Richard Dawkins "The God Delusion"
The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
FYI: This is going to be one of those "try to touch every major point" style reviews.
I'll start by saying I've never read any religious (or atheist) books before this point. I was raised as a member of the United Methodist Church, which I attended regularly until I was 18. I'm 41. Over my life, I've slowly drifted away from religion. By education and career, I am an engineer. I am a natural skeptic and someone who has more faith in science than in "faith".
Before reading this book I read an article ( http://www.bigthink.com/think-tank/atheism-easter-atheister ) that included the Dawkins' scale, shown below. I considered myself somewhere between a weak theist and a weak atheist, probably leaning towards agnostic.
Richard Dawkins’ Belief Scale Scoring Rubric:
1. Strong Theist: I do not question the existence of God, I KNOW he exists.
2. De-facto Theist: I cannot know for certain but I strongly believe in God and I live my life on the assumption that he is there.
3. Weak Theist: I am very uncertain, but I am inclined to believe in God.
4. Pure Agnostic: God’s existence and non-existence are exactly equiprobable.
5. Weak Atheist: I do not know whether God exists but I’m inclined to be skeptical.
6. De-facto Atheist: I cannot know for certain but I think God is very improbable and I live my life under the assumption that he is not there.
7. Strong Atheist: I am 100% sure that there is no God.
(By the way, shocked that Jung was such a strong theist.)
Having finished the book, I guess I'm floating somewhere between a weak atheist and a de-facto atheist.
Dawkins considers himself a de-facto atheist, mostly because as a scientist, you're always open to the possibility of being proven wrong. And he admits, if there was proof that God existed, he would change his mind. On the other hand, he pointed out quotes from many religious men who stated that even if they were given absolute proof that there was no God, they would not change their minds. That's scary.
I should back up and mention Richard Dawkins is a British evolutionary biologist. So he comes at things from the biological perspective, with a strong reliance on Darwin and his theory of evolution.
One of the first things Dawkins does is define what he means by religion. Although he mentions polytheism in passing, he is mainly focused on the monotheistic Abrahamic religions (Christianity, Judaism, and Muslim). He believes that neither the God who answers prayers and intervenes in modern life nor the clockmaker God exist.
During the course of the book he uses quotes to point out where many notable scientists and public figures fall in terms of faith. He makes a specific focus on Einstein who speaks of religion and uses the term God ("Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."), but as a Naturalist would -- a deep respect for the universe, not a belief in a supernatural God. From Einstein:
I have never imputed to Nature a purpose or a goal, or anything that could be understood as anthropomorphic. What I see in nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility. This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism.
The idea of a personal god is quite alien to me and seems even naive. (pg 36)
In chapter 1, Dawkins talks about the undeserved respect we have for religious faith, believers and atheists alike. We can argue to the death about politics, but there is this social more preventing us from insulting religion and religious practices, however bizarre.
In chapter 2, he introduces us to NOMA - non-overlapping magisteria - or the idea that science has a domain and religion has a domain, and never the two shall meet. That reminds me of Douglas Adams and his philosophers who demand "rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty" ("Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", chapter 25). Douglas Adams himself was an atheist and Richard Dawkins dedicates the book to him.
Also around this point in the book Richard Dawkins talks about how the U.S. government was constructed as a secular body. We were not created as a Christian nation. Thomas Jefferson, by his writings, shows himself to be an atheist, or at the very least an agnostic.
To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels, god, are immaterial, is to say they are nothings, or that there is no god, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason otherwise ... without plunging into the fathomless abyss of dreams and phantasms. ... (pg 63)
In the third chapter, Dawkins points out that most scientists claimed to be religious until the nineteenth century, when there was less social and judicial pressure than in earlier centuries to profess religion, and more scientific support for abandoning it (pg 124) To fix the timeline, Charles Darwin's "On the Origin of Species" came out in 1859.
Scientists like Newton, Michael Faraday, and Gregor Mendel were religious, or at least showed all signs of being religious in the public eye. Watson and Crick were atheists. Pascal is famous for hedging his bets. (Pascal's Wager pg 130).
In chapter four, Dawkins introduces the parable of Climbing Mount Improbable to explain how evolution accounts for irreducible complexity.
One side of the mountain is a sheer cliff, impossible to climb, but on the other side is a gentle slope to the summit. On the summit sits a complex device such as an eye or a bacterial flagellar motor. The absurd notion that such complexity could spontaneously self-assemble is symbolized by leaping from the front of the cliff to the top in on bound. Evolution, by contrast, goes around the back side of the mountain and creeps up the gentle slope to the summit: easy! The principle of climbing the gentle slope as opposed to leaping up to the precipice is so simple, one is tempted to marvel that it took so long for a Darwin to arrive on the scene and discover it. (pg 147)
Dawkins then talks about the gap theory, where religion insists on inserting God's hand everywhere there is a current gap in our scientific knowledge.
After speaking of evolution, Dawkins talks about the anthropic principle. Darwin's theory of evolution can explain the individual steps toward increasing complexity of life, but it can't explain the first spark of life. For that we must look to the size of the universe and the magic of big numbers.
It has been estimated that there are between 1 billion and 30 billion planets in our galaxy, and about 100 billion galaxies in the universe. Knocking a few noughts off for reasons of ordinary prudence, a billion billion is a conservative estimate of the number of available planets in the universe. Now, suppose the origin of life, the spontaneously arising of something equivalent to DNA, really was a quite staggeringly improbable event. Suppose it was so improbable as to occur on only one in a billion planets. ... even with such long odds, life will still have arisen of a billion planets - of which Earth, of course, is one. (pg 165)
Anyone hearing Douglas Adams and his infinite improbability drive?
Okay, this is beside the point, but I was looking up a place where Dawkins mentioned Douglas Adams in the index. Among other places, page 42. *g*
Yes, Douglas Adams and Richard Dawkins have a bit of a mutual love fest going. In an interview printed in "Salmon of Doubt", Douglas Adams admits he went from an agnostic to an atheist after reading some of Dawkins earlier works. (pg 141-142)
One more quote before I move on.
Where other science-fiction writers played on the oddness of science to arouse our sense of the mysterious, Douglas Adams used it to make us laugh. ... Laughter is arguably the best response to some of the stranger paradoxes of modern physics. The alternative, I sometimes think, is to cry. (pg 408)
Next, in chapter 5, Dawkins turns to the roots of religion. Why does it keep appearing if it isn't something of advantage to the individual's survival? His favorite theory is that religion is a by-product of something else. Perhaps the way a child's brain is primed to obey all authority figures. Or it could come out of the fact that children are natural dualists - they believe that the mind and the body are distinct. They are also native teleologists - they wish to assign a purpose to everything. And to a child's mind religion is easier to grasp than evolution.
Native dualism and native teleology predispose us, given the right conditions, to religion, just as my moths' light-compass reaction predisposed them to inadvertent 'suicide'. Our innate dualism prepares us to believe in a 'soul' which inhabits the body rather than being integrally part of the body. We can also easily imagine the existence of a deity as pure spirit, not an emergent property of complex matter but existing independently of matter. Even more obvious, childish teleology sets us up for religion. If everything has a purpose, whose purpose is it? God's of course. (pg 210)
It is also in this chapter that Dawkins points out even those of us who have abandoned religion were brought up in a religious culture. Hence "The old Northern Ireland joke, 'Yes, but are you a Protestant atheist or a Catholic atheist?'"
Chapter 6 covers the question of how we can be moral individuals without religion. Dawkins points out there are two base rationales for natural altruism - kinship and reciprocal altruism ("You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours".)
Chapter 7 shows us that Dawkins has read the bible, perhaps more than most highly religious individuals. He shows us that contemporary Christians do not pull their morals directly from the Bible. Even the ten commandments aren't as simple and straightforward as they seem. There was an innate in-group bias included with them.
'Thou shalt not kill' was never intended to mean what we now think it means. It meant, very specifically, thou shalt not kill Jews. And all those commandments that make reference to 'thy neighbor' are equally exclusive. 'Neighbor' means fellow Jew. (pg 288)
Dawkins then introduces the concept of the moral zeitgeist. In any society there exists a somewhat mysterious consensus [over what is moral], and for which it is not pretentious to use the German loan-word Zeitgeist (spirit of the times). (pg 300-301)
Chapter 8 covers the "why not live and let live?" idea. Here Dawkins points out the most horrible atrocities that are committed in God's name. As for why we should not condemn the extremists and leave the regular religious folks alone:
As long as we accept the principle that religious faith must be respected simply because its religious faith, it is hard to with hold respect from the faith of Osama bin Laden and the suicide bombers. The alternative, one so transparent that it should need no urging, is to abandon the principle of automatic respect for religious faith. This is one reason I do everything in my power to warn people against faith itself, not just so-called 'extremist' faith. The teachings of 'moderate' religion, though not extremist in themselves, are an open invitation to extremism. (pgs 345-346)
This, for me, is probably the biggest take home point of the book.
In Chapter 9, Dawkins asserts we should not be indoctrinating our children into religion. And, even more simply, we should not be labeling them with a religious title (ex: a Christian child) before they are old enough to choose their own faith, or lack there of.
Chapter 10 looks at whether humans have a psychological gap that God fulfills. Religion has at one time or another been thought to fill four main roles in human life: explanation, exhortation, consolation and inspiration. (pg 289) Having covered explanation and exhortation (where we get our morals), he now turns to consolation and inspiration.
Returning to childhood, Dawkins explores the idea of imaginary friends, and the consolation they provide. [I]maginary friends - and imaginary gods - have the time and patience to devote all their attention to the sufferer. (pg 391) So, [d]id gods, in their roles as consolers and counselors, evolve from binkers, by a sort of psychological 'pedomorphosis'? Pedomorphosis is the retention into adulthood of childhood characteristics. (pg 391-392)
As to inspiration, Dawkins proposes that science can fill that role as well. He shows us how science can let us experience more of the universe than is possible with our limited senses.
And, that's all folks. *g*
Excellent book. Well thought out and argued. Includes a full index and bibliography.
Review completed 06/12/2012.