The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The God Delusion
Book Review: A Real Eye Opener
Summary: 5 Stars
This Book is a real eye opener. It makes you think about more than just religion, but life in general. Do not get caught up in the stereotyical mindset before you read the book. Richard Dawkins provides useful info that could be helpful if people sit down and read it.Book Review: A Revolutionary Evolutionary!
Summary: 5 Stars
Impassioned, informative, provocative, interesting and amusing! `The God Delusion' is a stimulating rollercoaster of a book that will have many of you chuckling, sweating with fear (for our future) and begging to learn more. I looked up a few of his references and links, which proved equally fascinating. I now have a few more books on my wish list than I have time for!
Dawkins has the courage of his convictions. The book is brave and gutsy! His anger is misinterpreted by many, and as a consequence, they wrongly (or deliberately) perceive him as cold and callous. On the contrary, I believe his anger and exasperation with the many evils of organised religion, demonstrates his concern for humanity as a whole. It is poignantly clear, despite his cynical and openly derisive moments, that Dawkins is genuine in his wish to make this world a better place - for ALL and not a select or `chosen' few.
Dawkins' iconoclastic stance brings to mind what Matthew Arnold said in 'The Study of Poetry'... "there (will not) be a creed which is not shaken, not an accredited dogma which is not shown to be questionable, not a received tradition which does not threaten to dissolve". And before any out there suggests that Dawkins considers himself immune from the same scrutiny, there are frequent references where he concedes that he will happily admit defeat if he is presented with `damning' and persuasive evidence to refute his views.
I recommend this book to anyone with a questioning and enquiring mind, but it really should be read from cover to cover (hint-hint future reveiwers!) Enjoy!
Book Review: A Scientist Fights Back
Summary: 4 Stars
Dawkins' rational frontal attack on religion stems especially from his understandably great frustration at "religious" attacks on the facts of evolution. I can understand why many who are only superficially acquainted with the concepts of biological evolution may find them counter-intuitive or wrong, and also why a scientist (or even educated lay reader who has taken the trouble to learn) is totally frustrated with the attacks on a mature science (superstition versus rationalism) that is an arena of so much active discovery and new understanding in our day, and dismayed at the efforts to ruin the scientific education of thousands of the young. Dawkins cites the terrible toll throughout history of religious zealotry and finds little compensating good. The core of the book is his effort to demonstrate the irrationality of a belief in God. He also recounts how the United States was founded on "secular rationalism," and explicitly not as a "Christian nation" as so many in America today seem to believe. Whether one agrees with Dawkins' final conclusions about God or not, this should almost be required reading in the United States of the early 21st century, as we seem to be entering a new age of religious zealotry at home and abroad. Christians, as well as Muslims or Jews, certainly need to examine their faith and, in particular, how it is manifest in relation to others. Dawkins argues persuasively that the moral zeitgeist does indeed move forward, but that it is not driven by religion.
Book Review: A Sign for Hope
Summary: 5 Stars
Brilliant. It provides us, the non religious and peaceful people, an excellent set of arguments and concrete proofs to finally start the journey for a non secular world. A more secure world. A world of its age.
Book Review: A Sorry Tale of Obsession and Self-Contradiction
Summary: 1 Stars
I have not read all the thousand-plus reviews that precede this one, but it is clear that those I have read make little or no attempt to analyse what Dawkins is saying in this book.
Essentially, he bases his arguments on two premises:
1. Science should be the solution to all problems.
2. Natural selection is the only unifying principle in nature.
He provides no evidence to support these claims. He makes no attempt to justify or even explain them, but treats them as axioms and insists that anyone who questions them is being irrational. It should be clear to everyone that this is the language of faith, not science. Of course he refuses to accept this, but keeps repeating his premises over and over with a determination that can only be called obsessive.
His conclusions flow from these obsessions. Doctrine and theology do not follow the scientific method, so they cannot be valid branches of study. He criticises them without understanding them, and his criticisms are naïve, superficial and often very wrong.
Perhaps his most bizarre conclusion is that those make a lifetime study of natural selection develop a "raised consciousness" which allows them to understand things incomprehensible to others. While the arrogance of this claim is transparent, Dawkins, typically, does not try to justify it but seems to think it explains why many people disagree with him.
Much of the "rational argument" of this book consists of name-calling. His litany of accusations against God - "a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully" - would be more suited to a school playground than an academic discussion.
His major rhetorical principle is that if you say something loudly often and often enough, people will believe you; judging by most of the reviews I have read, this appears to work. Readers do not seem to realise how much of his reasoning is shallow, fallacious and even downright dishonest. An example of the latter is his insistence that all religions are essentially the same, and so any (real or perceived) flaws in one faith are reasons to damn them all.
