The God Delusion
by Richard Dawkins
|
List Price: Our Price: $6.54 You Save: $9.41 (59%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $3.45 (click here) Category: Book See more book details and other editions |
|---|
Book Reviews of The God Delusion
Book Review: Intellectual Dishonesty
Summary: 1 Stars
Dawkins continues to appeal to reason and to logic. He frequently appeals to moral values when critiquing religion. The fact of the matter is, if he is to be honest about his position, then the notions of reason, logic and morals, not to mention natural laws must be considered to be purely human conventions. The universe is irrational, having come about by pure chance and nothing else. Our ideas of reason and logic, morality and our perception of "natural laws" are also, at the core, irrational themselves. They are a product of an irrational and chaotic universe. There is no way of knowing whether it is right to murder or not. Even if one would respond by saying, "it is wrong to murder because it harms the progress of the species". However, that is again an appeal to morals - for in the atheist point of view, who can say that it is actually better to exist than to not exist?
The atheist is being dishonest by appealing to logic and reason. He simultaneously says it is a convention of man impressed upon to the world to make the universe rational (rationalizing the irrational is by definition, absurdity) and acts and speaks as if Logic and Reason were existential principles which exist above and beyond the plain of the material world. Logic and Reason are both immaterial, but the world is assumed to operate according to these laws which contradict the very idea that the universe is irrational, having come about by pure chance with nothing guiding it at all.
The atheist is also making the mistake of assuming his observations are correct. He himself is part of the very system he is observing. He is attempting to rationalize the irrational by appealing to notions which he simultaneously denies are existential and immaterial and accepts as existential and immaterial. The atheist has no right to appeal to logic, reason, or to critique religion's actions through the ages based on morals. He speaks from within the system; himself an irrational being. How can he believe that his observations about an irrational universe are rational?
Dawkins hurls insults at God, or rather, the idea of God. He attributes evil intent, malice, bloodshed, and various other wrongs to God. He critiques the morals of Christians who have led Crusades in the Middle East. Granted, Christians have done horribly un-Christian things in the name of Christ; but Dawkins has no right to judge Christianity.
Why?
He denies morality as an absolute - even if he does not admit it. His position necessarily believes that morals are simply an idea impressed by man upon the irrational world around him. Man is an irrational being, morals are irrational, and have no metaphysical foundation which make them "real" or worth paying any attention to. They are the creation of an irrational creature. On what basis can he say that murder is wrong? It is simply the Western mindset that says life has sanctity (and not all life at that!). On what basis can he ascribe what he considers vile human characteristics to God when the content of his moral categories have nothing behind them. His morals are simply a human invention, forced upon the world. They are in actuality, absurd and meaningless.
Furthermore, why is he a virulent atheist? Why does he hate the notion of God so much? If God is an empty idea and morals have no real value (in fact, even the concept of value has no actual content), then why is it "good" to attempt to smash the idea of God? Because humanity will accomplish so much "good" and will "advance" if the idea of God is squashed? Besides the fact that Godless institutions (Communist Russia, for example) have failed miserably, on what basis can Dawkins make an appeal to progress or continued survival as being beneficial? It is pure absurdity - it is purely random and arbitrary. Dawkin's view leaves room for nothing but arbitrariness.
Dawkins cannot argue his position without appealing to the Christian idea that the world around us is ordered and understandable. He appeals to the Christian idea of logic - that man has a rational mind and can reason to understand a rational world created by a rational God. He appeals to the laws of nature and reason as if these were immaterial things. Simultaneously, he denies Christianity and the status of reason and logic as immaterial and existential. He denies all spirituality and hence has no where to turn for any of his bases of belief. All of his ideas are arbitrary and without foundation - simply the ideas forced upon a world in order to understand it. He denies God at the outset, and then uses the concept of absolutes to deny there are absolutes. His atheism presupposes theism because he cannot escape the theistic ideas of logic, reason, and natural laws being established, unchangeable, ordered, and operating in a predictable manner.
Book Review: highly disappointing book.. I was expecting better arguments.
Summary: 1 Stars
I must say this is one of the most VERBOSE book I've ever read. There's a quote from someone, somewhere in almost every page. This is also my primary disappointment in that the author did nothing other than "sort" the various pieces of information (paper that someone published, dumb things someone said, etc) and use that to form his own opinions and conclusions. I'll use a quote myself for this review, from Kant: "enlightenment is man's exit from his self-incurred minority. Minority is the incapacity to use one's intelligence without the guidance of another."
