Dawkins' God From the Selfish Gene to the God Delusion

In Dawkins' God, McGrath has written a brilliant book, and it is difficult to think that the exposition of Dawkins' writings and their religious implications, will ever be better stated, explored and criticised... at once dispassionate, robust and readable. Richard Harries, Times Higher Education Supplement "Alister McGrath's book Dawkins' God: Genes, Memes and the Meaning of Life does a fair and sophisticated job of summarising my position." Richard Dawkins, Times Higher Education Supplement "Dawkins is disposed of with panache, and with McGrath's ususal clarity and conciseness." Theology "Wielding evolutionary arguments and carefully chosen metaphors like sharp swords, Richard Dawkins has emerged over three decades as this generation's most aggressive promoter of atheism. In his view, science, and science alone, provides the only rock worth standing on. In this remarkable book, Alister McGrath challenges Dawkins on the very ground he holds most sacred - rational argument - and McGrath disarms the master. It becomes readily apparent that Dawkins has aimed his attack at a naive version of faith that most serious believers would not recognize. After reading this carefully constructed and eloquently written book, Dawkins' choice of atheism emerges as the most irrational of the available choices about God's existence." Francis Collins, Director of the Human Genome Project "In this tour-de-force Alister McGrath approaches the edifice of self-confident, breezy atheism so effectively promoted by Richard Dawkins, and by deft dissection and argument reveals the shallowness, special-pleading and inconsistencies of his world-picture. Here is a book which helps to rejoin the magnificence of science to the magnificence of God's good Creation." Simon Conway Morris, Professor of Evolutionary Palaeobiology, Cambridge University "This is a wonderful book. One of the world's leading Christian contributors to the science/religion dialogue takes on Richard Dawkins, Darwinism's arch-atheist, and wrestles him to the ground! This is scholarship as it should be - informed, feisty, and terrific fun. I cannot wait to see Dawkins's review of Alister McGrath's critique." Michael Ruse, Lucyle T. Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy, Florida State University "A timely and accessible contribution to the debate over Richard Dawkins's cosmology which exposes philosophical naivety, the abuse of metaphor, and sheer bluster, left, right and centre. Here Alister McGrath announces what every Darwinian Fundamentalist needs to hear: that science is and always has been a cultural practice that is provisional, fallible, and socially shaped - an enterprise to be cultivated and fostered, but hardly worshipped or idolised. A devastating critique." David N. Livingstone, Professor of Geography and Intellectual History, Queen's University, Belfast "Alister McGrath critically examines the places where Richard Dawkins' well-established biological science changes into the speculations which undergird Dawkins' own anti-religious faith. In his appreciative examination and ruthless analysis of Dawkins writings and the polemics associated with them, McGrath has done a marvellous apologetic job, as well as providing a particular service for those daunted by scientific authoritarianism. We are all in his debt for rigorously identifying and exposing the weaknesses of some of the commonly used arguments against the Christian faith." R. J. Berry, formerly Professor of Genetics, University College, London and President of the Linnean Society "Alister McGrath subjects the atheistic world-view of Richard Dawkins to critical analysis and finds it severely lacking in intellectual rigour. As a former atheist himself, and a biochemist turned theologian and philosopher, the author is well placed to appreciate Dawkins' well-deserved reputation as a populariser of evolutionary theory, but equally well qualified to assess his stratagem of using a biological theory for ideological purposes. This book is essential reading for those interested in the traffic of ideas between science, philosophy and religion." Dr Denis Alexander, Chairman, Molecular Immunology Programme, The Babraham Institute and Fellow of St. Edmund's College, Cambridge "With clear and incisive argumentation, McGrath takes Dawkins on and exposes many of the weaknesses in his case for atheism." Reformed Theological Journal