Dawkins titles chapter 2 “The God Hypothesis,” within the chapter he explains with some precision just what he wants to disprove (or to come as close as possible to disproving, by stacking up probabilities against the hypothesis). In chapter 2, Dawkins also seems to ramble a bit, exploring irrelevant alleyways and appearing repeatedly to beg the question.

Dawkins begins chapter 2 with an entertaining and curious statement (please remember that I am “reading” the audiobook version, so I’m not always sure about capitalizations, spellings, and puncutation, and I apologize in advance for any errors, especially if they affect the sense noticeably; also, since I can’t provide page numbers, I’ll provide time codes):

The god of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, Philicidal [I assume this means "given to killing Philistines; please remember that I'm "reading" the audiobook and can't see all the spellings—rch], pestilential, megalomaniacal, sado-masochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. (54:34)

I could agree with some of these characterizations (“jealous and proud of it”) and quibble with others (“homophobic”—at most the topic of homosexuality is addressed directly in a verse or two in Leviticus, and indirectly in the stories of Sodom and Gomorrah and the rape at Gibeah, although in fact these latter two stories actually have nothing to do with sexual orientation, but feature male-on-male rape as a plot element by means of which certain “locals” attempt to assert their power over “strangers”), but I’m not sure that would really be to the point. In fact, it’s rather unusual that Dawkins should dwell on the Tanakh’s characterization of God (Yahweh) at all, given that he immediately insists:

The God Hypothesis should not stand or fall with its most unlovely instantiation, Yahweh … I am not attacking the particular qualities of Yahweh, or Jesus, or Allah, or any other specific god such as Baal, Zeus, or Wotan. Instead, I shall define the God Hypothesis more defensibly: “There exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us.” (56:10)

It turns out, however, that Dawkins cannot seem to stay away from “attacking the particular qualities” of this or that god or this or that specific religion. Later in chapter 2, he will explicitly refine the God Hypothesis to focus on “the Abrahamic god,” and within that broad umbrella, he will draw most of his specific data and examples from Christianity, with which Dawkins and his presumed readership are most likely to be familiar. As a matter of communicativeness and audience analysis, that maneuver certainly makes good sense. Yet readers do well to keep in mind precisely what Dawkins claims to criticize: the very idea that “[t]here exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us.” Any discussion that does not pertain to the truth or falsity (including relative degrees of probability leading toward each extreme) of this “hypothesis” is, strictly speaking, irrelevant to the book’s thesis—and there turns out to be plenty of irrelevant discussion in chapter 2.

Note also how Dawkins characterizes the Bible as fiction in his very first sentence of chapter 2. There are other examples of such question-begging in chapter 2 as well. Consider:

How did the Greeks, the Romans, and the Vikings cope with such polytheological conundrums? Was Venus just another name for Aphrodite, or were they two distinct goddesses of love? Was Thor with his hammer a manifestation of Wotan, or a separate god? Who cares? Life is too short to bother with the distinction between one figment of the imagination and many. (1:06:21)

Or take this cheeky comment as a third example:

More sophisticated theologians proclaim the sexlessness of god, while some feminist theologians seek to redress historic injustices by designating her female. But what, after all, is the difference between a nonexistent female and a nonexistent male? I suppose that in the ditzily unreal intersection of theology and feminism, existence might indeed be a less salient attribute than gender. (1:07:07)

Please understand that I am not accusing Dawkins himself of assuming the nonexistence of God as a starting point. I am ready to assume that Dawkins has actually thought through various arguments for and against God’s existence and has rationally reached the conclusion that no such being exists. However, as a matter of argumentation and rhetoric, Dawkins does not appear, in chapter 2, to actually be willing to test the God Hypothesis, or even to understand it very well. His primary mode of engagement with it seems to be mockery, and that hardly makes for reasoned discourse.

