rational person and is moreover a figure cast in a decidedly heroic mould. But, if one sets out in pursuit of beasts as fantastic, elusive, and protean as either Snarks or religion, one can proceed from only the vaguest idea of what one is looking for. So it is no great wonder that, in the special precision with which they define their respective quarries, in the quantity of farraginous detail they amass, in their insensibility to the incoherence of the portraits they have produced—in fact, in all things but felicity of expression—the Bellman and Dennett sound much alike.
Hart goes on to flay Dennett's attempt to construct an evolutionary account of religion based on “the infinitely elastic and largely worthless concept of memes”, and then to show that the very subject of Dennett's argument—‘religion‘—is a hopelessly broad and inadequate category.
Both reviews are in equal measuring illuminating and devastating, and both are academic in tone and content (keep your dictionary close by with Hart!). Stay tuned for a more popular level review of The God Delusion in a forthcoming Briefing.