Book report: The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins
Boy, do I miss Carl Sagan. In the good old days, if I wanted to read scathing indictments of religion, closely reasoned arguments against the existence of God, and a boost to atheism generally, all I had to do was reach out and read Sagan’s latest book. I was guaranteed to find fascinating insights, clever analysis, and impressive reasoning, all in his elegant and memorable style. Plus, the bonus of Sagan himself as a courtly and genial host. Now, all we have is Richard Dawkins and, believe me, it just ain’t the same.
In reading The God Delusion, I find myself in a peculiar position. I am unquestionably Dawkins’s target audience. I’m reasonably intelligent, educated, and have a background in science and math. I tend to be analytical, critical, and skeptical about every other topic under the sun. I even believe in evolution. However, I do happen to know that God exists, for reasons that would not impress any other person, but that are more than sufficient for me. So, reading a book about how God doesn’t exist and how people should stop pretending that God exists is something like reading a proof that there is no sun. It’s not going to have the intended effect on me, so I can just sit back and judge the presentation on its other merits.
Dawkins’s stated goal of The God Delusion is to liberate people from the pernicious influence of religion, making it, in a sense, a self-help book. Why must people automatically choose the religion of their parents or their society? I totally agree that each person should explore and make the best choice they can, even if that leads them away from the footsteps of their parents. If this book helps people to think for themselves, great. The question is: does it?
He tends to presume what he hasn’t yet proven, starting on page one with phrases like “the vice of religion”. He also asserts many extremely abstract points, such as the complexity of God, without any remotely convincing reasons. Dawkins is also something of a bully. He sounds like the kind of demagogues you hear on Fox “News”, who know that if they yell loudly enough and use enough inflammatory language, they can browbeat the opposition into conceding their point, if indeed they have a point. Dawkins is very similar. Anyone who doesn’t share his beliefs is an evil ignoramus (I kid: he doesn’t use the word “ignoramus”; but he does use “inane”, “insane”, and “faith-head”). By contrast, anyone whose beliefs overlap his is wonderful, savvy, intelligent, and enlightened. Funny coincidence.
Dawkins may not worship god, but he does worship Thomas Jefferson (“farsighted” and “honorable”). He uses many, many Jefferson quotes throughout the book, although not the ones about “endowed by their Creator” and “I am a Christian”, for obvious reasons. I find Dawkins’s admiration of Jefferson hysterically funny, for a couple of reasons. First, Dawkins doesn't have one millionth of Jefferson’s political savvy. Jefferson, after all, not only wrote the Declaration of Independence, but he also induced 56 otherwise sensible men to sign the document, thereby risking their lives, families, and fortunes. By contrast, Dawkins, with his sneering and condescending style, doesn’t have a prayer of converting many to his cause (see what I did there?). Second, Jefferson, um, owned human beings and apparently raped at least one of them. Perhaps not quite the model rational atheist to hold up as an example.
The book is poorly organized. He has chapter headings, and even sub-headings, but these are only departure gates for his meandering expositions. He bounces from argument to argument like a ping pong ball in a tornado. Also, Dawkins is extremely repetitive, repetitiously repeating the same repetition over and over again. Even people who agree with evolution, like me, will tire of how frequently he brings up Darwin. Many times, I found myself thinking, “Yes, Richard, we get it. Next slide, please!”
He has a lot of fun making the details of various religions sound ridiculous, but this, of course, is as easy as shooting fish in a barrel. I learned long ago, and probably most readers have also learned, that it is very easy to make *anything* sound ridiculous, including birth, death, love, hate, honor, suffering, and the Boston Red Sox. I can do a pretty good five minute standup routine on the periodic table, Newton’s laws of motion, and the quark model of baryons, but that doesn’t make them not true. Still, Dawkins seems to have a good time calling people names.
He also enjoys setting up straw men and knocking them down again. For example, if he can’t find a real quotation to mock, he has no problem making up an outrageous statement and then mocking that. That method, at least, saves him the trouble of footnoting the quotation.
At several points, he misstates certain aspects of certain faiths. A reader can only conclude that either 1) Dawkins didn’t understand what he read, or 2) Dawkins didn’t actually read it, or 3) Dawkins misstated it deliberately just to make a point. I can’t decide which is the more charitable explanation.
He sometimes employs double standards. For example, he starts the book with a lyrical description of a young boy lying in the grass enthralled by the wonders of nature. Later, he spends 6 pages arguing that any person who has a personal experience of God is having a hallucination. How does Dawkins know that the enthralled boy wasn’t also having a hallucination? It certainly couldn’t be because the boy’s experience parallels Dawkins’s own, while the personal experience of God doesn’t, right? Oh, it’s because the boy’s experience is scientific and repeatable! Of course! *Any* person who lies in the grass becomes enthralled by the wonders of nature! And no personal experience of God has ever been repeated! Got it.