Polytheism

After introducing the God Hypothesis, Dawkins engages in a discussion of polytheism, apparently in order to forestall charges of ignoring the broad variety of religious expressions, to challenge the notion that the move from polytheism to monotheism was a self-evident good, and to take some swipes at Christianity’s claim to be a monotheistic religion. At the very outset of this discussion, Dawkins shows that his ability to quote selectively rivals that of the Discovery Institute’s propaganda machine. According to Dawkins,

The Catholic Encyclopedia dismisses polytheism and atheism in the same insouciant breath: “Formal dogmatic Atheism is self-refuting, and has never de facto won the reasoned assent of any considerable number of men. Nor can Polytheism, however easily it may take hold of the popular imagination, ever satisfy the mind of a philosopher.” (58:20)

Dawkins’s quotation reproduces the second and third lines from the article “The Existence of God” in the 1909 edition of the Catholic Encyclopedia (hereafter CE). To be fair to Dawkins, that first paragraph does in fact sound like an insouciant dismissal of “formal dogmatic Atheism” as well as of “Polytheism.” However, to be fair to the CE, readers should note that these two sentences introduce a relatively long article that attempts to make a positive case for the existence of God. I’m not claiming that it succeeds, or that it fails, only that the article is rather longer than it sounds in Dawkins’s presentation. The 1909 CE also has separate articles on atheism and polytheism; the article on polytheism is very short, but the one on atheism is rather long, and hardly an insouciant dismissal (although you can expect that the CE of 1909 would render a negative judgment on atheism). To say that the CE dismisses atheism in a single breath significantly understates the attention given to it in the 1909 CE. Moreover, the very next sentence in the “Existence of God” article—following right after where Dawkins ends his quotation—reads, “But there are several varieties of what may be described as virtual Atheism which cannot be dismissed so summarily.” Note the use of the verb “dismiss” in the CE and in Dawkins’s introduction to his quotation from the CE: Dawkins says that the CE insouciantly dismisses atheism, and while the CE article on “The Existence of God” does seem to say that “formal dogmatic Atheism” can be so dismissed, it immediately says that “virtual Atheism” cannot be so dismissed. Add to that the fact that the CE devotes an entire article (over 2,300 words) to atheism and one might easily be led to conclude that Dawkins seriously under-represents the Catholic Encyclopedia‘s actual attention to atheism. Please remember that all of this pertains to the 1909 edition; why Dawkins chose to quote from the 1909, pre-Vatican II edition of the CE instead of the New Catholic Encyclopedia (most recently revised in 2003) is beyond me—unless it is the fact that the old CE is freely available on the web. (By the way, I did check, and the Bodleian does have the full run of the 2003 edition.)

Monotheism

Dawkins follows his selective quotation from the 1909 CE with a complaint about “monotheistic chauvinism” in British charity laws; a swipe (well-deserved) at American televangelists; and a very long detour into Trinitarianism and veneration of Mary and the saints in Catholicism. Here is the bulk of Dawkins’s entire discussion of Arianism:

Rivers of medieval ink, not to mention blood, have been squandered over the “mystery of the Trinity, and in suppressing deviations such as the Arian heresy. Arius of Alexandria, in the fourth century ad, denied that Jesus was “consubstantial” (i.e., of the same substance or essence) with God. “What on earth could that possibly mean?,” you’re probably asking. “Substance? What substance? What exactly do you mean by ‘essence’?” “Very little” seems the only reasonable reply. Yet the controversy split Christendom down the middle for a century, and the emperor Constantine ordered that all copies of Arius’s books should be burned. Splitting Christendom by splitting hairs: such has ever been the way of theology. (59:59)

Clearly, P. J. Toner—author of the aforementioned CE article on “The Existence of God,” is not the only one capable of insouciant dismissal! Instead of actually trying to understand what Trinitarians mean by words like “substance” and “essence,” Dawkins just waves the terms away as meaningless.

