The God Delusion Review (Part I)
Posted by Ray @ 11:24 pm(I’ve split the review because it’s very long. Part I deals with the weaknesses, and Part II deals with the strengths.)
I just finished reading Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. It’s a very interesting piece of work, and reading it I find myself backing down from my previous opinion that Dawkins is a “fundamentalist atheist”, as much a fundamentalist as religious nuts are. He comes off as far more reasonable than his lectures / readings would suggest. I suspect most of the perceived irritation stems from the fact that he’s gotten so many of the same unsophisticated questions and accusations from religious folks, that when he hears them in a Q&A session he can’t help but be frustrated.
As is expected for a work of this ambition, it falls short in many places. Most notably, the last chapter is empty and unconvincing when compared to the earlier chapters.
Much of his animosity towards religion appears to be directed towards the harm and “brainwashing” it causes children. Apart from the Intelligent Design versus Evolution debate (I’ll deal with that later), I find most of his arguments here very unconvincing.
For example, he rails against calling children “Muslim children” or “Catholic children”. To him, it is tantamount to calling the child a “Marxist child” or a “Communist child”. He prefers the construction “child of Muslim parents”, explaining that at least that way, it will be apparent to the child that they have a choice as to what religion they will choose.
But a child born to Muslim parents has no choice but to be Muslim, and a Catholic baptized at birth has no choice but to be Catholic. It doesn’t matter what the child thinks - their religious elders have already decided for them. Even if I call them “children of Catholic parents”, it does no good. And remember, in certain countries apostasy is a crime punishable by death.
The other area where the final chapter fails is the cursory examination of the comforting ability of religion. Religion plays a strong role in comforting people, both via first-order belief in God, and via the second-order pre-made social network.
Dawkins first brushes the whole issue aside by saying: “just because it’s comforting, does not make it true”. Fine; I too will brush aside the issue by saying: “just because it’s true, does not make it comforting”.
Then he sidetracks into how religious people tend to fear death more than non-religious people. He provides only anecdotal evidence for this phenomenon, a fact he readily admits. Then he goes on to argue about euthanasia and why religious persons don’t support it. Why the fascination with death? There are plenty of other comfort-functions religion performs. Many of them stem from the very real effects of having a cohesive, supportive social network other than your friends and family upon which to rely. The comfort-functions of religion are undeniable and very real, and it does no good to simply dismiss them for not being “true”.
My point is this. Dawkins could have devoted more of the book into examining his root thesis: Why is there no God? Instead, the final chapter seems tacked-on and empty, and only weakens the message.
My last complaint is that Dawkins gave the philosophical treatment of the subject matter a rather inadequate amount of analysis. Even to someone like me, who doesn’t really care about philosophy, the omission is glaringly obvious. The book would have benefitted greatly from a separate philosopher author.
Actually, the book would have benefitted greatly if it had been a collaborative project amongst intellectuals from all the disciplines of humanity, including that much-maligned subject, theology. As it is, the parts of the book that deal with cross-disciplinary material like astrophysics and philosophy are woefully under-represented.
Fortunately, the chapters on biology are excellent, and it is to that I’ll turn my attention to in Part II.
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god is real!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! thank u
Comment by dre — Thursday, February 22 2007 @ 12:50 am
Heh. Sorry to burst the bubble, but I’ve just got part II up. Give it a read!
As for me, I still believe in a weak form of deism (God exists, but can’t be bothered about puny little humans or the puny little universe). It borders on the atheistic, and exists only because of ignorance. As knowledge progresses, we shall see how much ignorance there is left within which God can exist…
Comment by Ray — Thursday, February 22 2007 @ 1:53 am
[…] (This is part II of a two-part review of The God Delusion. Part I deals with its weaknesses, part II deals with its strengths). […]
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