The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins

[Silvertusk]

Has anyone read this book? Does anyone know of a good critique of it?

Silvertusk

[Canuckster1127]

Has anyone read this book? Does anyone know of a good critique of it?

Silvertusk

I haven't read it yet. I'm going to however. It's important to keep up with what the "other side" is saying and Dawkins, is an extremely radical voice.

Some links to reviews of interest of the book or the movement of activist atheism would include:

New York Times Review (mildly critical)
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/22/books ... c7&ei=5070

London Review by Terry Eagleton (highly critical)
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n20/eagl01_.html

The Economist (relatively Neutral)
http://www.economist.com/books/displays ... id=7939629

I'd also recommend you read this article in Wired by Atheist Gary Wolf. It's significant in that it represents an Atheist rebelling against the proposals of Dawkins, Dennett and Harris (the three leading vocal Atheists in the public forum) as too radical.

http://www.wired.com/news/wiredmag/0,71 ... =rss.index

I'll post a review myself when I've read it.

There's a lot to go on however in the articles above that should orient anyone to the major theme and arguments.

Regards,

Bart

[ttoews]

Has anyone read this book? Does anyone know of a good critique of it?

Silvertusk

you might find this site useful. CBC TOWNHALL
...you can listen and watch Dawkins explain himself.

[Canuckster1127]

Another article that is revealing in Dawkins own words is here:

Bold emphasis on some key statements entered by me.

http://www.thedubliner.ie/template.php?ID=15

The God Shaped Hole

Richard Dawkins assesses the legacy of the Catholic Church in Ireland, and enters a plea for a religion-free society.

I am delighted that one of the leading Roman Catholic seminaries for the training of young priests in Ireland is closing down because it can't get any recruits. When I read that in the newspaper, it left me smiling for the rest of the day. However, if the Catholic Church does die in Ireland - and I devoutly hope it will - I hope that it will not be replaced by some other idiotic superstition like New Age-ism or some other kind of religion.

The Roman Catholic Church is one of the forces for evil in the world, mainly because of the powerful influence it has over the minds of children. The Catholic Church has developed, over the centuries, brilliant techniques in brain washing children; even intelligent people who have had a proper, full cradle-Catholic upbringing find it hard to shake it off when they reach adulthood. Obviously many of them do - and congratulations to them for it - but even some really quite intelligent people fail to shake it off, powerful evidence of the skill in brainwashing that the Catholic Church exercises. It's far more skilled than, for instance, the Anglican Church, mere amateurs in the game.

The Catholic Church also has an extraordinarily retrogressive stance on everything to do with reproduction. Any sort of new technology which makes life easier for women without causing any suffering is likely to be opposed by the Catholic Church. Regarding the accusations of sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests, deplorable and disgusting as those abuses are, they are not so harmful to the children as the grievous mental harm in bringing up the child Catholic in the first place. I had a letter from a woman in America in her forties, who said that when she was a child of about seven, brought up a Catholic, two things happened to her: one was that she was sexually abused by her parish priest. The second thing was that a great friend of hers at school died, and she had nightmares because she thought her friend was going to hell because she wasn't Catholic. For her there was no question that the greatest child abuse of those two was the abuse of being taught about hell. Being fondled by the priest was negligible in comparison. And I think that's a fairly common experience. I can't speak about the really grave sexual abuse that obviously happens sometimes, which actually causes violent physical pain to the altar boy or whoever it is, but I suspect that most of the sexual abuse priests are accused of is comparatively mild - a little bit of fondling perhaps, and a young child might scarcely notice that. The damage, if there is damage, is going to be mental damage anyway, not physical damage. Being taught about hell - being taught that if you sin you will go to everlasting damnation, and really believing that - is going to be a harder piece of child abuse than the comparatively mild sexual abuse.

The word atheism sounds negative; let me call it rationalism. It is a rational view of the world where you stand up proudly, in your humanity, you look life straight in the face, you look the universe straight in the face, you do your level best to understand it, to understand why you exist, what the universe is about, you recognise that when you die that's it, and therefore life is very, very precious and you devote your life to making the world a better place, to leading a good life so when you die you can say to yourself I have led a good life. Now, that seems to me to be a worthwhile goal to put in place of the medieval superstition which is religion. Belief in God doesn't have to be a bad thing, but I think it's a very demeaning thing to the human mind to believe in a falsehood, especially as the truth about the universe is so immensely exciting.

At the beginning of the 21st century, we humans have a real opportunity to learn about and understand the universe, the world, humanity, life, in a way that none of our predecessors have ever come close to. That is a huge privilege, and belief in God simply gets in the way of that. Religion is an irrelevance, it's a distraction, it's a rather boring, parochial falsehood that stands in the way of the glories of true understanding.

