Truth, evidence and controversy: Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion at 20

In my youth, somewhere in the late 1990s, when I was a goth or a punk or something, I had a t-shirt proclaiming, “Ignorance should not reproduce”. Along with the text there was a provocative image, which included the Christian cross.

Back then, if you were an educated liberal type, who valued reasoning and evidence, the scientific method, free expression and broadly progressive social values – the kinds of values championed by civil rights movements – there was a decent chance that you felt yourself to be battling against a stuffy, illiberal Christian orthodoxy that, to a considerable extent, held the reins of power, especially in the United States.

In 1999, at a Republican primary debate, the presidential candidates were asked “what political philosopher or thinker do you most identify with?” Without missing a beat, George W. Bush said “Christ”. This was arguably the moment he became the frontrunner to become president.

Religion and power commingled. This was not only a concern in politics, but in education, where we often heard about intelligent design being taught alongside natural selection.

Rereading Richard Dawkin’s The God Delusion, which turned 20 this year, I’m reminded of this time. The God Delusion offers a sustained critique of religion, and Christianity, in particular. Its arguments are presented across ten chapters, the most significant being the fourth, titled “Why There Almost Certainly is No God”.

The book was a huge bestseller – it sold more than three million copies and was translated into more than 30 languages. It struck at the heart of the religious leviathan, at least for its educated, secular readership.

It was also immensely controversial, with many significant rebuttals being published. There were three main objections.

First, Dawkins was accused of engaging with a caricature of religious faith. Literary scholar Terry Eagleton famously accused Dawkins and others of producing “vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince.”

Second, he was criticised for his tone. Theologian Alister McGrath spoke of Dawkins’ “shrill, aggressive rhetoric”.

Third, Dawkins was accused of replacing one religion with another – science. The title of novelist Marilynne Robinson’s 2006 article about Dawkins’ book, Hysterical Scientism, very much conveys this. (I’ll return to this last objection at the end.)

Notably, opposition to The God Delusion took the form of intellectual debate. He wasn’t “de-platformed” – cancelled – in any significant way.

Still, Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist, who made his name with The Selfish Gene (1976), became one of the “Four Horsemen of New Atheism”, along with the brilliant and polemical journalist Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great, 2007), cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett (Breaking the Spell, 2006), and philosopher Sam Harris (The End of Faith, 2004, and Letter to a Christian Nation, 2006).

Today, Dawkins remains a controversial figure, more for this statements around questions of trans identity than his criticisms of religion. But the enduring value of The God Delusion lies in its championing of liberal values: reasoning and evidence, free speech, thinking for oneself and putting regard for truth before one’s concerns about group membership.

Bristling at censorship

In his opening chapter, “A Deeply Religious Non-Believer”, Dawkins presents different incarnations of religiosity. He contrasts those who encounter the immensity of the universe and posit the existence of a God, with atheists, like himself, who feel awe but remain secular.

“A quasi-mystical response to nature and the universe,” he writes, “is common among scientists and rationalists.” He then quotes physicist Albert Einstein:

To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious.

For Dawkins, this kind of religiosity deserves respect. What follows is a lengthy objection to the fact that, at the time, there was a broad taboo against criticising religion. “A widespread assumption,” Dawkins writes, “which nearly everybody in our society accepts – the non-religious included – is that religious faith is especially vulnerable to offence and should be protected by an abnormally thick wall of respect.”

Naturally, Dawkins affirms that he will not follow this assumption. When I think about The God Delusion now, it is Dawkins’ bristling at censorship that most stands out in my mind, not his criticism of religion.

The origins of complexity

In the following chapters, Dawkins defines what he means by God and presents several arguments for God’s existence, including those by noteworthy philosophers and theologians such as Thomas Aquinas.

The most significant argument, for Dawkins, for the existence of God, which he tackles in Chapter Four, is “intelligent design”, which claims that the complexity we observe in natural things, such as the human eye, could only have arisen through the will of some intelligent designer.

But an easy rational objection to intelligent design is that saying God is the intelligent designer of the universe doesn’t really help, because, by the same argument, something even more intelligent than God must have designed God.

The greatest strength of The God Delusion is Dawkins’ account of Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection. “Darwin and his successors,” he writes, “have shown how living creatures, with their spectacular statistical improbability and appearance of design, have evolved by slow, gradual degrees from simple beginnings.”

