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The God Delusion (Hardcover)
by Richard Dawkins
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Religion, Science |
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| MSL Pointer Review:
A breath of fresh air, Richard Dawkins's book is a frank discussion of science and rationalism versus religion and superstition. |
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Author: Richard Dawkins
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Pub. in: September, 2006
ISBN: 0618680004
Pages: 416
Measurements: 9.2 x 6.4 x 1.4 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00640
Other information: ISBN-13: 978-0618680009
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- Awards & Credential -
A sweeping success almost immediately after its publication is September 2006, this thought-provoking book on religion from the celebrated Oxford biologist Dawkins is well worth your time. This book ranks #17 in books out of millions on Amazon.com as of January 19, 2007. |
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- MSL Picks -
Prof. Richard Dawkins is widely regarded as one of the brightest scientific minds of the twenty first century. He is one of the few geniuses who have plied their trade both in North America and the British Isles. His popular writings are marked by wit and the amazing ability to make complex scientific material understandable to the layman. Prof. Dawkins' latest book is no exception.
In it he not only re-states his case for principled atheism, he also amasses a wealth of evidence to demonstrate the deleterious effect of the practice of religion across the globe - from warring religious factions in Northern Ireland to the Sunni and Shia conflicts in Iraq, and the murder of Christians in Nigeria. Yet for all this, Dawkins notes, religion is given inextricably special status in our modern world. He cites as an example the February 2006 ruling by the United States Supreme Court that a "church in New Mexico should be exempt from the law... against the taking of hallucinogenic drugs... [by] Faithful members [who] believe that they can understand God only by drinking hoasca tea, which contains the illegal hallucinogenic drug dimethyltryptamine." There is also the 2004 case of a twelve year boy in Ohio whose school forbade him from wearing a T-shirt with the words: "homosexuality is a sin, Islam is a lie, abortion is murder. Some issues are just black and white." The boy's parents sued the school and had the ban over-turned.
But what about the scientific evidence against the existence of God? On this point Prof. Dawkins is confident that life as we know is best explained by a careful study of Darwin's theory of evolution, especially the mechanism of natural selection. So there is no need to resort to the notion of a creator-god. Dawkins is well aware that there are some scientists who hold to a theistic view of evolution and that there are others who consider the God question inconclusive. To Prof. Dawkins both of these groups are inconsistent for, to him, Darwinism leads inevitably to atheism. With the present state of scientific knowledge, the chances of God's existence are highly improbable. For Prof. Dawkins there is much more hope of finding intelligent life on other planets than to locate God anywhere in our universe of a billion or more galaxies.
Yet the professor appears mystified that "We live on a planet where we are surrounded by perhaps ten million species, each one of which independently displays a powerful illusion of apparent design... [and that scientists] have calculated that, if the laws and constants of physics had been even slightly different, the universe would have developed in such a way that life would have been impossible." But all of this, according to Prof. Dawkins, is due to the Darwinian doctrine of natural selection. So in his opinion how was life begun in the first place? His answer is terse but telling: "We can deal with the unique origin of life by postulating a very large number of planetary opportunities. Once that initial stroke of luck has been granted... natural selection takes over: and natural selection is emphatically not a matter of luck.'
Prof. Dawkins also admits that there are gaps in the evolutionary trajectory but he feels it "is illogical to demand complete documentation of every step of any narrative, whether in evolution or any other science. You might as well demand, before convicting somebody of murder, a complete cinematic record of the murderer's every step leading up to the crime, with no missing frames." And by that same token, I might add, shouldn't the Hebrew sacred narratives and the Christian Testament be given a fair hearing? And if God does not exist, why so militant?
(From quoting D. Palmer, USA)
Target readers:
Open-minded readers of all faiths and of all walks.
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- Better with -
Better with
God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
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Richard Dawkins is one of the most influential scientists of our time. The New York Times Book Review has hailed him as a writer who "understands the issues so clearly that he forces his reader to understand them too." Recently awarded the distinction of "Public Intellectual in Britain, Dawkins is Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University.
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From Publisher
Discover magazine recently called Richard Dawkins "Darwin's Rottweiler" for his fierce and effective defense of evolution. Prospect magazine voted him among the top three public intellectuals in the world (along with Umberto Eco and Noam Chomsky). Now Dawkins turns his considerable intellect on religion, denouncing its faulty logic and the suffering it causes. He critiques God in all his forms, from the sex-obsessed tyrant of the Old Testament to the more benign (but still illogical) Celestial Watchmaker favored by some Enlightenment thinkers. He eviscerates the major arguments for religion and demonstrates the supreme improbability of a supreme being. He shows how religion fuels war, foments bigotry, and abuses children, buttressing his points with historical and contemporary evidence. In so doing, he makes a compelling case that belief in God is not just irrational, but potentially deadly. Dawkins has fashioned an impassioned, rigorous rebuttal to religion, to be embraced by anyone who sputters at the inconsistencies and cruelties that riddle the Bible, bristles at the inanity of "intelligent design," or agonizes over fundamentalism in the Middle East - or Middle America.
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1 A DEEPLY RELIGIOUS NON-BELIEVER
I don"t try to imagine a personal God; it suffices to stand in awe at the
structure of the world, insofar as it allows our inadequate senses to
appreciate it. - Albert Einstein
DESERVED RESPECT
The boy lay prone in the grass, his chin resting on his hands. He suddenly
found himself overwhelmed by a heightened awareness of the tangled stems
and roots, a forest in microcosm, a transfigured world of ants and beetles and
even - though he wouldn"t have known the details at the time - of soil
bacteria by the billions, silently and invisibly shoring up the economy of the
micro-world. Suddenly the micro-forest of the turf seemed to swell and
become one with the universe, and with the rapt mind of the boy
contemplating it. He interpreted the experience in religious terms and it led
him eventually to the priesthood. He was ordained an Anglican priest and
became a chaplain at my school, a teacher of whom I was fond. It is thanks
to decent liberal clergymen like him that nobody could ever claim that I had
religion forced down my throat.
In another time and place, that boy could have been me under the
stars, dazzled by Orion, Cassiopeia and Ursa Major, tearful with the unheard
music of the Milky Way, heady with the night scents of frangipani and
trumpet flowers in an African garden. Why the same emotion should have led
my chaplain in one direction and me in the other is not an easy question to
answer. A quasi-mystical response to nature and the universe is common
among scientists and rationalists. It has no connection with supernatural
belief. In his boyhood at least, my chaplain was presumably not aware (nor
was I) of the closing lines of The Origin of Species - the famous "entangled
bank" passage, "with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting
about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth". Had he been, he
would certainly have identified with it and, instead of the priesthood, might
have been led to Darwin"s view that all was "produced by laws acting around
us":
Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object
which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher
animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several
powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that,
whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity,
from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful
have been, and are being, evolved.
Carl Sagan, in Pale Blue Dot, wrote:
How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and
concluded, "This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than
our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant"? Instead they
say, "No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way." A
religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as
revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence
and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.
All Sagan"s books touch the nerve-endings of transcendent wonder that
religion monopolized in past centuries. My own books have the same
aspiration. Consequently I hear myself often described as a deeply religious
man. An American student wrote to me that she had asked her professor
whether he had a view about me. "Sure," he replied. "He"s positive science is
incompatible with religion, but he waxes ecstatic about nature and the
universe. To me, that is religion!" But is "religion" the right word? I don"t think
so. The Nobel Prize-winning physicist (and atheist) Steven Weinberg made
the point as well as anybody, in Dreams of a Final Theory:
Some people have views of God that are so broad and flexible that it is
inevitable that they will find God wherever they look for him. One hears it said
that "God is the ultimate" or "God is our better nature" or "God is the universe."
Of course, like any other word, the word "God" can be given any meaning we
like. If you want to say that "God is energy," then you can find God in a lump
of coal.
Weinberg is surely right that, if the word God is not to become completely
useless, it should be used in the way people have generally understood it: to
denote a supernatural creator that is "appropriate for us to worship".
Much unfortunate confusion is caused by failure to distinguish
what can be called Einsteinian religion from supernatural religion. Einstein
sometimes invoked the name of God (and he is not the only atheistic
scientist to do so), inviting misunderstanding by supernaturalists eager to
misunderstand and claim so illustrious a thinker as their own. The dramatic
(or was it mischievous?) ending of Stephen Hawking"s A Brief History of
Time, "For then we should know the mind of God", is notoriously
misconstrued. It has led people to believe, mistakenly of course, that
Hawking is a religious man. The cell biologist Ursula Goodenough, in The
Sacred Depths of Nature, sounds more religious than Hawking or Einstein.
