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The God Delusion
I finished the subject book by Richard Dawkins and blogged on it in my old blog in January of 2007. The book talks about how the US is very close to a “theocracy,” and the “Christian Right” is “the American Taliban”. In the West, atheism seems to be losing ground simply because people who only care about short-term pleasure and believe the world is meaningless tend to not reproduce. They are strong believers in natural selection, certain of their superiority to infantile believers, that they make the logical decision to not reproduce, while the stupid believers are having larger and larger families.
Dawkins sees belief in God to be a clear and present danger. Page 317: “Horrible as sexual abuse no doubt was in the Catholic Chruch, the damage was arguably less than the long-term psychological damage inflicted by bringing the child up Catholic in the first place”. Page 318: “I am persuaded that the phrase ‘child abuse’ is no exaggeration when used to describe what teachers and priests are doing to children whom they encourage to believe in something like the punishment of unshriven mortal sins in an eternal hell.”
Dawkins finds Christianity (and all religion) to be a form of child abuse, and while he hasn’t directly called for children to be taken from their parents if the parents are going to “indoctrinate” them, he does everything but.
Page 339: “Our society, including the non-religious sector, has accepted the preposterous idea that it is normal and right to indoctrinate tiny children in the religion of their parents”.
Like most “liberals,” he doesn’t say what to DO about this “horror,” but it doesn’t take much imagination. In the liberal world, freedom is freedom to agree with the current leftist narrative.
Dawkins saw 9-11 as an opportunity to “do in religion”. One simply needs to declare all religions the same (irrational, delusional, unsupportable, etc.) and dangerous. The fault is religion, all religion, and what we need to do is replace faith in God with faith in “the science,” and then people will be “rational”. Science has given us nuclear weapons, Covid, and many other things that at least appear somewhat dangerous, so maybe we can call that even?
I argue that Dawkins and everyone else have an awful lot of “irrational faith”. We have faith that we will draw our next breath, a belief that will be falsified in the blink of an eye relative to eternity. We tend to think that the model of the universe running around in our head is “accurate,” even though we know it is delayed by an eternity in computer time (what we “see” took at least 13 milliseconds to register in our brain, and even then, incomplete in the extreme). To the extent that we are “scientists,” we have faith that this universe is ordered enough so that measurements and experiments done yesterday or tomorrow can be compared with each other by known principles that will hold across space and time. (Quantum Wave Theory makes those assumptions less certain.)
For the believer in random creation, it is a HUGE leap of faith, since all that order “just happened” … without meaning or purpose. A pure random event that can’t be tested, so is therefore not scientific.
While on that subject, apparently Dawkins can’t conceive of anything being “beyond material” or “eternal”. God can’t be postulated, because he would have to have been formed by something even more complex than the universe we see. Really? It seems very hard to see any basis for that “rule”. Why again should there be “something” rather than “nothing”? Since we seem to agree that there is “something,” is postulating that there is “something beyond” that big of a leap? Both cosmology with the “inflation theory” and evolution with “punctuated equilibrium” have their “creation spurts;” the difference is that they want to be clear that from their POV, it “just happens”.
1st Corinthians 13:13: “But now faith, hope, love, abide these three; but the greatest of these is love.”. Page 185, Dawkins: “Could irrational religion be a by-product of the irrationality mechanisms that were originally built into the brain by selection for falling in love?”. This section of the book makes it clear that Dawkins doesn’t find love to to be a good thing either … a bad piece of evolution that apparently makes us susceptible to religion. How about hope? Well, of course not, that would be “infantile”. Page 354: “…Jefferson more than once wrote to friends that he faced the approaching end without either hope or fear. This was as much as to say, in the most unmistakable terms, that he was not a Christian.”. Yes, Dawkins believes that a better world is a world without faith, hope, or love.
The culture we live in believes all the “pleasure” we can get is the highest good. The only part of the Catholic Church he has sympathy for is the pedophiles. Naturally, homosexuality, abortion on demand, and euthanasia are all to be encouraged. He quotes Dr. Puppy Love, Peter Singer, a couple of times, but doesn’t explicitly mention some of Pete’s superior moral stances (eating meat is immoral, sex with animals is moral, infanticide is moral, killing “unfit elderly” is moral).