His reasoning, and even his science, is iffy. For instance, Dawkins seems to be under the impression that he has refuted Aquinas’s first three proofs of the existence of God, but he hasn’t. He has, however, demonstrated his own unfamiliarity with the nature of infinite regress. I’m aware of several plausible (although possibly not actual) refutations to Aquinas, but Dawkins doesn’t use any of them, possibly because they involve physics. He’s pretty shaky with physics, and makes a couple of jaw-dropping missteps when he strays away from biology. He presumes to know exactly when and *how* the universe was created, and also that any God must have been created after the universe was, which, logically, would make it impossible for God to have created the universe. He really should let physicists know that he’s solved this problem, so that they can stop pointlessly wasting their time trying to figure it out. In addition, he makes sweeping statements that have obvious counterexamples, which undercuts his case. For instance, at one point he says, “intelligent beings [meaning God] must be the product of an evolutionary process.” The obvious counterexample is artificial intelligence, which doesn’t speak to the God aspect of the argument, but does show that there is at least one counterexample, possibly more.
Let me save you a few hours of reading by summarizing his message, which has two basic points: first, there is no scientific evidence that God exists (oh, you knew that?), and second, some religious people are evil (oh, you knew that, too?). Not that he should provide equal time to the other side of the argument, but you won’t find anything in his book about all the hospitals, schools, orphanages, old age homes, soup kitchens, women’s shelters, counseling centers, and social welfare agencies that religious organizations have established in the past couple of millennia, including all the schools that Dawkins attended and the university that currently employs him.
In the midst of all this, Dawkins does make a few good points. For instance, he points out that when people make statements about their own religious practices that others find ridiculous, everyone just tiptoes around such statements without comment. Why is that? I know that some religious practices sound loony to me, and mine must certainly sound loony to others. But no one ever says, “Why on earth do you do that?” Why is that? But he doesn’t explore this at all. Also, his observation of appalling behavior in the Bible is absolutely true: I don’t know why some people regard those folks as role models. And Dawkins’s concern about children exposed to traumatic religious experiences is important: parents need to take better care. For instance, my kids never heard “Now I lay me down to sleep” from me. He is sometimes entertaining when he’s not being nasty. For instance, I really enjoyed his exposition of the anthropic principle.
Dawkins is sometimes astonishingly insensitive to the human condition. At one point, he says something to the effect of: what “why” questions could theology possibly answer that science could not? I’m sure that he means questions like “Why do electrons orbit a nucleus?” or “Why do camels have humps?” But if he would step out of the laboratory in the ivory tower for a few minutes, and spend some time in hospital waiting rooms, or soup kitchens, or unemployment lines, or cemeteries, he would hear plenty of questions like “Why did she have to die?” or “Why did he have to get sick?” or “Why can’t I feed my family?” or “Why am I alone in the world?” Good luck finding satisfying answers to those with science.
So, if religion is wrong, why is it so widespread? Dawkins shrewdly refuses to say, preferring to muse that it’s sorta kinda something like a by-product of the trusting gullibility of the child, or possibly a genetic predisposition, but maybe not exactly. By wisely declining to spell out his ideas, Dawkins avoids the kind of withering criticism that he directs at religions, which, after all, foolishly spell out their beliefs in great detail for all the world to see. This is intellectual cowardice of a high order.
The last chapter is a mess, as if he threw a general science book in a blender and hit Frappe. He seems to be trying to set up science as a viable substitute for religion, but I think that’s a tactical mistake on his part. Most people don’t like science, and if he’s forcing them into an either-or decision, he may find that not many choose atheism. I think that he would do better to offer people a science-lite version of atheism, but he may be too much an elitist to go that far.
Boy, do I miss Carl Sagan.
Recommendation: Read *anything* by Sagan. If you find that you need venomous language, fuzzy thinking, and a narrative that jumps around like a kangaroo on a pogo stick, then by all means read The God Delusion. Dawkins makes a good blunt rock to sharpen your mind against.
PS
For the past five years or so, I’ve been reading a daily thought-for-the-day kind of thing. During the couple of weeks that I was reading The God Delusion, I happened to read an entry that started, “Recently, I listened to an audiobook by a militant advocate for atheism. As the author himself read his own work with spiteful sarcasm and contempt, it made me wonder why he was so angry.” Dawkins would call my reading this passage at the same time that I was reading his book pure coincidence, even though I’ve probably read a couple of thousand of these daily things previously, and don’t ever recall one about this topic. I, being an ignoramus, have a different explanation.