According to the theory of natural selection, complexity in life arises not from chance alone. Rather, random genetic variations (the chance part) are filtered by natural selection, so the genetic variants that provide survival and reproductive advantages in particular environments persist.

Also important, although less definitive, is the chapter in which Dawkins speculates about the roots of religion. While he hesitates to say how, exactly, religion arose in Darwinian terms, he argues that religion is a by-product – a “misfiring” – of other evolved capacities, such as the inclination to intuitively assign purposes to everything, or the necessity that children believe what stern adults tell them, lest they eat something poisonous or fall off a cliff.

In the remainder of the book, Dawkins discusses whether religion is necessary as a source of morality (the answer is “no”), the questionable morals of the Bible (the so-called “Good Book”), and the negative effects that religion can have on people.

The book’s final chapter is the most poignant. It brings us to the enduring relevance of The God Delusion. “It is often said that there is a God-shaped gap in the brain which needs to be filled,” writes Dawkins. “We have a psychological need for God – imaginary friend, father, big brother, confessor, confidant – and the need has to be satisfied whether God really exists or not.”

He then writes that religion “has at one time or another been thought to fill four main roles in human life: explanation, exhortation, consolation and inspiration”.

In other words, religion tells us how the world works and how to be good, it makes us feel a little better about our fleeting existence, and it inspires us to do great things.

Dawkins acknowledges that religion may well console us, but makes the cutting point: “Religion’s power to console doesn’t make it true.”

Dawkins’ recent troubles

As I have noted, in The God Delusion Dawkins was not only battling against what he saw as the irrationality of religion, but the taboo, in many circles, against criticising religion; indeed, the success of the book indicates that many surely felt the same way.

However, times have changed since 2006. And this is demonstrated by Dawkins’ own recent troubles.

Dawkins ran afoul of the social justice world when he tweeted the following in 2021:

In 2015, Rachel Dolezal, a white chapter president of NAACP [The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People], was vilified for identifying as Black. Some men choose to identify as women, and some women choose to identify as men. You will be vilified if you deny that they literally are what they identify as. Discuss.

Dawkins was applying reason to the vexed issues of racial and trans identity and he was punished. Among other things, in 2021, the American Humanist Association withdrew his 1996 Humanist of the Year award.

In an open letter responding to this decision, philosopher Rebecca Goldstein and psychologist Steven Pinker, both of whom had received the award, argued that seeking to “punish, dishonor, or humiliate a writer rather than engage with his words is a betrayal of humanism”.

“It has not been lost on commentators,” they observed, “that an association of ‘freethinkers’ has deemed certain thoughts unthinkable, nor that it is enforcing dogmas and catechisms by excommunicating a heretic.”

As the language of Goldstein and Pinker indicates, parts of the “woke” left, even though secular, now exhibit some of the characteristics of religious zealots. There is much more that could be said here about the alleged “God-shaped gap” in the human psyche.

Dawkins has written several books since this decision, including The Genetic Book of the Dead: a Darwinian Reverie (2024). He continues to attract controversy.

Science works

I mention all this because the great value of The God Delusion lies not in its criticism of religion, but its embrace of liberal values: reasoning and evidence, free speech, thinking for oneself.

Honestly, coming up with arguments against religion isn’t that challenging if one is so inclined. And when one tussles with a religious person, often the conversation ends up on the point that religion is more about faith than it is about reason. Religious people themselves refer to their religions as “faiths”.

The liberal values in mention have been hard-won across the centuries and they are always under siege. Sometimes this is from religion, as was the case 20 years ago. But sometimes the threat comes from the secular world: communism, fascism and even what we might call “identity politics” or “wokism” today.

Why do we care about reasoning and evidence and truth? One simple point is that when we have a regard for such things, our world gets better. This is what distinguishes science from religion.

In my favourite Dawkins moment, he was challenged at a talk by some smarty-pants in the audience to justify the scientific method – the intimation being that science is indeed just one faith among many, and is thus indistinguishable from religion.

Dawkins replied:

It works. Planes fly, cars drive, computers compute. If you base medicine on science, you cure people. If you base the design of planes on science, they fly. If you base the design of rockets on science, they reach the moon. It works, bitches.