In this last Dawkins installment, I want to do two things. The first is to briefly summarize his last chapter and respond to it. The second task is to develop something I mentioned in an earlier post — viz. that Dawkins is more than half ashamed of what he is doing — and for good …
In the Zone
The ninth chapter of Dawkins’ book is entitled “Childhood, Abuse, and the Escape from Religion.” The chapter is almost impudent in its intellectual dishonesty, and more than impudent in its proposal. Dawkins begins by telling a heart-wrenching story from 19th century Italy, in which a young Jewish boy (Edgardo Mortata) had been secretly baptized by …
Rabbitless Rocks
In the next chapter, Dawkins seeks to answer the question, “Why are you so hostile?” So believers in God are delusional. So what? Why get that datum wound tight around your axle? He also has to explain why, given his adversarial stance toward Christianity and creationism, he never takes “part in debates with creationists.” With …
Pina Coladas, and Walking in the Rain
The next chapter in Dawkins is called “The ‘Good’ Book and the Changing Moral Zeitgeist,” and it is one of the strangest bits of business I have encountered in some time. The first part of the chapter is dedicated to proving how the Bible exhibits “sheer strangeness” and is “just plain weird” (p. 237). To …
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 …
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 …
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 …