In conversation with Emily Hourican

Dawkins advocates removing all faith based schools and forms of training and further advocates that the state has an overriding interest in terms of the raising of children verses the desire and practice of their parents.

The more read of him and learn of him, the more concerned I am that people understand what he's saying and the implications of his views.

They're radical and very disconcerting in my opinion.

Bart

[Silvertusk]

Thanks for those links.

It worries and saddens me that now this book - which is already number 1 on the Amazon top 10 list - is another example of the what I call the "Da Vinci" syndrome where anything that is mocking God is a best seller. Do Christians have themselves to blame for this with such a coloured history or is it really the sign of the "end times".

Silvertusk

[bizzt]

Has anyone read this book? Does anyone know of a good critique of it?

Silvertusk

I haven't read it yet. I'm going to however. It's important to keep up with what the "other side" is saying and Dawkins, is an extremely radical voice.

Some links to reviews of interest of the book or the movement of activist atheism would include:

New York Times Review (mildly critical)
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/22/books ... c7&ei=5070

London Review by Terry Eagleton (highly critical)
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n20/eagl01_.html

The Economist (relatively Neutral)
http://www.economist.com/books/displays ... id=7939629

I'd also recommend you read this article in Wired by Atheist Gary Wolf. It's significant in that it represents an Atheist rebelling against the proposals of Dawkins, Dennett and Harris (the three leading vocal Atheists in the public forum) as too radical.

http://www.wired.com/news/wiredmag/0,71 ... =rss.index

I'll post a review myself when I've read it.

There's a lot to go on however in the articles above that should orient anyone to the major theme and arguments.

Regards,

Bart

I read the one with Gary Wolf... This really stuck out

Behind the lighting rigs and the acoustic panels, stained glass peeks out, a relic of McPherson's era. McPherson was personally wild and doctrinally flexible. She had visions and spoke in tongues, but she tried to put aside sectarian disputes. Even today, the charismatic movement is somewhat careless of doctrine. There is room for theistic evolutionists, for nonliteralists who hold that each of God's days in Genesis was the equivalent of a geological epoch, even for the notion that a check made out properly to the Lord can influence divine whim in the matter of a raise at work or a scholarship to college. Of course, evolutionary accommodation is controversial in the seminaries, and the idea of bribing God is rank heresy -- no trained theologian in any Christian tradition would endorse it. But such deviations are generously tolerated in practice. The forces at work in a living church have little to do with intellectual disputes over the meaning of the Lord's word. Having agreed that the Bible is inerrant, one is permitted to put it to use.

[Canuckster1127]

Bizzt, I noted that as well. Amy Semple McPherson was the founder of the Four Square gospel and was a remarkably eccentric and flamboyant personality.

Obviously, Gary Wolf is not a Christian. He's an Atheist who maybe slides a little closer to an agnostic.

Do you think Old Earth Creationism or Theistic Evolution are indicative of compromise and accomodation?

I think it's telling that the non-Christian community tends to assume that Christians must hold to a Young Earth position or else they are not fundamentalists or literalists. It's a false perception, but it shows how effective the YEC group has been in promoting this idea.

[Judah]

I believe the following reviews and commentaries are worth reading.
They are written by Dr Albert Mohler, president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary-the flagship school of the Southern Baptist Convention and one of the largest seminaries in the world.


The Dawkins Delusion - September 26, 2006

Dawkins and The God Delusion Revisited - October 23, 2006

Other links to Dawkins on Dr Albert Mohler's website.

[Kurieuo]

A few days ago, I listened a to a debate Dawkins participated in which was linked to from from ARN news:

David Quinn, a well known Catholic commentator and journalist in Ireland, debated Richard Dawkins on Irish radio on the reasonableness of religious belief. Dawkins is a formidable debater, but David Quinn embarrassed him. To hear the 18 minute audio, clear the link above. We could learn much from David Quinn.

If anyone else is interested it can be found at: http://origins.swau.edu/misc/Dawkins2.mp3

[Judah]

Has Richard Dawkins actually managed to prove absolutely and undeniably that God does not exist?

My understanding is that the existence of God cannot be either proven or disproven by science.
Dawkins himself says that the question "where does matter come from?" has not yet been answered by science.

He refers to the belief in God as a delusion, but here are some definitions of the word "delusion":

~ A false idea typically originating from a misinterpretation but firmly believed and strongly maintained in spite of contradictory proof or evidence.

~ A false, fixed, odd, or unusual belief firmly held by the patient. The belief is not ordinarily accepted by other members of the person's culture or subculture.

~ A fixed belief unrelated to a youth's cultural and educational background, improbable in nature, and not influenced or changed by reason or contrary experience. Categorized as a thought disorder.

