Book Reviews - Non Fiction

[c4ramesh]

I first came to know about Richard Dawkins through the TV documentary titled “The Root of All Evil?” - written and presented by himself. The documentary is about how the world would be a better place to live in without religion. The documentary was to the point and was reflective of my thoughts. When “The God Delusion” was released, I had a lot of expectations, even though I haven’t read “The selfish Gene” said to be one of his all time masterpieces. “The God Delusion” did live up to the expectations.

Richard Dawkins enthralls us with science, and logic presented in an elegant manner which keeps you turning from one page to another.

He correctly points out that God doesn’t in fact explain our existence. On the contrary God who is brought on to explain our existence would in turn need an explanation:

Creationist ‘logic’ is always the same. Some natural phenomenon is too statistically improbable, too complex, too beautiful, too aweinspiring to have come into existence by chance. Design is the only alternative to chance that the authors can imagine. Therefore a designer must have done it. …..Indeed, design is not a real alternative at all because it raises an even bigger problem than it solves: who designed the designer? Chance and design both fail as solutions to the problem of statistical improbability, because one of them is the problem, and the other one regresses to it.

God, in fact creates a problem of infinite regress, of which God can’t be given a unique exception. Even if such a luxury is given, it doesn’t quite seem to solve the problem as to why such a cause which is uncaused really needs to be God with the attributes of “omnipotence, omniscience, goodness, creativity of design, to say nothing of such human attributes as listening to prayers, forgiving sins and reading”?

In fact the attributes themselves seem to be self-contradicting, If God is omniscient, he must already know how he is going to intervene to change the course of history using his omnipotence. But that means he can’t change his mind about his intervention, which means he is not omnipotent!

Though Dawkins agrees that God can’t be disproved [but can reduce his likelihood to a near statistical zero], finds the exercise as mere shifting of burden of proof on the part of a theist. To ask a disproof of an illusion or delusion or whatever, and ones failure to do so doesn’t innately prove the same. Bertrand Russell’s parable of the celestial teapot is an apt analogue which serves to get the point across to theists.

Dawkins also takes a swipe at NOMA and in fact does it very well. The existence of God should be a testable statement which either results in a true or false answer.

His theory of how religion which is supposedly trash could have survived the process of natural selection whose job is to throw out waste! & the “meme” theory of ferociously replicating “selfish-genes” in the social pool is really interesting.

His critique of the proof for God is sufficient and this leads us to the common theistic argument that without God there would be no morality, this too is also well handled.

He successfully shows that we don’t derive our morality from religious books and our source of morality is something else. Now what is this something else? Unfortunately we hear very little about this from Dawkins. He suggests that it is not his job to find out and it is enough for him to show that our morality doesn’t hinge on the existence of God, job done!

Dawkins is at his elegant best when he talks of science, his examples of the “moth in the candle flame”, and the subsection titled “The mother of all burkas” are riveting stuff. I still want more…

In “The mother of all burkas”, Dawkins explicates to us as how small our world view is and we need to uncover such a lot of knowledge hidden from obviousness. I felt a veiled plea as to not quench the quest for this knowledge and not to fill gaps with God.

Penn & Teller had this to say on the book “The God Delusion is smart, compassionate, and true … If this book doesn’t change the world, we’re all screwed.” But I don’t think even for a moment the book will change the world for a simple fact, the message of “The God Delusion” isn’t forced on people as rule or even for the purpose of testing its validity, as religion is. May be we are all screwed for the moment. But “The God delusion” is one of the important milestones en route to make us free of this delusion.

Verdict: A must read!

Table of Contents:

Preface 1

1 A DEEPLY RELIGIOUS NON-BELIEVER 9
Deserved respect 11
Undeserved respect 20

2 THE GOD HYPOTHESIS 29
Polytheism 32
Monotheism 37
Secularism, the Founding Fathers and the religion of America 38
The poverty of agnosticism 46
NOMA 54
The Great Prayer Experiment 61
The Neville Chamberlain school of evolutionists 66
Little green men 69

3 ARGUMENTS FOR GOD’S EXISTENCE 75
Thomas Aquinas’ ‘proofs’ 77
The ontological argument and other a priori arguments 80
The argument from beauty 86
The argument from personal ‘experience’ 87
The argument from scripture 92
The argument from admired religious scientists 97
Pascal’s Wager 103
Bayesian arguments 105

4 WHY THERE ALMOST CERTAINLY IS NO GOD 111
The Ultimate Boeing 747 113
Natural selection as a consciousness-raiser 114
Irreducible complexity 119
The worship of gaps 125
The anthropic principle: planetary version 134
The anthropic principle: cosmological version 141
An interlude at Cambridge 151

5 THE ROOTS OF RELIGION 161
The Darwinian imperative 163
Direct advantages of religion 166
Group selection 169
Religion as a by-product of something else 172
Psychologically primed for religion 179
Tread softly, because you tread on my memes 191
Cargo cults 202

6 THE ROOTS OF MORALITY: WHY ARE WE GOOD? 209
Does our moral sense have a Darwinian origin? 214
A case study in the roots of morality 222
If there is no God, why be good? 226

7 THE ‘GOOD’ BOOK AND THE CHANGING MORAL ZEITGEIST 235
The Old Testament 237
Is the New Testament any better? 250
Love thy neighbour 254
The moral Zeitgeist 262
What about Hitler and Stalin? Weren’t they atheists? 272

8 WHAT’S WRONG WITH RELIGION? WHY BE SO HOSTILE? 279
Fundamentalism and the subversion of science 282
The dark side of absolutism 286
Faith and homosexuality 289
Faith and the sanctity of human life 291
The Great Beethoven Fallacy 298
How ‘moderation’ in faith fosters fanaticism 301

9 CHILDHOOD, ABUSE AND THE ESCAPE FROM RELIGION 309
Physical and mental abuse 315
In defence of children 325
An educational scandal 331
Consciousness-raising again 337
Religious education as a part of literary culture 340

10 A MUCH NEEDED GAP? 345
Binker 347
Consolation 352
Inspiration 360
The mother of all burkas 362

Appendix
A partial list of friendly addresses, for individuals needing support in escaping
from religion 375
Books cited or recommended 380
Notes 388
Index 400

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