That said, this book is anything but enlightened since nothing in it really came from Dawkins... ask your next door atheist and he'll probably give you the same arguments as Dawkins have. There are several fundamental flaws in this book, a few of which:
- The relationship between religion and God. God is God. Religion is man's worship of God. The author builds on this misconception of religion (and the wars it causes) as a case against the existence of God. He mentions in one paragraph, for example, of how Pope John Paul II attributed the survival of his assassination attempt to "Our Lady of Fatima"... Why didn't she guide the bullet to miss him altogether? Were all the other saints busy at that time? While this is a hilarious remark, it's also most irrelevant as far as God's existence goes. Unfortunately, the author spends a significant portion of the book doing this type of "rant" against religion (rather than God) to the point that it becomes tedious and boring to read.
- The misconception of evolution. By definition, evolution is the change of inherited traits through successive generations. This change is caused primarily by mutation. For example, humans have the same 99% DNA content as a fish, and a mutation in DNA can cause a man to develop gills and breathe underwater. If a cataclysmic disaster were to happen and flood the whole Earth, then the circus freaks with gills on their necks will live while the rest of us dies. This is evolution through natural selection. The point here is that the DNA that causes man to form gills already exists. DNA itself doesn't evolve-- i.e. your descendants 50,000 years from now won't grow gills just because you like to *swim a lot*.
The author uses evolution too liberally. Like most atheists, he takes evolution all the way back to the single cell organism, even when there is no proof that man's DNA evolved from a single cell organism (this is a theory, not a scientific fact, as plausible as it may sound). He also tries to apply human morality in the context of Darwinian evolution -- i.e. we are moral towards each other because of genetic kinship, repayment of favors, acquiring reputation, and "buying unfakeably authentic advertising." -- and yes, much of this idea is not his own, and there's nothing inherently deep about the concept that your next door atheist neighbor couldn't think of on a Sunday afternoon.
- Rather than providing a SOLID, DEEP argument for the NON-existence of God, Dawkins spends much of his time "debunking" religion, especially Christianity. The type of arguments he provides against Christianity is typical atheist:
1) I go to hell because I'm not Christian? What kind of God is that?
2) The stuff in the bible sounds awful -- incest, bestiality, people killed by an angry God, etc... I wouldn't want my kids reading it.
3) I can't believe some people think the earth is 4,000 years old.
You probably get the picture: the author builds on the logical/rational fallacy of one's belief as a case against the existence of God.
If anything, the only good point this book makes is that there are A LOT more atheists (and hypocrites) than most people think. There are many people, for example, who stay in their religion just because their parents belong to it, while they themselves don't really believe in God. In this respect, the book makes a valid point. You are what you DO, not simply what you believe. For example, over 75% of Americans identify themselves as Christians, and if this number were truly the case, 75% of brides would be virgins since they wouldn't do such a thing as "fornication." A quick look on the "Friends" sitcom clearly tells you that American culture is already an atheist one.
I do, however, want to clarify one thing about Christianity that this author is consistently clueless about. A Christian is not someone who accepts Jesus as his God, but someone whom Jesus accepts as his follower. This is the difference between faith that comes from humility, and one that comes from self-righteousness. Self-righteousness causes wars, not religion nor God. Truth doesn't lie in religion but in the person who accepts it.
Book Review: Ghost Busters
Summary: 2 Stars
As someone who has read Dawkins' earlier work on THE SELFISH GENE, I expected THE GOD DELUSION to be both bright and "bright" (a propagandistic attempt to use a word to denote atheism and connote intelligence). Dawkins is a good expositor of and contributor to evolutionary theory and makes a good case for the gene (not the group or the individual) as the primary unit of selection. But when religion rears its ugly head, Dawkins becomes "bright"-- and sophomoric. As a scientist, Dawkins knows that one cannot verify a hypothesis by collecting supportive examples. One cannot prove that religion is fatally flawed by collecting examples of bad religion. By their fruits ye shall know them is good advice shared by Jesus, William James (pragmatism) and Dawkins. Does religion bring "more abundant life"? is a good question. Toward the end of THE GOD DELUSION (p. 341) Dawkins makes an argument in favor of a religious education-- as literature. It's good to know about religion as long as you don't believe it. In the course of that argument, he cites a 1954 Gallup poll indicating that two-thirds of American Catholics and Protestants didn't know who preached the Sermon on the Mount. But while the "brights" are enjoying that laugh line, they should consider its implications for their method of judging religion by its wretched fruits: why should the behavior of "religious" people unfamiliar with religion be regarded as a fruit of religion? Academic Marxists still discount the fall of Communism as merely the collapse of "actually existing" (not "real") Marxism. Long bread lines are a fruit of "Soviet Marxism," not the real thing. A serious attempt to argue that God is a delusion would pay a great deal of attention to the distinction between actually existing Grand Inquisitors and religion at its best.
