In Defense of Religious Faith: The Dawkins Delusion, by Alister and Joanna McGrath

The Dawkins Delusion, written in the main by Alister McGrath a leading Christian theologian, one time atheist and eminent scientist, is in reply to The God Delusion, a volume by the renowned scientist Richard Dawkins who states:

If this book works as I intend, religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put it down.

In order to respond to Dawkins' critique of faith, McGrath answers the charge that God is a delusion, faith is intellectual nonsense, and Christianity is simply a force for evil, and begins by stating that it is highly significant that Dawkins thought it necessary to write such a book at all, for wasn't religion meant to have disappeared many years ago? However, despite a widespread belief that religion would decline, McGrath points out that religion has made a comeback worldwide and with a high percentage of the American population believing in God.

Faith is a delusion, says Dawkins, it is not grounded in evidence and it flies in the face of evidence. It is something that should have disappeared when we reached maturity, like belief in the Tooth Fairy or Santa Claus. And isn't the indoctrination of children with a belief in God just the same, isn't it a corruption of innocent minds and sustaining religious belief when it should have been wiped out ages ago? Isn't it a form of child abuse at a time when children lack the discriminatory ability to evaluate ideas?

Not so, says McGrath, the analogy is flawed. How many people believe in Santa Claus in adulthood? Many people discover God when they are older. Do they see this as a form of regression? And wouldn't the secularists enforce their own dogmas that science had disproved religion, as in the education of Soviet children in the 1950's? Is it only abusive to impose religious, but not anti-religious, dogmas and delusions?

Dawkins returns to a familiar theme. Who made God? Who designed the designer? But when searching for an answer to this question, says McGrath, it needs to be said that the natural sciences is also a quest for a theory that can explain everything and needs no explanation of itself. So who explains the explainer?