Dawkins views Hitler as more moral than other bad guys in history. “Hitler seems especially evil only by the more benign standards of our time”. Why, even the horror of Donald Rumsfeld is only in comparison to the “enlightened” standards of today; “Donald Rumsfeld, who sounds so callous and odious today, would have sounded like a bleeding-heart liberal if he had said the same things during the Second World War.” (p268)
All is relative to whatever the dominant culture thinks at a given time. Might is right!
Some will ask, “Why do I put myself through this”? Dawkins sits in a tenured chair at Cambridge. The book was high on the bestseller lists and got rave reviews in the popular culture. The same culture that bleats every day or so about the “American theocracy”. If you desire to understand theocracy better, fly a Pride flag in Iran or Afghanistan.
Dawkins won’t say it directly, but it is clear that he is in favor of the removal of religious freedom, and the creation of a country without faith, love, or hope as rapidly as he possibly can. Christians need to be aware that the forces that seek to use them as lion food are still afoot. He would like to kill all the Muslims too, but at least in that case, the feeling is mutual!
However, his imagined, undiscovered country will still have faith — faith that a “reasonable government” that persecutes Christians (because you have to in order to stamp them out) is “good”… like the USSR, Communist China, and Nazi Germany. The state will force you and your children to worship the state (for the “greater good,” of course!)
Many find this vision compelling because they have faith that a godless totalitarian nation will be a utopia of pleasure. Progressives tend to believe that history is bunk, so “past results are not a guarantee of future results”. Indeed. However, in finances we do tend to look at the past. If one cared to look at history, the evidence of totalitarian utopia is quite sparse.
Published in Religion and Philosophy
Science and faith have little to do with each other. I can excuse the theologian for not understanding that. The man of science, however, should know better.
Man of philosophy says: Nope.
Nah. Science has to borrow from monotheism to have any rational foundation. The idea that the universe does and must obey laws and law-like regularities? That’s theology. H/t Paul Davies.
Actually they have a lot to do with each other- why do you think science arose in the Christain West?
Scientism is an irrational belief that only science, independent of faith, can examine truth.
Fiedism is the irrational belief that only faith, independent of reason, can examine truth.
One is mistaken to believe in either faith or reason alone. It will lead to great error.
Both are wrong. Faith & Reason are the twin engines of the mind to approach truth.
JP II:
Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth—in a word, to know himself—so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves
Addendum- in my rush to answer, I didn’t see posts #3 & #4-obviously very similar
Absolutely correct.
Leftists are obviously on board with this:
The difference, of course, is that Christians only want to teach their own children to be Christians.
Leftists want to teach all children to be leftists. Even your children.
Very important distinction.
No dogma is dogma.
Interestingly, Dawkins has undergone some softening of his prior stances- he opposes the transgender dogma that there are more than 2 sexes, and now calls himself “cultural Christian”, addressing the problems of Islam. https://www.ncregister.com/cna/famous-atheist-richard-dawkins-says-he-considers-himself-a-cultural-christian
I’m not going to stick up for Dawkins, but you are making enemies when you don’t need to. Among the atheists and agnostics I personally know (not counting internet atheists whom I have never met), not one looks down on believers and thinks they are infantile or stupid. Nor do they reject God because belief would interfere with short-term pleasure.
Meh. I hoped it was clear from context: science offers no proof or disproof of religious claims, and shouldn’t be invoked by people of faith to defend their faith nor by people who lack faith to attack faith.
Indeed. And I’ve watched you torture language in the name of philosophy.
I thought that WAS philosophy…
Ha!
Why can’t we believe in an ordered universe without G-d and then do science?
According to William James, we can. It just won’t be with a consistent epistemological standard.
Free thinking for me but not for thee.
As a not-at-all proud member of the non-believing community I would note that ‘Taliban’ is a ludicrous charge and y’all suck at theocracy.
Nevertheless, in darker times in America, mentioning that you didn’t believe in G-d could net you a look of such askanceness that you could be scarred for life.
So it is only natural that an atheist would conclude that we respond by seizing your children and raising them with our totally scientific principles that always work.
You can thank us later.
I hadn’t known that. Interesting.
But Dawkins did-as often did Harris, Hitchens, and Dennett (aka the Four Horseman or the new atheists). He proclaimed that faith was one of the world’s great evils:
“It is fashionable to wax apocalyptic about the threat to humanity posed by the AIDS virus, “mad cow” disease, and many others, but I think a case can be made that faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.” Humanist Jan/Feb 1997
He even liken religious education of the young to mental child abuse.
