adventures in Atheism
The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins.
nonfiction science/religion/criticism
Rating: &&&&1/2
This is the best nonfiction writing I have read in years. Dawkins makes elegant arguments, and belies his reputation as a "belligerent" or "hostile" arguer. He also, contrary to his popular reputation, embraces scientism no more than he does religious belief - he is an avid student and practitioner of scientific inquiry, not a satisfied believer in unexamined orthodoxy. Dawkins stitches together biology, physics, human history, comparative religion, literature and art in provocative ways, and astonishes me with the breadth of his intellectual comfort zone. (He blew me away when he invoked the consciousness theory of Julian Jaynes, a psychological theorist whose unconventional work I encountered in freshman classes on Homer ... and not since.)
There are a couple of difficult chapters; Dawkins lost me in the tangled theory-of-science analysis of Chapter 4, and I will have to reread that bit. And Dawkins himself seemed to lose his train of thought in the final chapter on quantum physics, which oddly enough is where I (a layperson with little understanding of physics beyond the high school level) feel that scientific explanations for the conscious-being experience - individuality, personality, the powerful human perception of "soul" - ultimately will be untangled. But overall The God Delusion is highly accessible to the lay person, and a treasure trove of insights for anyone interested in comparative religion.
The jury in my head is still out on the atheism/theism question, and on the post-death possibilities for the individual soul. I remain agnostic on these matters, gravitating toward a (possibly conscious, continually developing) Einsteinian god-universe, waiting for quantum science or something else to fill in the human-scale details - or else waiting to die and find out then whether "I" still exist as a consciousness or .... fade to black. (In which case the current "me" is content enough at the prospect of reverting to a bunch of molecules, recombining into other material and transferring energy, living and conscious or not.) In the meantime, I'll be reading more of Dawkins, and paying attention to his references.
nonfiction science/religion/criticism
Rating: &&&&1/2
This is the best nonfiction writing I have read in years. Dawkins makes elegant arguments, and belies his reputation as a "belligerent" or "hostile" arguer. He also, contrary to his popular reputation, embraces scientism no more than he does religious belief - he is an avid student and practitioner of scientific inquiry, not a satisfied believer in unexamined orthodoxy. Dawkins stitches together biology, physics, human history, comparative religion, literature and art in provocative ways, and astonishes me with the breadth of his intellectual comfort zone. (He blew me away when he invoked the consciousness theory of Julian Jaynes, a psychological theorist whose unconventional work I encountered in freshman classes on Homer ... and not since.)
There are a couple of difficult chapters; Dawkins lost me in the tangled theory-of-science analysis of Chapter 4, and I will have to reread that bit. And Dawkins himself seemed to lose his train of thought in the final chapter on quantum physics, which oddly enough is where I (a layperson with little understanding of physics beyond the high school level) feel that scientific explanations for the conscious-being experience - individuality, personality, the powerful human perception of "soul" - ultimately will be untangled. But overall The God Delusion is highly accessible to the lay person, and a treasure trove of insights for anyone interested in comparative religion.
The jury in my head is still out on the atheism/theism question, and on the post-death possibilities for the individual soul. I remain agnostic on these matters, gravitating toward a (possibly conscious, continually developing) Einsteinian god-universe, waiting for quantum science or something else to fill in the human-scale details - or else waiting to die and find out then whether "I" still exist as a consciousness or .... fade to black. (In which case the current "me" is content enough at the prospect of reverting to a bunch of molecules, recombining into other material and transferring energy, living and conscious or not.) In the meantime, I'll be reading more of Dawkins, and paying attention to his references.