The God Delusion

This is another one that I'll need to re-listen to in order to give a proper review. I had a print copy of this book once that I sold back to the Book Barn in Niantic, thinking that I would never get around to reading it—I was looking for a print copy of The Selfish Gene when I first bought it.

I remembered that I used an Audible credit on this and decided to listen to it on a whim. It always nice that Lalla Ward helped in narrating the audiobooks—Selfish Gene was an example of that—and The God Delusion was no different. It went from an audiobook to fall asleep with to one that I spent some of my waking hours trying to understand where Dawkins was coming from.

The review may change once I do a second listen...or read—I might try to hunt down a print copy again, possibly the same one I sold back.

What I can say was this: Dawkins's God Delusion does what it says on the tin, or rather, what he emphasizes in the beginning—to try and make a case for Universal Atheism by focusing on the wrongs of religion en masse.

There are some interesting passageways about his concerns regarding the study of theology in academia and its interaction with the sciences. However, as I mentioned, I need to give this another go before I can give a proper opinion on the book.

Richard Dawkins is an insufferable ass. I mean that wholly as an ad hominem attack; it has no bearing on the quality of his arguments. He secretes a superlatively patronizing tone that only the snootiest of Brits can attain, and he fully admits his abhorrence of the people that he claims to want to convert to his beliefs. As such, it's hard enough to read a book like The God Delusion without being distracted by all the snide parentheticals. Listening to it, as I did, is even more difficult because you get to hear every condescending inflection the way he intended it.

Moving past the tone and style of the book, however, I have to admit that I agree with many points Dawkins makes. In large part, he lays out his arguments rationally, coming to many of the same conclusions I have come to myself. He debunks a lot of illogical, contradictory and downright asinine ideas held by many religious people, and generally shows the unreasonability of belief in a supernatural being (or set of beings) that actively participates in the events of the world. Taken as a whole, I have to say that I agree with about 75% of what Dawkins says.

But there is at least one very big thing that he does not address, and a few conclusions that I think he simply gets wrong, particularly with regard to ethics. I will outline these counterpoints below.

NOTE: As Dawkins includes many definitions and manifestations of supernatural beings in the word "God" I will use the same convention when I refer to "Dawkins," by which I mean all atheists who essentially agree with him. I think he would be amused by this juxtaposition.

Preferring reason because it is reasonable is a tautology.

Dawkins' use of reason is aptly summed by a line Benjamin Franklin penned in his autobiography: "So convenient a thing is it to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do."

Perhaps the simplest argument against Dawkins' viewpoint is the axiomatic nature of reason. One cannot prove, without using reason, that reason is better or more useful or more valid than unreason. (Although, one can find evidence that sometimes irrationality is reasonable--that's a paradox for another essay, though.) A preference for reason is, therefore, no different than a preference for unreason. The very act of arguing for reason requires one to accept reason as an a priori virtue.

Furthermore, Dawkins' reverence for Reason (with a big R), almost as though it were a divine entity in its own right, seems a bit strange in light of his constant jibes at those who believe in God. He tends to overlook the limitations of reason as a human construct, which include imperfect and incomplete knowledge, differences in reasoning capacity between people, and the equal (or near-equal) validity of differing conclusions based on the same evidence. These limitations may not be enough to parry his attacks against religion, but his failure to address them sufficiently puts him in the same category of disingenuous debaters that he riles against.

Please, please, PLEASE do not take the above paragraphs to mean that I do not value reason, or that I believe unreason is better or more valid or more useful than reason. I agree with Dawkins that reason is a virtue. But I also admit that my preference for reason rather than unreason is exactly that--a preference--not a universal truth that must, or even should, be followed by all.

His biblical examples are lacking.

Dawkins uses several examples to show that people pick and choose the parts of the Bible that they want to believe. I agree with him here, but I take issue with a couple of stories he chooses as examples. In several instances, he uses a formulaic argument against each story, saying something to the effect: "Look at how utterly immoral these people acted, and yet we are supposed to believe that they are God's chosen people." Then, he says that Jews and Christians are either ignorant because they don't know about these stories, or worse, they are inconsistent and hypocritical because they choose to overlook them.