The “new atheists” actually argued that religion should not be tolerated.
The new atheists are no longer fashionable and even many atheists think they would fail an introductory course in religion or philosophy-since they were guilty of a scientific fundamentalism/scientism.
I used to ask internet atheists what kind of atheist they are: Christian atheist? Buddhist atheist? Islamic atheist? Etc.
Because without God there is no order. The natural state of matter is moving toward entropy, disorder, not order. There are what we might consider pauses in this process, such as crystal formation, but ultimately even they decay and continue the march.
Science, the physical world, cannot exist without the spiritual world (for lack of a better term and one with the least possible specificity for now). Science deals with the physical world. It studies that which is. Ultimately it fails to explain where it came from, or how it got that way, beyond that which can be observed or measured. Every attempt to explain the arising of order out of disorder fails in the realm of science due to the impossibility of observing it. So every attempt at explaining the origin of order is based on imagination without evidence. At the same time, the probability of events necessary to explain the origin of order out of disorder, without the hand of a power external to the physical world, is fantastically remote. Therefore, science ultimately demonstrates the existence of a spiritual world.
As I said, I’m not sticking up for Dawkins. I take issue with the portrayal of atheists in general as being hostile towards or looking down on those who are religious. There are white people in America who are white supremacists, but when some activists say that all or most white people are white supremacists, we recognize that as nonsense. There are Catholics and Lutherans who think the other group is hell-bound, but that doesn’t describe the majority of Catholics and Lutherans. This is mountains and molehills territory. Practically no one wants to take your religion away from you.
I still don’t get it. Why can’t the physical world exist apart from a spiritual world and why can’t the big bang have occurred from an alternative physical world?
Admittedly, this is all conjecture but isn’t it the same with the spiritual world?
We know that the “big bang” doesn’t obviate God- heck the so called big bang was 1st proposed by a Catholic Priest/Physicist [NB- the term “big bang” was initially a pejorative term coined by physicists who thought the universe was timeless]. The next problem for the atheist explanation of the origin of the universe is the so called fine tuning problem-the universe seems “set up” to create life. To get around that atheists conjecture a multi-verse. Why is a multiverse (an infinite number of unexplainable universes) a more likely conjecture than the existence of God? Neither can be “proven”. The main problem with the multi-verse explanation is that it just kicks the can down the road-why is there anything rather than nothing? That is the problem atheists can’t solve.
Also, theists can’t explain who is G-d’s mommy?
An absurd reply & only shows you have no idea of what the term God means…..as with Dawkins you would miserably fail an intro philosophy or theology course.
I see others are handling the metaphysics.
I usually do the epistemology.
How do you reckon we know there is any order in the universe?
And please explain it to Hume et al….and Kant and…
Hume at least did a good job explaining the significance of things we need to know independently of empirical investigation because empirical investigation itself assumes them.
I think the whole idea that atheists and agnostics are all hostile to religion may be an illusion. It might just be that the only ones we hear from in the news and in political punditry are the religion-hating atheists, while the majority of atheists, who are non-hostile, are just quietly sitting at home doing other things. That is because controversy sells news and makes for more interesting punditry.
The same effect happens in the art world. Many people think that all modern art is stuff like Andy Warhol’s photographs of Campbell Soup cans or some bozo spitting or wiping his a$$ on a canvas. This is not so, even though that’s what you’ll see in most museums. The majority of art being produced by actual professional artists is traditional realistic-type painting. It’s just that the outrageous canvas-spitters get all the news coverage because it is way more interesting, and nearly all big museums are run by lefty thinkers.
It’s like vegetarians. There is this perception that people who are vegetarians are hostile to meat-eaters and want to take away our hamburgers. There are radical activists who get news coverage and want to prohibit the consumption of meat. But most vegetarians just want to eat their vegetables in peace and are not striving to outlaw BBQ restaurants.
Careful there.
This rule probably applies to a wide spectrum of things. Even all things.
There are certainly nazi-types who vote Republican and trans-activists who wander the streets with chips on their broad shoulders and cellphones in their hands.
What will become of our political divide if we can’t point to those people with contempt and certainty?
How will anyone ever win office?
Not a lot of substance to your reply Mimac. Let me simplify it for you. If the universe needs a creator, then why doesn’t G-d need a creator?