The God Delusion

I just read this book, and enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would (I wasn't so keen on Dawkins' television series, The Root of All Evil). I'm sure lots of people have opinions on the book, so I thought I'd start a thread.

To kick off:

The spine has already cracked on my copy (UK paperback) after one reading! Does anyone else have that problem?

What is that red spiky thing on the cover of the UK paperback version? The Big Bang? Dawkins' aura? A piece of insignificant cosmic dust?

I enjoy reading and listening to Richard Dawkins, but I tend not to be attracted to this particular subject. I'm in complete agreement that belief itself poses problems in an age scientific progress, and it certainly pains me to think of children the world over who have been born into religions and are being taught to harbor beliefs instead of developing an appreciation for evidence and discovery. And yet the subject doesn't compel me enough to read a book about it if it's just going to tell me what I already know. I'm sure he has interesting examples and arguments, but I think I'm going to wait until my bookshelf starts begging me.

Personally, I dislike him, as he seems to be just as fundamentalist in his atheistic beliefs as the people he criticizes. I have yet to see evidence that it is not possible to be a rational, intelligent scientifically minded human being, and be religious at the same time. Just because one is Christian does not mean that they believe in a literal seven day creation, refuse to believe in evolution, and espouse fundamentalist doctrines. Infact, most of the famous western scientists, mathematicians, etc, were Christian. I only wonder why its so important to Mr Dawkins to convince people that science and faith are mutually exclusive. I know plenty of people of strong Christian, Jewish, and Muslim faith, as well as other religions, who are very well educated and not averse to science at all.

I started to listen to this book and found it depressing. I stopped mid-way into the second chapter.

I'm not sure why a book has to be written to *prove* there is no God. I agree with Child_of_Light in that neither extreme of religion (fundamentalism versus atheism) is appealing. To me, belief should be on an always fluid continuum. There is just as much to be said for religion as against it.

There is a book I still want to check out called The God Gene which presents the idea of the origin of our religious beliefs to be in our genetic make-up. Now that sounds more interesting to me!

Personally, I'm a huge fan of Professor Dawkins and his writing. I found The God Delusion to be useful as a set of tools for intellectual combat against irrational beliefs. That said, I find that it is not his best work. I would recommend Unweaving the Rainbow as a gentler and better written book.

Charging atheists with fundamentalism seems to be popular pastime these days. There is the wrongheaded belief that atheism is a religious view that is just a polar opposite of fervent belief. Atheism simply means the lack of belief in the existence of god. Atheists live their lives as normal people, sans religion (a subset of superstition.)

If there was suddenly rock-solid evidence of a deity or deities, every rational person would have to accept it as truth. This has yet to happen. In the meantime, atheism is the only logical position to hold.

SqueakyChu #4:
I started to listen to this book and found it depressing. I stopped mid-way into the second chapter.

To me, the book got better as it went along. Reading the first four chapters, I was spending a lot of time mentally arguing with Dawkins. After that, I spent more time thinking "hey, I never knew that!", or "I never knew thought of that!".

monohex #5:
If there was suddenly rock-solid evidence of a deity or deities, every rational person would have to accept it as truth. This has yet to happen. In the meantime, atheism is the only logical position to hold.

I don't agree. I think the only logical position, in the face of a total lack of evidence for God's existence, is agnosticism. Although in this case I am talking about a more "deistic" God who rarely or never interferes in the world. I think Dawkins' argument against agnosticism fails at the point he asserts that God is "improbable". One cannot assign probabilities to things that exist "outside" of the universe we are living in, based on generalisations about things (i.e. evolution) that happen inside this universe.

Having said that, I can't see much practical difference between atheism, agnosticism, pantheism etc. The differences are philosophical and have little effect on real life.

BTW, One of the things I like about this book is the large number of suggestions for further reading. I tried to read a couple of the web pages Dawkins' mentions, the one in note 25 (about the man murdered for being an atheist) and the second one in note 91 (the discussion between Dawkins and Holloway - Holloway is a very thoughtful guy), but neither of the links worked.

Yeah, weblinks often expire, or are redirected, and it is compounded by the fact that the passage or chapter may be written months or even (in some cases) years before the book is available for purchase.

There's also a book recently released to rebut Dawkins' book: The Dawkins Delusion by Alister E. McGrath and people I respect said it's good, but I haven't read it.

>>#5 Monohex: When people refer to fundamentalist atheism, or at least when I refer to such, I'm referring to such practices as Dawkins partakes in, of trying to forcibly convert others to atheism like fundamentalist Christians attempt to convert nonbelievers. To me such practices are just as unacceptable coming from one extreme as the other.