~ A delusion is commonly defined as a false belief, and is used in everyday language to describe a belief that is either false, fanciful or derived from deception.
In psychiatry, the definition is necessarily more precise and implies that the belief is pathological (the result of an illness or illness process).

~ A belief that is firmly held despite compelling evidence to the contrary and is not a conventional belief that the person might be expected to hold given the particular educational and cultural background.

~ A persistent false belief that is strongly held despite clear evidence that the belief is actually false.
Delusion comes from the Latin word "deludo" meaning "to play false."

Definitions of Delusion on the Web

It would seem to me that Dawkins is rather jumping the gun to label a belief in God as a "delusion" when there is no absolute prove that God is a false idea, out of keeping with a person's cultural and educational background, not shared by others in that milieu, is improbable and fanciful, etc, etc, etc.
Where is his contradictory proof otherwise?

[Canuckster1127]

Dawkins has no "proof."

He has stated in other contexts that on a scale of 1 - 7 with 7 being absolute certainty of no God, he is at a 6 and that in practical terms he lives his life on the assumption that there is no God.

He relies upon, in my opinion, the fallicious thinking that the absence of evidence is the evidence of absence. This is doubly fallacious in that he limits his scope of inquiry into only that which is material and that which falls completely within the realm of reason, as he defines it.

If you examine the epistemological foundations of his own assertions, it's fairly clear that he does not hold to the same standards in his own system and further the radical agenda he advocates in terms of eliminating faith schools and the rights of parents to raise their children presumes certainty on his part as to the truth or efficasy of his approach.

[August]

Dawkins lives in a world of radical skepticism, he states that nothing can be absolutely proven, ever. That statement is of course self-defeating, how does he prove that statement to be true? I would also like to hear his opinion on his own existence, based on that.

[bizzt]

Bizzt, I noted that as well. Amy Semple McPherson was the founder of the Four Square gospel and was a remarkably eccentric and flamboyant personality.

Obviously, Gary Wolf is not a Christian. He's an Atheist who maybe slides a little closer to an agnostic.

Do you think Old Earth Creationism or Theistic Evolution are indicative of compromise and accomodation?

I think it's telling that the non-Christian community tends to assume that Christians must hold to a Young Earth position or else they are not fundamentalists or literalists. It's a false perception, but it shows how effective the YEC group has been in promoting this idea.

I believe Theistic Evolution is but not Old Earth Creationism. The Other problem is that YEC tends to be the most Vocal that the Secular Community hear the most. It is really too bad but hey the same perception falls on Atheists, Deists, Agnostics....

[pdavid]

I have just finished reading this book and I have to say it is extremely well-written and I really enjoyed it. He has a very talented style of writing. I am not a religious man myself, but contrary to popular opinion this does not make me agressive or morally inferior. I do not believe in a god, but as Dawkins frequently states "Everybody is an atheist, I just go one god further."

In answer to your questions, Dawkins has a chapter called "Why there almost certainly is no god." He recognises the fact that it is impossible to prove the non-existence of anything. He quotes Russel's famous orbiting cosmic teapot analogy which I recommend reading. The point he tries to make is that the onus cannot be on those who say something doesn't exist, but rather on those who say it does. He also questions why the default answer is 'god' and other explanations must disprove the notion before becoming valid. Dawkins also recognises that any scientist allows for a plethora of possibilities unless something is proved 100%, but places the probability of a god existing at an extremely, extremely low figure. In an interview with Paxman he was asked whether he was allowing for the possibility of a god, and he said exactly that. He doesn't believe in a god, but understands that this doesn't make the probability of a god's existence 50/50. He does not, I repeat NOT, claim to have disproved a god's existence, rather he explains why this solution is, in all senses of the word, improbable. I recommend reading "Mount improbable" and "The Blind watchmaker" as well as "The God delusion" for a complete take on his attitude.

I urge anybody to read this book, but I especially urge Christians to pick up this book, as it really is a great eye-opener, and dispels the common myths about the qualities of atheism. It helps to open your mind to other possibilities, even if you are confident that nothing can stop you believing. You don't have to be an atheist to read books about atheism, just as you don't have to be religious to read books about religion. Please don't delete this post because I said I don't have religious beliefs. I am far from agressive with my atheism as are the majority, so I would be grateful if I was met with the same attitude. Thanks a lot.

Best regards,

David

[Canuckster1127]

pdavid,

Your comments are well spoken, despite my disagreeing with many of them. I appreciate that you have read the book, which I have yet to do.

My question for you in response to what you say would be:

Why do you believe so many Atheists and Agnostics themselves take issue with Dawkins and what they perceive as an extreme agenda in terms of implementing his views practically?

This is not a dualistic construct. Dawkins is seen as a firebrand along with Dennett and Harris and much of the criticism of The God Delusion is coming from his own camp.

Thoughts?

Bart