Boy, do I miss Carl Sagan. In the good old days, if I wanted to read scathing indictments of religion, closely reasoned arguments against the existence of God, and a boost to atheism generally, all I had to do was reach out and read Sagan’s latest book. I was guaranteed to find fascinating insights, clever analysis, and impressive reasoning, all in his elegant and memorable style. Plus, the bonus of Sagan himself as a courtly and genial host. Now, all we have is Richard Dawkins and, believe me, it just ain’t the same.
In reading The God Delusion, I find myself in a peculiar position. I am unquestionably Dawkins’s target audience. I’m reasonably intelligent, educated, and have a background in science and math. I tend to be analytical, critical, and skeptical about every other topic under the sun. I even believe in evolution. However, I do happen to know that God exists, for reasons that would not impress any other person, but that are more than sufficient for me. So, reading a book about how God doesn’t exist and how people should stop pretending that God exists is something like reading a proof that there is no sun. It’s not going to have the intended effect on me, so I can just sit back and judge the presentation on its other merits.
Dawkins’s stated goal of The God Delusion is to liberate people from the pernicious influence of religion, making it, in a sense, a self-help book. Why must people automatically choose the religion of their parents or their society? I totally agree that each person should explore and make the best choice they can, even if that leads them away from the footsteps of their parents. If this book helps people to think for themselves, great. The question is: does it?
He tends to presume what he hasn’t yet proven, starting on page one with phrases like “the vice of religion”. He also asserts many extremely abstract points, such as the complexity of God, without any remotely convincing reasons. Dawkins is also something of a bully. He sounds like the kind of demagogues you hear on Fox “News”, who know that if they yell loudly enough and use enough inflammatory language, they can browbeat the opposition into conceding their point, if indeed they have a point. Dawkins is very similar. Anyone who doesn’t share his beliefs is an evil ignoramus (I kid: he doesn’t use the word “ignoramus”; but he does use “inane”, “insane”, and “faith-head”). By contrast, anyone whose beliefs overlap his is wonderful, savvy, intelligent, and enlightened. Funny coincidence.
Dawkins may not worship god, but he does worship Thomas Jefferson (“farsighted” and “honorable”). He uses many, many Jefferson quotes throughout the book, although not the ones about “endowed by their Creator” and “I am a Christian”, for obvious reasons. I find Dawkins’s admiration of Jefferson hysterically funny, for a couple of reasons. First, Dawkins doesn't have one millionth of Jefferson’s political savvy. Jefferson, after all, not only wrote the Declaration of Independence, but he also induced 56 otherwise sensible men to sign the document, thereby risking their lives, families, and fortunes. By contrast, Dawkins, with his sneering and condescending style, doesn’t have a prayer of converting many to his cause (see what I did there?). Second, Jefferson, um, owned human beings and apparently raped at least one of them. Perhaps not quite the model rational atheist to hold up as an example.
The book is poorly organized. He has chapter headings, and even sub-headings, but these are only departure gates for his meandering expositions. He bounces from argument to argument like a ping pong ball in a tornado. Also, Dawkins is extremely repetitive, repetitiously repeating the same repetition over and over again. Even people who agree with evolution, like me, will tire of how frequently he brings up Darwin. Many times, I found myself thinking, “Yes, Richard, we get it. Next slide, please!”
He has a lot of fun making the details of various religions sound ridiculous, but this, of course, is as easy as shooting fish in a barrel. I learned long ago, and probably most readers have also learned, that it is very easy to make *anything* sound ridiculous, including birth, death, love, hate, honor, suffering, and the Boston Red Sox. I can do a pretty good five minute standup routine on the periodic table, Newton’s laws of motion, and the quark model of baryons, but that doesn’t make them not true. Still, Dawkins seems to have a good time calling people names.
He also enjoys setting up straw men and knocking them down again. For example, if he can’t find a real quotation to mock, he has no problem making up an outrageous statement and then mocking that. That method, at least, saves him the trouble of footnoting the quotation.
At several points, he misstates certain aspects of certain faiths. A reader can only conclude that either 1) Dawkins didn’t understand what he read, or 2) Dawkins didn’t actually read it, or 3) Dawkins misstated it deliberately just to make a point. I can’t decide which is the more charitable explanation.
He sometimes employs double standards. For example, he starts the book with a lyrical description of a young boy lying in the grass enthralled by the wonders of nature. Later, he spends 6 pages arguing that any person who has a personal experience of God is having a hallucination. How does Dawkins know that the enthralled boy wasn’t also having a hallucination? It certainly couldn’t be because the boy’s experience parallels Dawkins’s own, while the personal experience of God doesn’t, right? Oh, it’s because the boy’s experience is scientific and repeatable! Of course! *Any* person who lies in the grass becomes enthralled by the wonders of nature! And no personal experience of God has ever been repeated! Got it.
