Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins is an insufferable ass. I mean that wholly as an ad hominem attack; it has no bearing on the quality of his arguments. He secretes a superlatively patronizing tone that only the snootiest of Brits can attain, and he fully admits his abhorrence of the people that he claims to want to convert to his beliefs. As such, it's hard enough to read a book like The God Delusion without being distracted by all the snide parentheticals. Listening to it, as I did, is even more difficult show more because you get to hear every condescending inflection the way he intended it.

Moving past the tone and style of the book, however, I have to admit that I agree with many points Dawkins makes. In large part, he lays out his arguments rationally, coming to many of the same conclusions I have come to myself. He debunks a lot of illogical, contradictory and downright asinine ideas held by many religious people, and generally shows the unreasonability of belief in a supernatural being (or set of beings) that actively participates in the events of the world. Taken as a whole, I have to say that I agree with about 75% of what Dawkins says.

But there is at least one very big thing that he does not address, and a few conclusions that I think he simply gets wrong, particularly with regard to ethics. I will outline these counterpoints below.

NOTE: As Dawkins includes many definitions and manifestations of supernatural beings in the word "God" I will use the same convention when I refer to "Dawkins," by which I mean all atheists who essentially agree with him. I think he would be amused by this juxtaposition.

Preferring reason because it is reasonable is a tautology.

Dawkins' use of reason is aptly summed by a line Benjamin Franklin penned in his autobiography: "So convenient a thing is it to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do."

Perhaps the simplest argument against Dawkins' viewpoint is the axiomatic nature of reason. One cannot prove, without using reason, that reason is better or more useful or more valid than unreason. (Although, one can find evidence that sometimes irrationality is reasonable--that's a paradox for another essay, though.) A preference for reason is, therefore, no different than a preference for unreason. The very act of arguing for reason requires one to accept reason as an a priori virtue.

Furthermore, Dawkins' reverence for Reason (with a big R), almost as though it were a divine entity in its own right, seems a bit strange in light of his constant jibes at those who believe in God. He tends to overlook the limitations of reason as a human construct, which include imperfect and incomplete knowledge, differences in reasoning capacity between people, and the equal (or near-equal) validity of differing conclusions based on the same evidence. These limitations may not be enough to parry his attacks against religion, but his failure to address them sufficiently puts him in the same category of disingenuous debaters that he riles against.

Please, please, PLEASE do not take the above paragraphs to mean that I do not value reason, or that I believe unreason is better or more valid or more useful than reason. I agree with Dawkins that reason is a virtue. But I also admit that my preference for reason rather than unreason is exactly that--a preference--not a universal truth that must, or even should, be followed by all.

His biblical examples are lacking.

Dawkins uses several examples to show that people pick and choose the parts of the Bible that they want to believe. I agree with him here, but I take issue with a couple of stories he chooses as examples. In several instances, he uses a formulaic argument against each story, saying something to the effect: "Look at how utterly immoral these people acted, and yet we are supposed to believe that they are God's chosen people." Then, he says that Jews and Christians are either ignorant because they don't know about these stories, or worse, they are inconsistent and hypocritical because they choose to overlook them.

In the specific stories of Lot in Sodom and his subsequent incest (Genesis 19) and the Levite at Gibeah (Judges 19), the only thing Dawkins proves is that biblical exegesis skills are weak. I find it interesting that he rails against the ignorance and prejudice of religious people, but then exhibits the same ignorance and prejudice when it comes to exposition of some passages in the Bible. Essentially, in each of these particular stories, I disagree that the actions taken by the main characters are meant to be examples of how people should act. Dawkins conveniently ignores certain portions of the text, instead putting forth the actions of Lot and the Levite as being sanctioned by God. (In Lot's particular case, the incest is the genesis of later Israel's two most hated enemies, the Moabites and Ammonites, which is perhaps the strongest symbolic, if not literal, damnation of the act of incest in any religious or literary work that I have ever seen.)

As I stated above, I agree with Dawkins' premise that people choose which parts of the Bible (and religious texts in general) that they follow. But his own choice of some stories to illustrate his point seems strange at best and deceptive at worst. Removing these examples from his book would not negate the larger argument he is making--which makes me wonder why he put them in to begin with.

Arguments against the first mover.

The first mover "proof" of God, first posited by Thomas Aquinas, goes something like: Every effect has a prior cause, but at some point there must have been a first cause, which we call God. (Aquinas actually makes three arguments which are basically variations on the same theme.) Dawkins, however, says that even if there is such an initiator, there is no reason to call it "God" or to imbibe it with supernatural powers, such as omniscience, omnipresence and/or omnipotence. After going on a diatribe about the incompatibility of omniscience and omnipotence, he remembers that he is making an argument against the first mover, and says that we might as well call it the big bang instead of God.

