In the next chapter, Richard Dawkins undertakes the question of morality, seeking to ground that morality on the unshakeable foundation of evolution. What kind of foundation might that be? Well, let’s go down into the basement and have ourselves a little check. But before getting to this important issue, Dawkins gives us some samples of …
Who? Me?
Richard Dawkins knows that he cannot just say that religion is silly, and that people are silly for believing it. Given his evolutionary premises, he has to give a Darwinian account of why people are so overwhelmingly religious. This is the goal of his next chapter in The God Delusion. “Religion is so wasteful, so …
A Colorless, Odorless Gas With Lots of Potential
In this centerpiece chapter, Richard Dawkins sets out to turn the tables on the creationists, and he wants to do so in an elegant way. His argument reminds me of a comment once made to my brother-in-law (a pediatric cardiologist) by another doctor, an atheist. He said that the liver was so complicated, God couldn’t …
Cereal or Eggs?
The next chapter is the heart of Dawkins’ book, so the best plan would seem to take more than one installment to deal with it. At the conclusion of this chapter, Dawkins says that “this chapter has contained the central argument of my book” (p. 157), which is actually kind of scary when you think …
The Crawl Space Under the Neutral Zone
The next chapter of Dawkins’ book concerns the arguments for God’s existence. He addresses, in turn, the traditional Thomist arguments, the ontological argument, the aesthetic argument, the argument from personal experience, the argument from Scripture, the argument from admired religious scientists, Pascal’s wager, and a Bayesian argument involving probability calculations. Not surprisingly, since Dawkins is …
The Guy in the Teapot
Not surprisingly, Richard Dawkins places the evolutionary process at the center of his argument. “This book will advocate an alternative view: any creative intelligence, of sufficient complexity to design anything, comes into existence only as the end product of an extended process of gradual evolution” (p. 31, emphasis in the original). This might be hard …
A Couple Junior High Girls in a Slap Fight
Dawkins spends a goodish bit of time in his first chapter trying to show that belief in supernatural religion is not worthy of the thinking man’s respect. “It is in the light of the unparalled presumption of respect for religion that I make my own disclaimer for this book. I shall not go out of …
Psalter, Claymore and Bagpipes
The first chapter of The God Delusion is divided into two sections. The first section is entitled “Deserved Respect,” and talks about scientists like Einstein, Hawking, and others who use religious terminology to talk about the whoa-factor when it comes to just how cool the universe actually is. It is beyond dispute that lots of …
Let’s Fritz Our Brains At Them
Richard Dawkins wants to raise our consciousness — to “raise consciousness to the fact that to be an atheist is a realistic aspiration, and a brave and splendid one” (p. 1). And his new book, The God Delusion, certainly does have some high aspirations in this regard. As high, that is, as approximately one hundred …
And It Figures
One of the most obvious characteristics of our relativistic, postmodern times is a schizophrenic approach to different kinds of authority. The radical individualism pioneered by modernity, and carried on by its sham-alternative, postmodernity, is an individualism that reacts violently to all forms of godly authority, and capitulates immediately in the face of brow-beated bluster. Relativism …