His reasoning, and even his science, is iffy. For instance, Dawkins seems to be under the impression that he has refuted Aquinas’s first three proofs of the existence of God, but he hasn’t. He has, however, demonstrated his own unfamiliarity with the nature of infinite regress. I’m aware of several plausible (although possibly not actual) refutations to Aquinas, but Dawkins doesn’t use any of them, possibly because they involve physics. He’s pretty shaky with physics, and makes a couple of jaw-dropping missteps when he strays away from biology. He presumes to know exactly when and *how* the universe was created, and also that any God must have been created after the universe was, which, logically, would make it impossible for God to have created the universe. He really should let physicists know that he’s solved this problem, so that they can stop pointlessly wasting their time trying to figure it out. In addition, he makes sweeping statements that have obvious counterexamples, which undercuts his case. For instance, at one point he says, “intelligent beings [meaning God] must be the product of an evolutionary process.” The obvious counterexample is artificial intelligence, which doesn’t speak to the God aspect of the argument, but does show that there is at least one counterexample, possibly more.
Let me save you a few hours of reading by summarizing his message, which has two basic points: first, there is no scientific evidence that God exists (oh, you knew that?), and second, some religious people are evil (oh, you knew that, too?). Not that he should provide equal time to the other side of the argument, but you won’t find anything in his book about all the hospitals, schools, orphanages, old age homes, soup kitchens, women’s shelters, counseling centers, and social welfare agencies that religious organizations have established in the past couple of millennia, including all the schools that Dawkins attended and the university that currently employs him.
In the midst of all this, Dawkins does make a few good points. For instance, he points out that when people make statements about their own religious practices that others find ridiculous, everyone just tiptoes around such statements without comment. Why is that? I know that some religious practices sound loony to me, and mine must certainly sound loony to others. But no one ever says, “Why on earth do you do that?” Why is that? But he doesn’t explore this at all. Also, his observation of appalling behavior in the Bible is absolutely true: I don’t know why some people regard those folks as role models. And Dawkins’s concern about children exposed to traumatic religious experiences is important: parents need to take better care. For instance, my kids never heard “Now I lay me down to sleep” from me. He is sometimes entertaining when he’s not being nasty. For instance, I really enjoyed his exposition of the anthropic principle.
Dawkins is sometimes astonishingly insensitive to the human condition. At one point, he says something to the effect of: what “why” questions could theology possibly answer that science could not? I’m sure that he means questions like “Why do electrons orbit a nucleus?” or “Why do camels have humps?” But if he would step out of the laboratory in the ivory tower for a few minutes, and spend some time in hospital waiting rooms, or soup kitchens, or unemployment lines, or cemeteries, he would hear plenty of questions like “Why did she have to die?” or “Why did he have to get sick?” or “Why can’t I feed my family?” or “Why am I alone in the world?” Good luck finding satisfying answers to those with science.
So, if religion is wrong, why is it so widespread? Dawkins shrewdly refuses to say, preferring to muse that it’s sorta kinda something like a by-product of the trusting gullibility of the child, or possibly a genetic predisposition, but maybe not exactly. By wisely declining to spell out his ideas, Dawkins avoids the kind of withering criticism that he directs at religions, which, after all, foolishly spell out their beliefs in great detail for all the world to see. This is intellectual cowardice of a high order.
The last chapter is a mess, as if he threw a general science book in a blender and hit Frappe. He seems to be trying to set up science as a viable substitute for religion, but I think that’s a tactical mistake on his part. Most people don’t like science, and if he’s forcing them into an either-or decision, he may find that not many choose atheism. I think that he would do better to offer people a science-lite version of atheism, but he may be too much an elitist to go that far.
Boy, do I miss Carl Sagan.
Recommendation: Read *anything* by Sagan. If you find that you need venomous language, fuzzy thinking, and a narrative that jumps around like a kangaroo on a pogo stick, then by all means read The God Delusion. Dawkins makes a good blunt rock to sharpen your mind against.
PS
For the past five years or so, I’ve been reading a daily thought-for-the-day kind of thing. During the couple of weeks that I was reading The God Delusion, I happened to read an entry that started, “Recently, I listened to an audiobook by a militant advocate for atheism. As the author himself read his own work with spiteful sarcasm and contempt, it made me wonder why he was so angry.” Dawkins would call my reading this passage at the same time that I was reading his book pure coincidence, even though I’ve probably read a couple of thousand of these daily things previously, and don’t ever recall one about this topic. I, being an ignoramus, have a different explanation.
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