Is He Out There? Debating The God Delusion, by Paul Laffan

Author: Paul Laffan. Review by Jonathan Wooding.

This book is essential reading, but what an awful title! Is He Out There? We Quakers, connoisseurs of interiority (and somewhat scientifically minded too, on a good day), know the answer to that question. But this book is not an exercise in sifting false from true religion. Here, Paul Laffan is defending the reputation of The God Delusion, the polemical book by Richard Dawkins, who was, at the time of publication in 2006, the professor for the public understanding of science at Oxford.

The distinction between ‘genuine first-hand religious experience’ and ‘religion’s wicked practical partner, the spirit of corporate dominion’ (as William James called it in The Varieties of Religious Experience) is not allowed in this book. Nor is there much breathing space given to the historic Judaeo-Christian vacillation between a ‘God of power’ and a ‘God of peace’, as outlined in Graham Shaw’s God In Our Hands (1987). No, these things are all one and the same, apparently – they are all ‘anti-scientific’ and ‘deleterious’. According to Laffan, there doesn’t appear to be ‘a viable modern religiosity’, nor should we any more subscribe ‘to Christianity, or any of the traditional world religions’. The author’s gold standard is empirical knowledge, and because we have more of this now than when religions were ‘developed’, well, that makes religion a deceased dove, my friend. Give just one metaphysical inch and you’ll be a mile down the road to the everlasting evolutionary bonfire. Postmodern pietists like myself are barking up the wrong rood. Contemporary professors of religion have failed to make one iota of sense to Laffan and others convinced by Richard Dawkins; this leaves me quaking in my boots as a subscriber to what is still a Religious Society of Friends.

Laffan is understandably cross with the facetious tone of people like me, towards what we see as mere ‘scientism’. He challenges several well-known defenders of the faith as naive, too. These, I would say, are poor innocents – I for one have welcomed and befriended them over the years. Take a look at who he means: Karen Armstrong (The Case for God: What religion really means); John Gray (Seven Types of Atheism); David Bentley Hart (Atheist Delusions); Francis Spufford (Unapologetic) and Rupert Shortt (whose Outgrowing Dawkins: God for grown-ups I reviewed in these pages (18 March, 2022)). All of these, it would appear, are suffering – however much they may deny it – from the same delusion. This delusion is not just what Freud called a consoling ‘illusion’. No, it’s less benign than that. The irredeemable delusion in question is the belief that God objectively exists, and caused the universe to exist. Any attempt to suggest that other conceptions of God are available is mercilessly exposed as sophistry and cruel fantasy. That the religious project might be platonistic and not empirical just doesn’t bear thinking about.

Laffan is defending Richard Dawkins as an evolutionary biologist – the man who wrote papers like ‘Selective pecking in the domestic chick’ in 1966 – as well as the author of The God Delusion. The paper on chicks gained Dawkins a doctorate for his contribution to knowledge. The God Delusion suggested that God can have nothing to do with knowledge.

Laffan says his own book ‘looks at how Christianity has responded to Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion’. It is an exhilarating, blaspheming battle of books ancient and modern. Indeed, it is rancorous, acerbic and vituperative in the best tradition of Swiftian satire (see The Battle of the Books, 1704). Thank the Lord that Quakers don’t have to do theology! Honestly, you’d think we were still waiting in fear for our lives for Elizabeth Tudor’s religious settlement, or for Charles Stuart’s Declaration of Indulgence.

Quakers, as we know, aim ‘to live in the life and power which takes away the occasion of all wars’. Is that enough to put an end to any battling? Well, Laffan has a few scores to settle nonetheless: ‘evolution is what is at stake for Dawkins’. He is a brilliant and fearsome advocate.

He is also a teacher in writing and literature. I like his references to literature – to Samuel Beckett and George Eliot, for instance, both of whom played a part in the erosion of lazy literalism and fanciful consolations in religious thinking. But I’d like to hear more of this. Laffan has a fine appreciation of the power of literary devices, so perhaps he could consider Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s notion that God herself is one of these devices: ‘a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am’.

All of this comes down to how we perceive and know things – epistemology, the theory of knowledge and understanding. Alas, Laffan doesn’t really go into this seriously. Knowledge based on personal experience or perception – gnosis – doesn’t get much of a look in here, despite this tantalising aside: ‘The Gnostic form of knowledge was not what we would recognize by the word: it meant spiritual enlightenment … which could hardly be more alien to the spirit of modern science.’ You can see my frustration.

No, apparently evolution is what is at stake. And yet, as a teacher of writing, Laffan might have considered the nature of one particular literary form: creative non-fiction. This form of expression doesn’t mean we are playing fast and loose with reality and the truth; it is a pursuit of a truthful understanding of the universe, including one’s self, domestic chicks, evolution and all. This pursuit might be done by an ancient scribe or a laboratory-equipped modern scientist but, either way, it is always mediated by human creativity and interpretation. And it will inevitably be superseded.

Pursuing truth is something we can all do, even as the ‘poor, bare, forked animal’ (as King Lear has it) that we humans always have been. But, according to Laffan, the religious pursuit ‘draws on a mythological framework, rather than on the observation and mensuration we would expect of a scientific explanation’. I would say this truth is not necessarily ‘fabricated’, as Laffan has it in The Fabricated Christ (reviewed 9 July 2020), nor a delusion, nor falsity, nor deceit, though of course it’s always open to that. If one were to say that the earnest writers of the Bible were all guilty of nothing more than creative non-fiction, this is not to dismiss their efforts as malign or untruthful. They would surely all have been fascinated by Dawkins’ The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life.

If I might take a ‘stab in the dark’ – and isn’t this what theology is? – Paul Laffan is a logical empiricist who is paying his philosophical debt to A J Ayer. Ayer’s ruthlessly anti-metaphysical, game-changing book Language, Truth and Logic (1936) argued that a statement is meaningful only if it can be verified or falsified by experience – the verification principle. Statements that are not verifiable or falsifiable, such as metaphysical statements, are meaningless. So for him all religious statements and propositions are non-sensical. It’s enthralling to watch Laffan’s temerity as he confronts the theological celebrities who make such statements, from popes to archbishops. It’s the same kind of gall he accuses the Pontifical Academy of Sciences of having in its appropriation of Galileo’s legacy. He is no respecter of persons, says this admiring but rather more timid Quaker.

I guess this is what speaking truth to power must look like, without question. But there’s no time for, let’s say, the art of prayer, the beauty of holiness, or waiting silently on God. These should still be valid, surely, a thousand years hence, as millennia before, without threatening evolutionary theory. Is this enlightenment or is it just heavy heckling? Are we detoxifying religious thinking, or just demolishing it? Must all theology be sophistry?

Laffan’s book appears at times to be magisterial and comprehensive, but I do have the temerity to say there is some ‘selective pecking’ happening here. We might do well to remember, too, the atheist philosopher, Bertrand Russell, and his words to the more mystically-inclined Ludwig Wittgenstein, after a strenuous debate: ‘Logic is hell!’

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