Some of his blows land. The most important one doesn't.
My father is religious. When I told him recently that I had lost my faith long ago, he did not argue. He listened.
After a while he asked me to read The Dawkins Delusion by Alister McGrath so we can discuss.
I agreed to read McGrath so that we could talk about it but I read The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins first to have the full picture.
He has not read Dawkins and probably won't.
McGrath is an unusual figure. He was an atheist in his early twenties, studying biochemistry at Oxford, when he changed his mind. He went on to earn a PhD in molecular biophysics and then a theology degree. He is now a professor of theology at Oxford. He wrote The Dawkins Delusion specifically as a point-by-point response to The God Delusion.
He is the critic Dawkins was least prepared to answer. Not because McGrath is right. Because he cannot be dismissed as someone who hasn't thought carefully about the evidence.
Where McGrath lands blows that land
McGrath's most effective critique is the strawman problem. Dawkins argues against versions of religious belief that most serious theologians don't hold. The God that gets demolished in The God Delusion is personal, interventionist, and provable through design arguments. This is not the God of Aquinas, whose "Five Ways" were never meant to be the kind of proof Dawkins is refuting. It is not Tillich's God as the "ground of being." It is a popular-level God that sophisticated believers have been arguing against for centuries.
Dawkins acknowledges in the book that he has not read much theology. This is an unusual admission for someone claiming to have refuted the case for God.
McGrath is also right about the meme theory, but only up to a point — and the point matters.
Dawkins coined "meme" in The Selfish Gene: ideas spread because they are good at replicating, not because they are true. Applied to religion, this is meant to explain away religious belief as a kind of mind virus.
McGrath's counter: the argument applies equally to atheism. If ideas spread for sociological reasons regardless of their truth, atheism is a meme too. The God Delusion is a meme. The meme framework, if it works at all, undermines every position including the one deploying it.
The problem is that this only lands against a specific kind of atheism. If you are holding a confident positive belief that God definitely does not exist, then yes, you can ask why that position escapes the sociological explanation while religious belief doesn't.
But not all atheism makes that positive claim. The more defensible position is the null one: I see no evidence for the claim, so I don't accept it. This is what Sagan was pointing at with the dragon in the garage. If someone tells you there is an invisible, heatless, intangible dragon in their garage, and every proposed test comes back empty, your non-belief in the dragon is not a faith commitment. It is simply the default rational position when no evidence has been provided. The burden of proof sits with whoever is making the positive assertion.
McGrath's meme argument does not touch that position. It works against Dawkins' certainty and rhetorical overconfidence, which are legitimate targets. It does not work against the more careful version of the same scepticism. And that distinction is worth holding onto, because it comes up well outside this debate.
McGrath's definition of faith is also worth having. Dawkins defines faith as "belief without evidence" — making it irrational by definition. McGrath argues this is a caricature. In the Christian tradition, faith involves trust extending beyond certainty, based on evidence and experience. This is not unlike what everyone does in relationships, in medical decisions, in most of life. If McGrath's definition is right, faith is not obviously irrational — it is rational commitment under uncertainty. The disagreement about what faith *is* runs underneath every argument in both books, and Dawkins never properly addresses it.
Where the rebuttal fails
McGrath does not seriously engage with the argument from improbability. This is the problem.
The Boeing 747 gambit is Dawkins' strongest philosophical move: invoking God to explain the complexity of the universe fails because God must be more complex than the universe. Complexity cannot be explained by positing something even more complex. Natural selection solves the problem without a designer. McGrath gives this a few paragraphs rather than a serious response. He suggests that the universe's complexity points to God rather than away from him. But this is precisely the move Dawkins predicts and refutes. You cannot explain complexity by invoking something more complex.
A rebuttal that does not engage the central argument is not a refutation.
The book is also primarily defensive. McGrath spends most of its eighty pages showing what Dawkins gets wrong rather than making a positive case. The few pages where he advances a positive argument for the rationality of belief are underdeveloped. Dawkins' argument is: the God hypothesis is improbable. An effective reply needs to show either that it is more probable than Dawkins claims, or that naturalism is less probable. McGrath does neither at any length.
What the two books together show
Dawkins asks: is the God hypothesis true? He argues it is not.
McGrath asks: is Dawkins' argument as strong as he claims? He argues it is not.
Both answers are probably correct. The God hypothesis is probably improbable — the argument from improbability is serious and goes unanswered. And Dawkins' certainty is not epistemically warranted — the certainty with which he holds a position that depends on probability is itself a kind of dogmatism.
Neither book asks the question that genuine inquiry requires: what evidence would change your mind? Dawkins does not say. McGrath does not say. Both are prosecutorial rather than investigative. Reading the books as a pair makes this visible in a way that reading either alone does not.
My father and I talked about both books. He is not convinced by Dawkins. I am not convinced by McGrath's failure to answer the improbability argument. We are probably not going to agree. What I took from the conversation is that the interesting question is not "who wins?" The interesting question is: what does it mean to hold a position honestly when the evidence is genuinely ambiguous?
Neither book is interested in that question. The conversation I had with my father came closer to it than either author did.
Sources: The Dawkins Delusion by Alister McGrath (Amazon), The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins (Amazon), The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt (Amazon)
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