She loves churches, mosques and temples, and numerous passages in her
book fairly beg to be taken out of context and used as ammunition for
supernatural religion. She goes so far as to call herself a "Religious
Naturalist". Yet a careful reading of her book shows that she is really as
staunch an atheist as I am.
"Naturalist" is an ambiguous word. For me it conjures my childhood hero, Hugh Lofting"s Doctor Dolittle (who, by the way, had more than a touch of the "philosopher" naturalist of HMS Beagle about him). In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, naturalist meant what it still means for most of us today: a student of the natural world. Naturalists in this sense, from Gilbert White on, have often been clergymen. Darwin himself was destined for the Church as a young man, hoping that the leisurely life of a country parson would enable him to pursue his passion for beetles. But philosophers use "naturalist" in a very different sense, as the opposite of supernaturalist. Julian Baggini explains in Atheism: A Very Short Introduction the meaning of an atheist"s commitment to naturalism: "What most atheists do believe is that although there is only one kind of stuff in the universe and it is physical, out of this stuff come minds, beauty, emotions, moral values - in short the full gamut of phenomena that gives richness to human life."
Human thoughts and emotions emerge from exceedingly complex
interconnections of physical entities within the brain. An atheist in this sense
of philosophical naturalist is somebody who believes there is nothing beyond
the natural, physical world, no supernatural creative intelligence lurking
behind the observable universe, no soul that outlasts the body and no
miracles - except in the sense of natural phenomena that we don"t yet
understand. If there is something that appears to lie beyond the natural world
as it is now imperfectly understood, we hope eventually to understand it and
embrace it within the natural. As ever when we unweave a rainbow, it will not
become less wonderful.
Great scientists of our time who sound religious usually turn out
not to be so when you examine their beliefs more deeply. This is certainly
true of Einstein and Hawking. The present Astronomer Royal and President
of the Royal Society, Martin Rees, told me that he goes to church as
an "unbelieving Anglican... out of loyalty to the tribe". He has no theistic
beliefs, but shares the poetic naturalism that the cosmos provokes in the
other scientists I have mentioned. In the course of a recently televised
conversation, I challenged my friend the obstetrician Robert Winston, a
respected pillar of British Jewry, to admit that his Judaism was of exactly this
character and that he didn"t really believe in anything supernatural. He came
close to admitting it but shied at the last fence (to be fair, he was supposed
to be interviewing me, not the other way around).
When I pressed him, he said he found that Judaism provided a good discipline to help him structure his life and lead a good one. Perhaps it does; but that, of course, has not the smallest bearing on the truth value of any of its supernatural claims. There are many intellectual atheists who proudly call themselves Jews and observe Jewish rites, perhaps out of loyalty to an ancient tradition or to urdered
relatives, but also because of a confused and confusing willingness to label
as "religion" the pantheistic reverence which many of us share with its most
distinguished exponent, Albert Einstein. They may not believe but, to borrow
Dan Dennett"s phrase, they "believe in belief".
One of Einstein"s most eagerly quoted remarks is "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." But Einstein also said, It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.
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| View all 13 comments |
Scientific American (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-19 00:00>
Richard Dawkins, in The God Delusion, tells of his exasperation with colleagues who try to play both sides of the street: looking to science for justification of their religious convictions while evading the most difficult implications - the existence of a prime mover sophisticated enough to create and run the universe, "to say nothing of mind reading millions of humans simultaneously." Such an entity, he argues, would have to be extremely complex, raising the question of how it came into existence, how it communicates - through spiritons! - and where it resides. Dawkins is frequently dismissed as a bully, but he is only putting theological doctrines to the same kind of scrutiny that any scientific theory must withstand. No one who has witnessed the merciless dissection of a new paper in physics would describe the atmosphere as overly polite. |
Steven Pinker (Harvard Professor, author of The Language Instinct, and How the Mind Works), USA
<2007-01-19 00:00>
At last, one of the best nonfiction writers alive today has assembled his thoughts on religion into a characteristically elegant book. |
Desmond Morris, (Author of The Naked Ape and The Human Animal) (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-19 00:00>
This is a brave and important book. |
Penn & Teller (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-19 00:00>
The God Delusion is smart, compassionate, and true... If this book doesn't change the world, we're all screwed. |
View all 13 comments |
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