CoL,
The concept of "fundamental atheism" is nonsense.

Atheism is the unbelief in any particular god.

The analogy, and I wish I knew who to give the credit to, runs this way:
Atheism is as much a religion as not collecting stamps is a hobby.

Dawkins may be a bit over-the-top emphatic with what he says, but it's not like he threatens anyone with eternal shopping at Walmart.

I understand his pain; it's like the majority of people have SEP, and he doesn't.

>10 WholeHouseLibrary: "SEP?" Just curious what this means.

SEP - Someone Else's Problem -- Not unakin to the expression "Not being able to see the forest for the trees".

There's a wonderful description of the condition in The Hitchhikers Guide. Briefly, except for Ford Prefect, everyone is so intent with watching the football (soccer) match that they don't see that a space ship has landed on the field and the robotic occupants are systematically disbursing among the fans and slaughtering them. Ford, because he uses techniques of averted vision and and sudden movements, is able to notice that which everyone else is ignoring. He warns his friends, and they leave. Everyone else has a big problem.

The dictionary definition of atheism is the belief that there is no God, (Webster's New World College Dictionary 4th ed. p. 89). The emphasis is on belief. No one can prove anything about the existence or nonexistence of God. I think The Will to Believe by William James is a good exposition of the questions involved. Choose as you will but anybody's choice is a matter of belief.

This is a good discussion.

One of the funniest bumper sticker I ever saw (at least to me) read thusly:

Militant Agnostic:
I don't know and neither do you.

I offer that for its laugh value. Not as a credo I espouse, although, in general, come to think of it, it is the credo I espouse. What I mean is, I don't mind anybody's belief system, although there are aspects of the fundamentalist wings of most organized religions I find offensive (including my own, which is Judaism). I just don't want anybody telling me what I should be believing and I don't want anyone trying to co-opt our society for one particular belief.

However, I fully agree with Child of Light's sentiments way back in Post #3. I don't see any reason why a belief in God and a belief in scientific fact/theory are in any way mutually exclusive.

And I certainly do believe this: no matter how much we learn about what makes the universe and/or the physical world tick, we'll never know it all.

What's important to mention here is that Dawkins isn't just ramming his opinion down our throats so as to create controversy--I think he's annoyed by the power that religions have and the way these groups intimidate and control people. I think the message is more like, "If A isn't true, then B,C,D,E, F and G aren't true either." He wants people to know that what they're giving away is based on some very small assumptions.

One statistic that I've read from a few sources is that the Catholic Church, all versions of it, takes in $1 billion a day in donations worldwide. ONE BILLION DOLLARS EVERY DAY. That's a lot of power. I think that's what bugs Dawkins--not the belief in God itself, but the ridiculous control that we grant such groups by believing.

My problem is that he ignores all the good religion has, can, or will ever do, instead focusing on the harm fundamentalists, holy warriors, etc, have done throughout history. This to me is a demonstration of his ignorance.

I don't think he does ignore that. His larger moral concern is that, in his book, it is immoral to believe things that are not the case. If that itself is immoral, it is completely irrelevant whether religion has done anything good at all, because if the truth claims of religion are wrong then you should not believe them, period. He is coming at the question from an entirely different ethical perspective than just "are fundamentalists mean to people."

Well, yes, but then he's also coming at it from the point of view that we already know everything about the universe there is to know already. If the universe really is infinite, as science postulates, this is impossible. Therefore, although the traditional anthropomorphic God doesn't exist, there's no way to prove that a God of some type doesn't exist. He also can't disprove the truth claims as literally laid out in the bible (creation, etc), and use that as a basis, because the ancient Jews and Christians didn't read the Old Testament literally, biblical literalism is a fairly recent idea. I'm just saying that, in my experience, and based on what I know of religion and science, Dawkins doesn't understand religion well enough to say its bunk.

That's the celestial teapot argument. "We can't prove that there isn't an invisible, undetectable teapot orbiting the earth, so you can't tell me it isn't there."

And again, it's about money and power. There's no money to be made in atheism or agnosticism. Nobody asks you to do anything, (no pun intended). There are no particular rules, no fear of judgment to keep you in line, no fear of eternal punishment, no guarantees that you'll be rewarded in the afterlife if you do well on earth. There's no reason to "put off" having a good time here because of the good time you'll "definitely" have later.

In essence, (at least as far as money and power are concerned) there's NOTHING in nothing. That's why man had to invent SOMETHING.