Category Archives: McGrath, Alister

Genes: masters or slaves?

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In Richard Dawkins’ celebrated book The Selfish Gene, there is a passage which (rather typically for him) smuggles non-empirical assumptions into a statement that purports to be a scientific one.

The passage reads as follows:-

[Genes] swarm in huge colonies, safe inside gigantic lumbering robots, sealed off from the outside world, communicating with it by tortuous indirect routes, manipulating it by remote control.  They are in you and me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence.

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McGrath vs Dawkins: faith and evidence

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Richard Dawkins is no philosopher, nor theologian, nor biblical scholar.  None of which automatically disqualifies him from expressing his opinions on religion, but all of which should make him exercise a little more care and caution in expressing those opinions.

For a man so committed to evidence and reason, it is remarkable that Dawkins pays so little attention to both in certain sections of The God Delusion.  It is clear that before he wrote that book, he had read Alister McGrath’s Dawkins’ God: Genes, Memes, and the Meaning of Life (2005).  …

Darwin and a Godless universe

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If any one theory can be said to have converted the Western world to atheism, it is Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.  The noted American sceptic Robert Ingersoll (1833-99) declared:-

This century will be called Darwin’s century.  He was one of the greatest men who ever touched the globe.  He has explained more of the phenomena of life that all of the religious teachers.  Write the name of Charles Darwin on the one hand and the name of every theologian who ever lived on the other, and from that name has come more light to the world than from all of those. …