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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 August 2009
The aim of this paper is to place Richard Dawkins' book The God Delusion (2006) within a particular literary genre and, by so doing, to account for certain features of its written style, to identify its structuring claims and to offer an explanation for the popularity it has enjoyed with a broad readership. By offering a description of this kind, I hope to avoid engaging in the polemics which the book both offers and has elicited; the argument is situated at another level. My proposal may seem a surprising one: Dawkins' work comes within a spectrum that includes in its modern forms both science fiction and fantasy literature, a spectrum that uses the products of science to think with, in order to explore human dilemmas. In a word, this is a modern theodicy. I shall begin by sketching out the notion of thinking with science, before turning to characteristic stylistic features of Dawkins' work, and then examining the core claims of the book in the perspective outlined. I shall offer some concluding remarks, but there is little to be said about the author's argument with respect to religion or faith; his topic is a pretext for another kind of exercise.
1 Cf. Bachelard, Gaston, La Formation de l'esprit scientifique (Paris: J. Vrin, 1938)Google Scholar for this kind of approach.
2 Cited in Barrow, Logie, Independent Spirits: Spiritualism and English Plebeians 1850–1910 (London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), p. 70Google Scholar.
3 See the previous note. I would also point to my own earlier work, which draws in part on Barrow and which I effectively cite in the following paragraph, ‘Secrets of the Spirit World’, in Jenkins, Timothy, Religion in English Everyday Life: An Ethnographic Approach (New York and London: Berghahn, 1999), pp. 221–37, esp. p. 224Google Scholar.
4 For example, Hesse, David, Science in the New Age: The Paranormal, its Defenders and Debunkers, (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993)Google Scholar.
5 There is much work to be done to characterise the genre; a pioneering work is Q. D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public (London: Chatto & Windus, 1968 [1932]). One of the most interesting approaches is to compare the genre's underlying categories with those of folklore; see Tom Shippey's œuvre, in particular his study of Tolkien, The Road to Middle Earth (London: Allen & Unwin, 1982) and J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (London: Harper Collins, 2000) and also his work on science fiction.
6 Dawkins, Richard, The God Delusion (London: Bantam, 2006)Google Scholar.
7 Terry Eagleton, ‘Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching’, London Review of Books (19 Oct. 2006) and http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n20/eagl01_.html
8 Gudmundur I. Markusson, review of The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, Journal of Cognition and Culture 7/3–4 (2007), pp. 369–73.
9 It is worth pointing out that this kind of thinking goes back at least thirty years – see Dawkins' The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978) and Wilson's, E. O.Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975)Google Scholar.
10 For example, Dawkins, The God Delusion, pp. 115 and 239.
11 Lash, Nicholas, The Beginning and the End of ‘Religion’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 21CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
12 Usefully summarised in the introduction by Stefan Collini to a reprint of Snow's essay: Snow, C. P., The Two Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)Google Scholar.