Dawkins protests vociferously against people who use irrational arguments and make assertions without evidence or with highly selective or distorted evidence. Yet he himself repeatedly does all of these.
How can he even keep a straight face when claiming that Darwin "anticipated and disposed of every single one of the alleged difficulties that have since been proposed, right up to the present day"?
Questions that have occupied philosophers for centuries are dismissed after a few minutes' cursory consideration. Looking at Thomas Aquinas's arguments for the existence of God, he deduces that the first three all involve some sort of infinite regress which terminates in God, but claims that there is no reason why God should terminate them (without even looking at the reasons why there is no other solution). He concludes that he has shown the arguments to be "spectacularly weak." If they are so weak, why does he not answer them? Does he see nothing self-contradictory in an infinite regress? Or does he think there is some other solution? You can't solve a problem by ignoring it. But ignore it he does.
Dealing with the 1917 miracle of Fatima - in which 70 000 people (including atheists who only went there to laugh when the proposed miracle failed to occur) saw the sun spinning in the sky and then hurtling toward them - he concedes the difficulty in assuming that they all simultaneously witnessed the same hallucination or told the same lie. He "answers" this by pointing out that it is even more improbable that the Earth suddenly started falling toward the sun. Rather than looking for alternative explanations, he finishes with a breathtaking non sequitur: "That is really all that needs to be said about personal `experience' of gods or other religious phenomena."
The confused structure of the book should be obvious to anyone. Having made his assault on God and religion, Dawkins has no idea where to go next. He meanders through a few issues before coming to a non-conclusion. He makes some attempts to fill holes in his arguments, but this only leads him to contradict himself.
Because a universe constructed by natural selection is necessarily blind and uncaring, he believes that purpose is an illusion which humans attempt to impose upon the world, and makes an unconvincing attempt to explain morality in terms of evolution. Yet he devotes much of his book to discussing the supposed evils of religion, using the language of conventional morality: right, wrong, good, evil, decency, vicious, repellent, unpalatable, "unspeakable vandalism". He expresses outrage over murder, torture, gang rape, child abuse, suicide bombers, and intolerance of all kinds. I share his disgust with these atrocities; but my disgust is based on Christian morality. On what does Dawkins base his?
According to his reasoning, people who perpetuate these outrages are only acting on their genetic heritage, so they can hardly be blamed. If our acts are all the products of mindless natural selection, how can they be good or evil? By dismissing purpose and faith-based morals, he has undermined his whole argument. Perhaps the effect of natural selection is to lower consciousness rather than raise it.
Much of The God Delusion is merely self-delusion. Dawkins has not done his homework. He spends a lot of time pointing out apparent inconsistencies and self-contradictions in the Bible and wonders why theologians do not notice them - apparently unaware that they have written thousands of pages about these very problems.
He does not even appear to have read his own books, asserting that his previous works did not set out to convert anyone. Does he forget that The Blind Watchmaker begins by saying "I want to persuade the reader, not just that the Darwinian world-view happens to be true, but that it is the only known theory that could, in principle, solve the mystery of our existence"?
Surprisingly, there is very little science in the book. And when he uses scientific arguments, they are often totally erroneous, as in the astonishing statement that "Darwinian natural selection is the only known solution to the otherwise unanswerable riddle of where the information comes from." The meaning of natural selection, according to any good biological dictionary, is the conservation of genetic information by differential survival and reproduction - the information having presumably arrived by random mutation. There is no suggestion that selection is the origin of any information at all. Naturally Dawkins offers no evidence for this absurd claim. Darwin himself in The Origin of Species had no idea where information came from: he finally settled for the Lamarckian principle of inheritance of acquired variation!
His obsessiveness is most evident in dealing with God's nature. "Who designed God?" he asks repeatedly, as have millions of children before him. Over and he repeats that God would have to be even more complex and improbable than the universe he created. He offers no explanation for such a dogmatic position, apart from saying that "The evolutionary drive towards complexity...comes from natural selection", which only makes sense if he is suggesting that God has evolved. Yet he describes those who disagree with him as retreating from rational argument. Presumably, since he has not provided any evidence for his point of view, "rational argument" must mean accepting his word without question. He compounds his arrogance by adding that anyone who does not agree with him is guilty of "amazing psychological blindness".
Overall, the book is a conglomeration of good and bad, logical and illogical arguments all lumped together in very little order, and many of them repeated ad nauseam. If this book is the best that an eminent academic atheist can do, the wonder is not that religious faith is on the increase but that it is increasing so slowly.