Now I will readily confess that I have my own intellectual, exegetical, and theological problems with—yea, even objections to—Trinitarianism, and wouldn’t mind a bit if Arius came back to the table for some more discussion. However, all of this is, strictly speaking, irrelevant to the God Hypothesis. Monotheistic chauvinism in British charity laws has absolutely no bearing on the factual question of whether a god, as defined by Dawkins, actually exists. Trinitarianism and all of its attendant controversies presuppose the truth of the God Hypothesis, but exposing Trinitarianism as hopelessly muddled does not disprove the presupposition, but goes only to a particular way of fleshing out the hypothesis. I will not squander bandwidth here on a detailed review of Dawkins’s treatment of Mary and the saints—I’m not Catholic and have no real stake in the veneration of Mary or the saints—but I will point out that these topics, too, are irrelevant to the truth or falsity of the God Hypothesis. If Trinitarianism and the veneration of Mary and the saints turn Catholics for all practical purposes into virtual polytheists, that fact does not prove that such worshipers are incorrect in thinking that “[t]here exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us.” Even if it is ludicrous (and I’m not saying that it is or isn’t) to think that God has a bizarre form of multiple personality disorder and presides over a vast heavenly hierarchy of messengers who tote prayers up to God from the faithful and blessings back down from God to the faithful, this ludicrosity (is that a word?) does not prove that no god exists.

By the way, the discussion of Trinitarianism yields another example of Dawkins under-representing his religious sources. Of the Trinity, Dawkins mockingly writes:

Do we have one god in three parts, or three gods in one? The Catholic Encyclopeda clears up the matter for us in a masterpiece of theological close reasoning: “in the unity of the Godhead there are Three Persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, these Three Persons being truly distinct one from another. Thus, in the words of the Athanasian Creed: ‘the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God, and yet there are not three Gods but one God.’” (1:01:42)

Dawkins does go on to supply one more quotation from the 1909 CE, itself quoting Gregory Thaumaturgus (one or two paragraphs into the lengthy essay). What Dawkins doesn’t bother to tell his readers is that his first quotation from the CE entry “The Blessed Trinity” is less than two complete sentences out of the first, introductory paragraph, a paragraph that simply describes the dogma. One can hardly expect the introductory paragraph of a 13,800-word essay to unpack all of its reasoning in the space of 59 words within the opening paragraph! Yet when the 1909 CE entry on the Trinity fails to do this impossible and unreasonable task, Dawkins deploys sarcasm rather than employing actual analysis. Again, I really have no dog in the Trinitarian race, but if you’re going to criticize a widely-held and long-held belief, at least try to understand it. Don’t just try to mock it into submission. On this score, Dawkins is almost (but not quite) as bad as Dembski.

I would like to think that I went into reading The God Delusion with an open mind, and in fact I expected to agree with Dawkins on a number of points (though not his largest one). I would like to think that I will be reading chapters 3 and following with an equally open mind. However, there are several statements in chapter 2 that lead me to think that, when it comes to Christian theology, Dawkins either doesn’t really know what he’s talking about, or doesn’t care to be accurate. For example, even though Dawkins is aware of feminist theology, he snipes that “theology … unlike science or most other branches of human scholarship, has not got on in eighteen centuries” (1:20:50). By invoking feminist theology, Dawkins implies that he knows that there have been developments in theology during the past eighteen centuries. Yet he conveniently forgets this when it come times to make a swipe at Christianity.

