Darwin's Angel. An Angelic riposte to The God Delusion, John Cornwell, Profile Books, 2007, ISBN 978 1 84668 048 9, website.
It is difficult to respond at book length to polemical works. Particularly to works that are as swingeing and expansive in their argument as Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion. Your response must draw energy from what it criticises, and the time and energy devoted to the task inevitably makes your opponent seem important.
Successful refutations show a deep understanding of their targets. They bring out the force of the opposed argument and display its hidden connections. Although mudslinging and snide imputations may be difficult to resist, particularly when used by one's opponent, they are ultimately suicidal weapons. It is important to offer a more attractive and genial understanding of the issues addressed.
By these high standards, Darwin's Angel is an engaging but flawed work. Its title is an elegant conceit. By imagining that the reply comes from the guardian angel of Charles Darwin and Richard Dawkins, Cornwell dramatises his assertion that the human world cannot be defined exclusively by material and biological processes. He is also able to take a rhetorically large view of the issues that Dawkins raises, distinguishing his work from mere polemic.
His execution of the task, however, is thoroughly human in its virtues and limitations. He relies on a close reading of The God Delusion that credits Dawkins with meaning what he says. He concedes the strong points of Dawkins' argument, and goes beyond assertion to argue the many detailed points of criticism that he makes. These include Dawkins' reliance on flawed authorities, his implicit appeal to intolerance and his erection and demolition of straw men as ciphers of religious faith.
But his angelic narrator also dips his wings in the mud, occasionally adopting an Olympian disdain and using ad hominem arguments. More seriously the detail included in a short book — 21 sections in 150 pages — obscures the shape and roots of Dawkins' argument. Neither does Cornwell's own argument shine lucidly. Although he shows that Dawkins' book has many weaknesses, his own position does not commend itself strongly.
Ultimately Dawkins and Cornwell differ about the nature of reality and so about what must be included in a truthful account of it. Dawkins' view confines reality to the material elements and to the evolutionary processes that have shaped its complexity. We can only know