Dawkins and the Devil

Stephen M. Barr offers a hilarious review of Richard Dawkins’s latest, A Devil’s Chaplain in the August/September issue of First Things . He chides Dawkins for getting his facts wrong and for pervasive, stubborn superficiality. He concludes that there are several Dawkinses, and that his book is a war of each against each. Dawkins the Humanist, Dawkins the Reasoner, and Dawkins the Darwinist each sit “on a different branch, sawing away at the branches on which the others sit. Dawkins the Humanist preaches, inveighs, denounces; he bristles with moral indignation. Dawkins the Darwinist tells him, however, that his humanism is speciesist vanity, his moral standards arbitrary, and his indignation empty. Dawkins the Humanist rebels, proclaiming himself (in human affairs) passionately anti-Darwinian. Dawkins the Reasoner joins the rebellion, declaring that our minds allow us to transcend our genetic inheritance. Dawkins the Darwinist answers with lethal effect that our brains ‘were only designed to understanding the mundane details of how to survive in the stone-age African savannah.” The problem, Barr claims, is Dawkins’s insistent materialism and atheism, which make it impossible for him to arrive at any coherent position.

My favorite passage of the review, though, was Barr’s comment on the claim that the book offers a more subdued, gentler Dawkins. He offers a list of examples of Dawkins’s trademark invective, yet admits that the anthology may have the purpose of humanizing the “flame-throwing controversialist.” Then he adds: “Whether all of this humanizes Dawkins is not for me to say; it is doubtless a speciesist concern in any case. Of more concern is the quality of his thinking, which is far from impressive. To call it low-grade intellectual poodling would perhaps be too harsh; but it is certainly not high-grade.”