Richard Dawkins’ latest book is an object lesson in how to misunderstand Scripture

One of my favourite anecdotes about the pitfalls of translation derives from the lovely lines in act two of As You Like It, where the Duke celebrates the Forest of Arden’s many delights: “And this our life, exempt from public haunt,/ Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,/ Sermons in stones, and good in everything.” A scholar is said to have spotted a fault. “Shakespeare must have been a bit confused. Surely what he meant was, ‘sermons in books, stones in the running brooks’.”
I thought of this as I read Richard Dawkins discussing the Bible in his new book, Outgrowing God. It has become commonplace to describe Dawkins as a mirror image of the fundamentalists he endlessly spars with, but he is especially crude when he addresses scripture. Again and again we are prompted to decide whether this or that story did or (more usually) did not take place as literally narrated. If the answer is no, Dawkins assumes a whole edifice crumbles.

The Bible is an extraordinary, complex human phenomenon, a library of books of every genre, evolved over centuries and held together first in Hebrew scripture by one nation’s quest for identity and then in the New Testament by the ministry of a man believed by his followers to personify the Jewish nation. There is nothing traditional about fundamentalist interpretations of the Bible.