Dawkins doesn't do that because he is a ghost buster. People are frightened into religion and do not understand that they have the choice to leave it. If "brights" continue to respect religion, people will continue to be more responsive to their fears than to the rational arguments of the intellectual elites. Therefore it is necessary to frighten people out of religion. The "God meme" replicates itself by making people feel that it is NOT SAFE to reject religion. The cultural Darwinians must create memes that make people feel that it is not safe TO BE RELIGIOUS. For example, tell people that subjecting children to religious education is worse than child sexual abuse (p. 317). Or tell people that those who claim that God permits evil to give people a chance to overcome adversity should rot in Hell (p. 64). Sophisticated arguments that carry weight with intelligent people don't work with religious crackpots. Dawkins does not address himself to sophisticated believers, because he does not believe that there are any. True, he says that "science finds itself in alliance with sophisticated theologians like [Dietrich] Bonhoeffer, united against the common enemies of naïve, populist theology and the gap theology of intelligent design." But any delusion that Dawkins will explain why even sophisticated non-gap theology is still a delusion is quickly dispelled when he says, "What worries thoughtful theologians such as Bonhoeffer is that gaps shrink as science advances, and God is threatened with eventually having nothing to do and nowhere to hide" (p. 125) So the table is set, and now Dawkins is going to explain how Bonhoeffer overcomes that worry and defends Christianity in a scientific age and why that more sophisticated defense nevertheless fails. Not. Dawkins says nothing about the defects of sophisticated theology. Why? Because, of course, it is not Bonhoeffer's THEOLOGY that Dawkins regards as sophisticated but Bonhoeffer, who-- had he not been executed by the Nazis-- would surely have become a "bright." Nor does Dawkins attempt to address the Christianity of geneticist Francis Collins but tries to outnumber him with testimonials from "bright" biologists James Watson and Craig Venter. (Stalin asked, "How many divisions does the pope have?" Is that the level Dawkins feels he must operate on?)
The new ghost busters should stick to their scientific and philosophical work and stop trying to break spells and raise consciousness by being contemptuously disrespectful of religion. Liberals can't understand why talking down to people doesn't produce more enlightenment. (But how can we not talk down to them when they are such idiots?) Dawkins has not tarnished the respectability of religion-- we don't need him to formulate the question any ten-year-old can ask: Who created God?-- but he has tarnished his own respectability by stooping to propagandistic meme-marketing.
Book Review: This is the book that awoke a movement
Summary: 5 Stars
This was the book that awoke me as an active atheist. Before I read it in 2007, I was basically a quiet and closeted atheist, and in fact, fell with believers on many issues such as a strong dislike for gay marriage(why?), ambivalence on the issue separation of Church and State and so on.
In the same way that Evolution by Natural selection raises our consciousness about how complex things can arise from simple processes, this book raised my consciousness about the real effects of unchallenged religion in our civilization. It caused me to look at my own beliefs, held since my days as a Christian 20 years ago and decide which ones really belong and which don't.
In reading this tome, I realized that religious people who repeatedly fail to assert any proof of their god and fail to find any basis for their alternative theories regarding the complexity of life or have instead merely taken their fight to the courts, more or less demanding to be heard.
This is akin to people demanding that the theory of a flat Earth be taught along side the theory that the planet is more less a sphere rotating about its axis and revolving about the sun.
Just as in the case of introducing a 'creationist' theory to be taught along with Evolution by Natural selection, we're left to wonder which theory to use. There are countless such theories. The Christians want their pet theory, which is the Jewish equivalent of Zeus flying around using magic and spells to help evolution along. There's even a variant in which god did it all 6,000 years ago. The Christians aren't even sure how much of the current real science they will accept. What would we teach along side evolution? That god helps it along (whenever science fails to explain a step, in which case expect many reprints of the text) or that god did it 6,000 years ago and Jesus might have been running from raptors while giving sermons.
He makes his argument from improbability, which I view as strong. Some people don't find this argument compelling, but it is a very strong argument because it forces fundamentalists to be specific. Be specific, what is your proposition anyway?
The primary complaint from creationists is that the diversity of life is too fantastic to be explained by a natural, non-intelligent process--although any reasonably educated person can quickly find many examples of enormous complexity arising from simple sets of rules, but that's beside the point--They simply assert that it must have been designed (Paley).
However, the designer, presumably at least as complex as any one of us and likely much more compelx is simply assumed to exist. Voila! Dawkins demonstrates how silly this is by repeatedly asking 'who designed the designer?' Most fundamentalists will ignore the question or try to move it into a region where the question isn't valid, but he won't allow it.
