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Finally, concerning religious beliefs—where Dawkins paints in broad strokes—McGrath admirably delves into their complexity and diversity. It may make a nice sound bite to lump Christian evangelicals with Islamic extremists. But to develop a serious scientific critique of religion, one must discuss pertinent differences in theology. And McGrath finds Dawkins's knowledge of Jesus of Nazareth, the roots of religious violence, and the Bible (e.g., Dawkins asserts without qualification that Paul wrote Hebrews) seriously wanting.

The Dawkins Delusion? is a deliberately short work not intended to fight Dawkins on all fronts. Even so, it is odd that McGrath does not attempt to counter Dawkins on neo-Darwinism, for this is Dawkins's whole cachet. As Dawkins put it, "Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist." Thus, any critique of Dawkins's atheism without tackling its Darwinian foundation is bound to leave the reader unsatisfied.

McGrath does not attack Darwinism because he views it as equally compatible with both theism and atheism. Either interpretation is legitimate, he says. McGrath cites as a witness atheist-Darwinist Stephen Jay Gould, who noted that half his Darwinist colleagues believed in God, and half did not. Therefore, thought Gould, Darwinism must be compatible with both worldviews, or half of his colleagues must be "stupid." But of course this would not make half of them stupid; it would just make half wrong. McGrath recounts surveys showing many scientists to be theists. Unfortunately, this does nothing to establish the compatibility of Darwinism and theism. Humans hold incompatible beliefs all the time.

To see why Darwinism and theism are incompatible, consider random mutations and natural selection—the two elements of modern Darwinian theory. Random mutations are, well, random. By definition, random mutations are unguided. "Mutations are simply errors in DNA replication," according to University of Chicago biologist Jerry Coyne. "The chance of a mutation happening is indifferent to whether it would be helpful or harmful." If a mutation is harmful, the organism with the mutation will leave fewer offspring; but if the mutation is beneficial for reproduction, the mutated gene will be passed to many offspring. This is the "natural" selection part. Theistic Darwinists claim that this process creates life's diversity and is also "used" by God.

While theists can have a variety of legitimate views on life's evolution, surely they must maintain that the process involves intelligence. So the question is: Can an intelligent being use random mutations and natural selection to create? No. This is not a theological problem; it is a logical one. The words random and natural are meant to exclude intelligence. If God guides which mutations happen, the mutations are not random; if God chooses which organisms survive so as to guide life's evolution, the selection is intelligent rather than natural.

Theistic Darwinists maintain that God was "intimately involved" in creation, to use Francis Collins's words. But they also think life developed via genuinely random mutations and genuinely natural selection. Yet they never explain what God is doing in this process. Perhaps there is still room for him to start the whole thing off, but this abandons theism for deism.

So there is a danger in the approach of theistic Darwinists such as McGrath. He is surely right that the religious and scientific worldviews are compatible. Harmony can be found. But this is not because theism can concede a materialist origin story and escape unscathed. Rather, it is because the materialist story is false and, further, is contradicted by mounting physical evidence in physics, chemistry, and biology.

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November 2007, Vol. 51, No. 11