Scratching the Itch of Morality

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …