The antireligion wars started by Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris will heat up even more with this salvo from celebrated Oxford biologist Dawkins. For a scientist who criticizes religion for its intolerance, Dawkins has written a surprisingly intolerant book, full of scorn for religion and those who believe. But Dawkins, who gave us the selfish gene, anticipates this criticism. He says it's the scientist and humanist in him that makes him hostile to religions—fundamentalist Christianity and Islam come in for the most opprobrium—that close people's minds to scientific truth, oppress women and abuse children psychologically with the notion of eternal damnation. While Dawkins can be witty, even confirmed atheists who agree with his advocacy of science and vigorous rationalism may have trouble stomaching some of the rhetoric: the biblical Yahweh is "psychotic," Aquinas's proofs of God's existence are "fatuous" and religion generally is "nonsense." The most effective chapters are those in which Dawkins calms down, for instance, drawing on evolution to disprove the ideas behind intelligent design. In other chapters, he attempts to construct a scientific scaffolding for atheism, such as using evolution again to rebut the notion that without God there can be no morality. He insists that religion is a divisive and oppressive force, but he is less convincing in arguing that the world would be better and more peaceful without it. (Oct. 18)
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From Scientific American
Richard Dawkins, in The God Delusion, tells of his exasperation with colleagues who try to play both sides of the street: looking to science for justification of their religious convictions while evading the most difficult implications—the existence of a prime mover sophisticated enough to create and run the universe, "to say nothing of mind reading millions of humans simultaneously." Such an entity, he argues, would have to be extremely complex, raising the question of how it came into existence, how it communicates —through spiritons!—and where it resides. Dawkins is frequently dismissed as a bully, but he is only putting theological doctrines to the same kind of scrutiny that any scientific theory must withstand. No one who has witnessed the merciless dissection of a new paper in physics would describe the atmosphere as overly polite.
George Johnson is author of Fire in the Mind: Science, Faith, and the Search for Order and six other books. He resides on the Web at talaya.net
From Bookmarks Magazine
Richard Dawkins's latest book raises the question of style over substance. As in his well-known books The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, and River Out of Eden, the renowned evolutionary biologist has done his homework, and argues with precision and a fair glaze of wit. But Dawkins can't restrain his vitriol for those that have put their faith in religion, to the point that he comes off as rabid as those believers whose eyes he yearns to open. This fatal flaw knocks his book down a rung or two for critics, many of whom seem inclined to believe in Dawkins, if only he weren't so preachy.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
From AudioFile
An evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins sees religion as a human construct that is the source of much of the evil in the world, closing people's minds to scientific truths, oppressing women, and threatening people with eternal damnation. As "Darwin's rottweiller," he sets out to annihilate faith. His book-length essay is a bestseller. Since he is human, though, his own understanding of the universe, though devilishly complex, must be based on a hypothesis, a hunch, on faith. Dawkins and his wife, the actress Lalla Ward, perform this book as melody and harmony in two voices. For example, Dawkins will set up a quotation from Einstein, and Ward will speak the lines. Since both have fine English voices, the performance would succeed as music even if it weren't an intellectual tour de force. B.H.C. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine
--This text refers to the
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Review
"At last, one of the best nonfiction writers alive today has assembled his thoughts on religion into a characteristically elegant book." --Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor, Harvard University, author of The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, and The Blank Slate
"A resounding trumpet blast for truth . . . It feels like coming up for air." --Matt Ridley, author of Genome and Francis Crick
"Dawkins gives human sympathies and emotions their proper value, which...lends his criticisms of religion such force." --Philip Pullman, author of His Dark Materials trilogy
"This is a brave and important book." --Desmond Morris, author of The Naked Ape and The Human Animal
"Richard Dawkins is the leading soothsayer of our time. . . . The God Delusion continues his thought-provoking tradition." --J. Craig Venter, decoder of the human genome
"The God Delusion is smart, compassionate, and true . . . If this book doesn't change the world, we're all screwed." --Penn & Teller
"The world needs . . . passionate rationalists . . . Richard Dawkins so stands out through the cutting intelligence of The God Delusion." --James D. Watson, co-discoverer of DNA, author of The Double Helix
Product Description
A preeminent scientist -- and the world's most prominent atheist -- asserts the irrationality of belief in God and the grievous harm religion has inflicted on society, from the Crusades to 9/11.
With rigor and wit, Dawkins examines God in all his forms, from the sex-obsessed tyrant of the Old Testament to the more benign (but still illogical) Celestial Watchmaker favored by some Enlightenment thinkers. He eviscerates the major arguments for religion and demonstrates the supreme improbability of a supreme being. He shows how religion fuels war, foments bigotry, and abuses children, buttressing his points with historical and contemporary evidence. The God Delusion makes a compelling case that belief in God is not just wrong but potentially deadly. It also offers exhilarating insight into the advantages of atheism to the individual and society, not the least of which is a clearer, truer appreciation of the universe's wonders than any faith could ever muster.
About the Author
Richard Dawkins taught zoology at the University of California at Berkeley and at Oxford University and is now the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, a position he has held since 1995. Among his previous books are The Ancestor's Tale, The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, Climbing Mount Improbable, Unweaving the Rainbow, and A Devil's Chaplain. Dawkins lives in Oxford with his wife, the actress and artist Lalla Ward.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1 A DEEPLY RELIGIOUS NON-BELIEVER
I don't try to imagine a personal God; it suffices to stand in awe at the
structure of the world, insofar as it allows our inadequate senses to
appreciate it.
—Albert Einstein
DESERVED RESPECT
The boy lay prone in the grass, his chin resting on his hands. He suddenly
found himself overwhelmed by a heightened awareness of the tangled stems
and roots, a forest in microcosm, a transfigured world of ants and beetles and
even – though he wouldn't have known the details at the time – of soil
bacteria by the billions, silently and invisibly shoring up the economy of the
micro-world. Suddenly the micro-forest of the turf seemed to swell and
become one with the universe, and with the rapt mind of the boy
contemplating it. He interpreted the experience in religious terms and it led
him eventually to the priesthood. He was ordained an Anglican priest and
became a chaplain at my school, a teacher of whom I was fond. It is thanks
to decent liberal clergymen like him that nobody could ever claim that I had
religion forced down my throat.*
In another time and place, that boy could have been me under the
stars, dazzled by Orion, Cassiopeia and Ursa Major, tearful with the unheard
music of the Milky Way, heady with the night scents of frangipani and
trumpet flowers in an African garden. Why the same emotion should have led
my chaplain in one direction and me in the other is not an easy question to
answer. A quasi-mystical response to nature and the universe is common
among scientists and rationalists. It has no connection with supernatural
belief. In his boyhood at least, my chaplain was presumably not aware (nor
was I) of the closing lines of The Origin of Species – the famous 'entangled
bank' passage, 'with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting
about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth'. Had he been, he
would certainly have identified with it and, instead of the priesthood, might
have been led to Darwin's view that all was 'produced by laws acting around
us':
Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object
which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher
animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several
powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that,
whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity,
from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful
have been, and are being, evolved.
Carl Sagan, in Pale Blue Dot, wrote:
How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and
concluded, 'This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than
our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant'? Instead they
say, 'No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.' A
religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as
revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence
and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.
All Sagan's books touch the nerve-endings of transcendent wonder that
religion monopolized in past centuries. My own books have the same
aspiration. Consequently I hear myself often described as a deeply religious
man. An American student wrote to me that she had asked her professor
whether he had a view about me. 'Sure,' he replied. 'He's positive science is
incompatible with religion, but he waxes ecstatic about nature and the
universe. To me, that is religion!' But is 'religion' the right word? I don't think
so. The Nobel Prize-winning physicist (and atheist) Steven Weinberg made
the point as well as anybody, in Dreams of a Final Theory:
Some people have views of God that are so broad and flexible that it is
inevitable that they will find God wherever they look for him. One hears it said
that 'God is the ultimate' or 'God is our better nature' or 'God is the universe.'
Of course, like any other word, the word 'God' can be given any meaning we
like. If you want to say that 'God is energy,' then you can find God in a lump
of coal.
Weinberg is surely right that, if the word God is not to become completely
useless, it should be used in the way people have generally understood it: to
denote a supernatural creator that is 'appropriate for us to worship'.
Much unfortunate confusion is caused by failure to distinguish
what can be called Einsteinian religion from supernatural religion. Einstein
sometimes invoked the name of God (and he is not the only atheistic
scientist to do so), inviting misunderstanding by supernaturalists eager to
misunderstand and claim so illustrious a thinker as their own. The dramatic
(or was it mischievous?) ending of Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of
Time, 'For then we should know the mind of God', is notoriously
misconstrued. It has led people to believe, mistakenly of course, that
Hawking is a religious man. The cell biologist Ursula Goodenough, in The
Sacred Depths of Nature, sounds more religious than Hawking or Einstein.
She loves churches, mosques and temples, and numerous passages in her
book fairly beg to be taken out of context and used as ammunition for
supernatural religion. She goes so far as to call herself a 'Religious
Naturalist'. Yet a careful reading of her book shows that she is really as
staunch an atheist as I am.
'Naturalist' is an ambiguous word. For me it conjures my
childhood hero, Hugh Lofting's Doctor Dolittle (who, by the way, had more
than a touch of the 'philosopher' naturalist of HMS Beagle about him). In the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, naturalist meant what it still means for
most of us today: a student of the natural world. Naturalists in this sense,
from Gilbert White on, have often been clergymen. Darwin himself was
destined for the Church as a young man, hoping that the leisurely life of a
country parson would enable him to pursue his passion for beetles. But
philosophers use 'naturalist' in a very different sense, as the opposite of
supernaturalist. Julian Baggini explains in Atheism: A Very Short Introduction
the meaning of an atheist's commitment to naturalism: 'What most atheists
do believe is that although there is only one kind of stuff in the universe and it
is physical, out of this stuff come minds, beauty, emotions, moral values – in
short the full gamut of phenomena that gives richness to human life.'
Human thoughts and emotions emerge from exceedingly complex
interconnections of physical entities within the brain. An atheist in this sense
of philosophical naturalist is somebody who believes there is nothing beyond
the natural, physical world, no supernatural creative intelligence lurking
behind the observable universe, no soul that outlasts the body and no
miracles – except in the sense of natural phenomena that we don't yet
understand. If there is something that appears to lie beyond the natural world
as it is now imperfectly understood, we hope eventually to understand it and
embrace it within the natural. As ever when we unweave a rainbow, it will not
become less wonderful.
Great scientists of our time who sound religious usually turn out
not to be so when you examine their beliefs more deeply. This is certainly
true of Einstein and Hawking. The present Astronomer Royal and President
of the Royal Society, Martin Rees, told me that he goes to church as
an 'unbelieving Anglican . . . out of loyalty to the tribe'. He has no theistic
beliefs, but shares the poetic naturalism that the cosmos provokes in the
other scientists I have mentioned. In the course of a recently televised
conversation, I challenged my friend the obstetrician Robert Winston, a
respected pillar of British Jewry, to admit that his Judaism was of exactly this
character and that he didn't really believe in anything supernatural. He came
close to admitting it but shied at the last fence (to be fair, he was supposed
to be interviewing me, not the other way around).3 When I pressed him, he
said he found that Judaism provided a good discipline to help him structure
his life and lead a good one. Perhaps it does; but that, of course, has not the
smallest bearing on the truth value of any of its supernatural claims. There
are many intellectual atheists who proudly call themselves Jews and observe
Jewish rites, perhaps out of loyalty to an ancient tradition or to murdered
relatives, but also because of a confused and confusing willingness to label
as 'religion' the pantheistic reverence which many of us share with its most
distinguished exponent, Albert Einstein. They may not believe but, to borrow
Dan Dennett's phrase, they 'believe in belief'.4
One of Einstein's most eagerly quoted remarks is 'Science
without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.' But Einstein also
said,
It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie
which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God
and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in
me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the
structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.
Does it seem that Einstein contradicted himself? That his words
can be cherry-picked for quotes to support both sides of an argument? No.
By 'religion' Einstein meant something entirely differe...
