Outgrowing God is a book by Richard Dawkins, author of the better know (but rubbish) The God Delusion. So why would I, a committed Christian, read such a book? Certainly because of curiosity – I was interested to read what he had to say, especially since he is quoted so often and atheists repeat what he has to say as “justification” for their disbelief. I also wanted to be sure that my faith was strong enough to withstand his arguments against the existence of God.
I borrowed the book from our local library (there was no way that I was going to buy it) and have only read a few chapters so far. I shall try to write a chapter by chapter critique and this covers Chapter 1, titled So Many Gods. I should say at the outset that this book is written by someone who most definitely does not believe in any god, and he cannot resist mocking belief.
First, let me say that he says something very sensible, that children are ascribed the religion of their parents before they can even talk, e.g. a Catholic child, a Muslim child, a Protestant child and so on. It is as if religion is something inherited, as if it were race, whereas it is nothing of the sort. I have said before that I am grateful for my nominally Christian upbringing, but that is not the reason that I am a Christian, although it is impossible to say whether it made it more likely that I would be a Christian than have any other faith. In fact I wish children were not branded in this way and I think it a mistake to reinforce it with religious education. Children must be free to believe or disbelieve, rather than indoctrinated to think that they are right and that therefore others are wrong. That’s why people kill.
So this chapter is about the many different gods there have been through history in different societies. His point is that there are so many gods that we cannot logically believe in, that we cannot believe in any. If societies make up gods, then gods are made up.
Superficially, that might seem fairly convincing, but of course it is not a logical argument. The fact that people invent gods, does not logically mean that there is no God.
More interesting would be to know why societies have made up gods. It has to be the realisation that there is indeed a mighty power behind creation. People have not just accepted things the way they are, but thought there was something behind it. The question Dawkins does not ask, because he does not believe in God, is whether God might have put these thoughts into people’s heads. I say that as someone who could not get it out of my head that I simply had to get hold of a Bible. .I say it as someone who knows of extraordinary conversions to belief.
So if God gave people the idea of gods, why was it incomplete? There are many possible answers to that question, but it is worth considering that the story of God in the Bible took thousands of years to unfold. It is only with the New Testament that God is finally revealed.
So Chapter 1 is no argument against the existence of God. It is written so as to ridicule the idea that God exists and claims that existence is unlikely, but will only persuade those who are already persuaded.