Ritröð Guðfræðistofnunar - 01.09.2008, Page 11

Alister E. McGrath
Does religion poison everything?
Reflections on the uNew Atheism” and
religious belief
It is a great pleasure to be able to speak to such a distinguished audience
here at the University of Reykjavik on a topic which has been much debated
in recent years, not least since the publication of Richard Dawkins’ book
The God Delusion (2006).1 Is religion intrinsically evil? This view has
achieved widespread circulation in recent years, and is vigorously asserted
in Christopher Hitchens’s book God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons
Everything (2007)2.
“Religion poisons everything” is a very simplistic message, which can
only be sustained by doing violence to the facts of history and contemporary
experience. Hitchens achieves this feat largely by ignoring any evidence
to the contrary, and papering over the many cracks in his “argument”
with aggressive rhetoric. Yet, despite its obvious deficiencies, this is clearly
something that many would like to believe to be true, as can be seen from
the response in Iceland to a lecture given by Richard Dawkins in Reykjavík
on 24 June, 2006. In this lecture, I would like to explore the reliability of
this judgement, and offer a more realistic account of the situation.
Religion is dangerous, poisonous, and evil. This simplistic soundbite is
ideally attuned to a media-driven culture which prefers breezy slogans to
serious analysis. It resonates deeply, perhaps at a sub-rational level, witli the
1 Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. For a response to this
book in Icelandic, see Alister McGrath and Joanna Collicutt McGrath, The Dawkins Delusion?
Atheist Fundamentalism and the Denial of the Divine. London: SPCK, 2007.
2 Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great : How Religion Poisons Everything. New York: Twelve,
2007. It is instrucdve to compare this with Rodney Stark, For the glory of God: how monotheism
led to reformations, science, witch-hunts, and the end ofslavery. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2003.
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