Similarly, at the beginning of the section of chapter 2 subtitled “Monotheism,” Dawkins begins with a quotation from Gore Vidal that labels the Old Testament “a barbaric Bronze Age text.” “Barbaric” I can buy, at least for parts of the Tanakh, but Bronze Age? Only the most conservative of biblical scholars assigns any part of the Tanakh to the Bronze Age, and at that only the Torah, and maybe the book of Job (those scholars are incorrect, but this isn’t the place for that debate), and beyond that not more than a few Psalms (an early version of Psalm 29, for example). That leaves well over two-thirds of the actual text of the Tanakh that nobody places earlier than the Iron Age. The trend in biblical studies these days is to date almost all of the Tanakh no earlier than the end of the 8th century, and many scholars would say that is rather too early. The most generous thing I can say about this is that Dawkins hasn’t vetted his sources very well. But then Dawkins goes on to make silly statements of his own. He accuses Yahweh, the god portrayed in the Tankah, as being “fiercely unpleasant … morbidly obsessed with sexual restrictions, with the smell of charred flesh, with his own superiority over rival gods, and with the exclusiveness of his chosen desert tribe” (1:10:17). Of these, only the charge of being “morbidly obsessed … with his own superiority over rival gods” could really be made to stick if the whole witness of the Tankah were taken into account. Issues of sexual restrictions are confined to a few chapters in the Torah, and those restrictions are mostly boil down to prohibitions of adultery and incest, with a line or two about bestiality and homosexual sex between males. If the 8th-century prophets are to be believed, Yahweh himself was the biggest critic of ancient Israel’s and Judah’s sacrificial cults, and one or two passages in the prophets virtually deny that Yahweh had anything to do with inspiring the idea of sacrifice. Moreover, the biggest critic of Israel and Judah in the Tankah is—you guessed it—Yahweh, and sometimes, according to the prophets (especially Amos), Yahweh took particular offense at Israelite and Judean “exclusivism”! In the next sentence, Dawkins claims that “Paul of Tarsus” invented Christianity as a “less ruthlessly monotheistic” alternative to Judaism, even though Christianity (of a sort; call it “the Jesus movement,” following Gerd Theissen and others, if you prefer) was around for some time before Paul—by his own admission originally an opponent of the movement—became one of its ablest early promoters. Whether Dawkins is just ignorant of the facts or is willfully misrepresenting the case I don’t know, but either case would give me cause to question whether Dawkins has bothered to actually research the matters on which he claims to speak (beyond an internet search on the 1909 Catholic Encyclopedia).

Whenever someone criticizes Dawkins for not reading theology more carefully, he seems to have a stock reply, the gist of which is that he sees no need to read learned works of theology because he does not believe that God exists at all. To those who criticize him along these lines, Dawkins retorts, “How many learned books of fairyology and hobgoblinology have you read?” My own answer to Dawkins’s stock reply originally appeared in a comment on John Lynch’s blog post on the stock reply:

If you want to say that all talk about the Trinity is irrelevant because God does not exist at all (never mind in “three persons,” whatever that means), then you need not concern yourself with specific Trinitarian dogmas. You need only concern yourself with the broader question as to whether God exists at all (the God Hypothesis proper, as Dawkins defines it in chapter 2). However, if you want to say that talk about the Trinity is fatally flawed because specific terms used in Trinitarian dogma are confused or meaningless, you need to deal with the specific terms and show, not merely posit, that the terms are indeed confused or meaningless. In the abstract, there’s no reason why Dawkins should be required or expected to be well-read in specific dogmas–and few specific dogmas are inherent in the generic God Hypothesis. If he’s going to attack specific dogmas, though, he should show that he actually understands what the proponents of those dogmas mean when they affirm and attempt to explain those dogmas.

Secularism, the Founding Fathers and the religion of America

Dawkins spends much of the rest of chapter 2 discussing the religious outlooks of the United States’s “founding fathers,” especially Thomas Jefferson. Much of this discussion is historically accurate. Despite what some American Christians might like to believe, the “founders” did not intend for the United States to be a “Christian nation,” nor to be governed as a “religious” nation at all. As far as government and politics were concerned, the founders were largely secularists. Nothing in the founding of the United States gives “dominionists” any leg to stand on. But none of this bears at all on the God Hypothesis. What Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and other early Americans believed about God or aimed for in the way they sculpted the early republic may be interesting as a historical point, but those beliefs are irrelevant to the question of whether [t]here exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us.” The only possible importance any of this could have to testing that hypothesis is in the realm of appeal to authority, and none of the “founding fathers” were competent to speak as authorities on this topic.

In sum, I was not terribly impressed with the first twenty pages or so of The God Delusion, chapter 2. Dawkins raises a few important questions at the beginning of the chapter, and sets out his overall goal quite clearly. However, much of the rest of these sections of chapter 2 seems to me poorly researched and/or irrelevant to testing the God Hypothesis as Dawkins stated it at the beginning of the chapter.