His longer argument seems to boil down to the declaration that such a first mover, if indeed there is one, is necessarily simple. Oddly, his reasoning is rather Aquinian: Since things tend to become more complex as they evolve, any first mover must have been very, very simple--much more simple than the monotheistic God of the Jews, Christians and Muslims possibly could be. Dawkins rules out any complex being's existence simply by reason that such a being would not be a first mover--there would have been something even simpler before it, which would mean that "God" was not actually God, but a product of his own evolutionary sequence (begging the question as to whether God's evolutionary sequence could have had an initiator). Dawkins' argument is largely a straw man: Aquinas never attempts to prove God's attributes with the first mover argument, simply that a first mover exists. Aquinas uses other arguments to "prove" the various attributes of God, but Dawkins never acknowledges those additional arguments, let alone addresses them.

Secondarily, Dawkins' assertion that God would have developed from a similar evolutionary process as those established on Earth is merely conjecture based on observations of the universe as it is now. But if God created the universe, why would the current rules apply to him? Also, as Dawkins discusses near the very end of the book, our knowledge of the world is based on how we experience things through our various senses. Very small animals experience the effects of surface tension and Brownian motion much differently than we do, and so on. Projecting that same idea to God, why would something that seems complex to us not seem simple to him?

(Due to length restrictions, the rest of this review is provided in comments.) show less

This book is 45 years old at this point, but it ages well. If you could ignore the handful of references to computers and floppy disks of the era, you could believe it was written relatively recently. We have, of course, learned since it was initially written, and the 30th anniversary edition I read did include some helpful interjections in addition to the extra chapters added to the second edition in 1989.

The Selfish Gene is and continues to be wildly popular for a reason. It provides an show more extremely accessible explanation of the mechanism of evolution, popularizing the concept that the gene is the fundamental building block that the whole process revolves around. What’s a gene? The definition he uses is approximately “any sequence of any length of DNA”, with the understanding that shorter sequences are more likely to survive longer unaltered than longer sequences, but allows him to ignore quibbling over terminology of specific lengths when it’s largely not meaningful to the concepts being presented.

The core idea is that genes that are successful are genes that increase the number of copies of themselves in existence. It explains the concept that there is a mechanism for even extreme “altruism”, such as an organism sacrificing itself for others to be selected for, if you recognize that multiple close kin relations each have many of their genes in common with that individual, and that dying saving several siblings increases the number of copies of your genes propagated to future generations than failing to do so.

It goes further into many other elements of how to view evolution from the perspective of individual genes, in specific environments, and how natural selection does and doesn’t work to change species over time.

One thing I’m not sure I was aware of, going into this reading of the book, is that Dawkins also coined the term “meme” and gave the first(?) presentation of ideas as replicators subject to very similar selection pressures as genes. This explanation is relatively simple and there are entire books on the concept now, but I did enjoy his short treatment here. show less

To be sure, I need to be clear as to WHY I like this book. It's not like any of the science or reasoning in it is new or unusual, or that I haven't heard many similar reasonings here or there all the way from high school physics courses all the way to certain and strange movies I've enjoyed.

Why I do love this book is simple: it's clear, concise, and it does a very admirable job of setting up magical thinking in all its flavors against the fundamentals of science.

It's a great primer. I think show more I would have loved reading this when I was 13 or 14. It might have even sparked my interest in science even more than I had been sparked... but that might not be possible. Science Fiction did a perfectly admirable job in that department, with Heinlein and Asimov as my tutors.

Even so, apart from the things I've heard about of Dawkins, this is relatively mild in the religion bashing. He uses logic and reasoning, postulating clearly and setting up the universe as it is, not as we wish it would be. He also makes sure that Occam's Razor is quite sharp.

I certainly have no complaints about this book, assuming I wanted a basic primer, of course.

As for being an adult reading this? It's charming. It's somewhat magical in the sense that I draw a sense of wonder about the universe and our living within it. For that alone I would recommend it as a bit of light reading, assuming you're up to your science snuff. :) show less

An excellent, rather mathematical, doorstop of a book. So far, I have read only through "Rendezvous 0: The Tasmanian's Tale". This goes into detail about how estimates can be made of the time when the first shared ancestor of all living humans lived (Dawkins calls this Chang 1) and the time when all animals can be subdivided into two classes, those who are the ancestors of all living humans, and those who are the ancestors of no living humans (Chang 2). I've previously read Dawkins's "The show more Greatest Show on Earth", but that is a lighter, less mathematical book, and his discussion of the same topic in that book just ended up confusing me. He points out that the simplest mathematical model, which has assumptions of a completely stable population and random mating would put the earliest human "Concestor" as having lived around 500 AD, which is clearly wrong. This helpfully demonstrates why a mathematical model may not predict reality too well, with its additional complexity. He throws in the helpful idea that Concestor 0 must have lived before the most distant time when a human population became isolated and gives an estimate of a lower bound of tens of thousands of years and an upper bound of hundred's of thousands. Likely this concestor, who must be an ancestor of isolated populations like those in Tasmania did not live in Africa. He points out that quite a large number of humanity's Chang 2 ancestors have not bequeathed their genes to the current human population.

At only 8 hours, for a 600 page book, the audio edition that I'm listening to is abridged, with whole chapters dropped. I wish the cover had made this clear. show less