(John Allen Paulos offers even stronger defenses to this fundamentalists technique of moving god anywhere he'll fit to be able to carry out his magic without the need to answer any questions, in his book Irreligion).
Fundamentalists see other needs for god though, and Dawkins touches on these as well. Among these are 1) the origin of the Universe and 2) morality among many others.
Dawkins discusses these points, and I think does a good job of making a strong case that, for each of these, there is more than ample means of explaining them without introducing Zeus.
He explains the origins of morality as a natural consequence of and requirement for, survival of large groups such as humans and other mammals. Morality varies and has varied in humans. What was moral 150 years ago certainly isn't moral now. Morality shifts and evolves itself. It's natural, but it's evolved to such a degree at this point that it's clear the old testament is quite dated.
The bible is full of all sorts of immorality and genocide, infanticide, the killing of apostates, non-believers, animal sacrifice, and so on. Indeed, by our modern definition of what it means to be moral, much of the early biblical texts would need to be fully excised. We do not, he concludes, get our morality from the bible. Instead, we get our morality from culture in an ever shifting zeitgeist--which more or less is cultural advancement--and we then look at the bible through that lense.
Dawkins is a fantastic writer and an all-around genius who is matchless, in this format. Professor Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist who published the ground breaking text 'The Selfish Gene' in around 1976. He's also authored several other books on evolution.
Book Review: A few good points, but mostly a boring hash
Summary: 2 Stars
The author offers a general critique of religion, especially the familiar Abrahamic faiths. He concludes that the religious view is clearly invalid and that a god involved in human affairs is too improbable to merit serious consideration. Although I personally find the supernatural claims of such religions unconvincing, and regard the possibility that there is no god as conceivable, I often found the approach of this book and its arguments somewhat tedious and superficial.
I will admit that the author was amusing at times, and his discussion of the Templeton Foundation, of which of I was previously unaware, was somewhat enlightening. His observation that the Templeton Foundation bestows a prize of greater monetary value than the Nobel Prize for spiritual achievements is interesting. His claim that the prize seems like a sort of bribe to induce scientists "to say something nice about religion" is worth looking into.
Dawkins also touches upon the intellectual laziness of creationism. Indeed, people who give up on finding an evolutionary path to a given living entity, such as Behe at Lehigh, are not doing anybody a favor! Perhaps some people are unaware of the connection between science and engineering--or medicine. When the scientist understands how a living structure has developed by physio-chemical processes, the engineer or physician can then use that understanding to cure or prevent a disease.
The most objectionable flaw of this book is similar to that of books written by evangelical Christians--that of a rush to judgment. The forth chapter of this book is devoted to proving that god does not exist. All that he offers in way of an argument is a series of metaphysical conjectures. He attempts to disprove the anthropic principle by claiming that the existence of parallel universes renders the need for one fine-turned universe unnecessary. The existence of parallel universes, however, is little more than a conjecture, as are many other ideas current in Physics. Some day one of these conjectures may indeed break away from the pack, predict the masses of fundamental particles, and derive the value of Planck's constant and other important parameters. This day, however, has not yet arrived. Until such an event comes to pass, I don't believe that we can begin to narrow down the possibility of whether god does or does not exist. Until then, those of us who conduct and analyze scientific experiments on daily basis find that our best theories are unable to predict even the simple motions of atoms on a surface, let alone a comprehensive theory of everything that might trace the evolution of God during the early stages of the Big Bang.
There are other questions or points of view that the author dispenses with in a manner that is too cavalier. He interprets the concerns of a rabbi for undermining the religious faith of others as intellectual cowardice. I really think that such is an unfair characterization! He also dismisses the miracle at Fatima without any real explanation other than that the sun really could not have fallen from the sky. Although the sun clearly did not fall from the sky, it is also clear that something strange happened there--something for which we less formally religious people have no adequate explanation.
There are good books that have been written on the topic of what is knowable, and, by implication, what can be said about god and his role in the world. On the side of the believers, the book by Collins (the leader of the Human Genome Project) is a pleasure to read and offers a religious view that is in accord with evolutionary biology. On the other side Karl Popper lays out a worldview that makes no mention of religion as a source of authority.
I am not sure who would actually benefit from this book. For people who could not understand the validity of evolution after studying it in high school, the odds are against them ever learning to appreciate it. People who have a proper understanding of evolution, and therefore regard it favorably, would not actually glean a great deal from this book. People who believe that evolution is impossible and contrary to their religion will probably never be convinced by any argument; as a result this book would offend them instead of winning them over.