In the specific stories of Lot in Sodom and his subsequent incest (Genesis 19) and the Levite at Gibeah (Judges 19), the only thing Dawkins proves is that biblical exegesis skills are weak. I find it interesting that he rails against the ignorance and prejudice of religious people, but then exhibits the same ignorance and prejudice when it comes to exposition of some passages in the Bible. Essentially, in each of these particular stories, I disagree that the actions taken by the main characters are meant to be examples of how people should act. Dawkins conveniently ignores certain portions of the text, instead putting forth the actions of Lot and the Levite as being sanctioned by God. (In Lot's particular case, the incest is the genesis of later Israel's two most hated enemies, the Moabites and Ammonites, which is perhaps the strongest symbolic, if not literal, damnation of the act of incest in any religious or literary work that I have ever seen.)

As I stated above, I agree with Dawkins' premise that people choose which parts of the Bible (and religious texts in general) that they follow. But his own choice of some stories to illustrate his point seems strange at best and deceptive at worst. Removing these examples from his book would not negate the larger argument he is making--which makes me wonder why he put them in to begin with.

Arguments against the first mover.

The first mover "proof" of God, first posited by Thomas Aquinas, goes something like: Every effect has a prior cause, but at some point there must have been a first cause, which we call God. (Aquinas actually makes three arguments which are basically variations on the same theme.) Dawkins, however, says that even if there is such an initiator, there is no reason to call it "God" or to imbibe it with supernatural powers, such as omniscience, omnipresence and/or omnipotence. After going on a diatribe about the incompatibility of omniscience and omnipotence, he remembers that he is making an argument against the first mover, and says that we might as well call it the big bang instead of God.

His longer argument seems to boil down to the declaration that such a first mover, if indeed there is one, is necessarily simple. Oddly, his reasoning is rather Aquinian: Since things tend to become more complex as they evolve, any first mover must have been very, very simple--much more simple than the monotheistic God of the Jews, Christians and Muslims possibly could be. Dawkins rules out any complex being's existence simply by reason that such a being would not be a first mover--there would have been something even simpler before it, which would mean that "God" was not actually God, but a product of his own evolutionary sequence (begging the question as to whether God's evolutionary sequence could have had an initiator). Dawkins' argument is largely a straw man: Aquinas never attempts to prove God's attributes with the first mover argument, simply that a first mover exists. Aquinas uses other arguments to "prove" the various attributes of God, but Dawkins never acknowledges those additional arguments, let alone addresses them.

Secondarily, Dawkins' assertion that God would have developed from a similar evolutionary process as those established on Earth is merely conjecture based on observations of the universe as it is now. But if God created the universe, why would the current rules apply to him? Also, as Dawkins discusses near the very end of the book, our knowledge of the world is based on how we experience things through our various senses. Very small animals experience the effects of surface tension and Brownian motion much differently than we do, and so on. Projecting that same idea to God, why would something that seems complex to us not seem simple to him?

(Due to length restrictions, the rest of this review is provided in comments.)

Despite the fact that while I read this book I was ranting and raving to my wife and anyone else who listened, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I do not always agree with Dawkins, though I agreed with him much more than I expected to. There has been quite a bit of discussion around this book. Many of the claims that I've read or heard about this book have turned out to be wrong. There have been misrepresentations from all sides.

Dawkins is, not surprisingly, at his best when he's explaining difficult scientific concepts. Unfortunately, the bulk of this book is not Dawkins at his best. Some of the arguments put forward in the book are supported by a rickety foundation of carefully selected examples. Others are simple rhetorical tricks. Still others seem so blisteringly obvious that one wonders why Dawkins bothered. Some of the arguments, though, are splendidly put together and are genuinely engaging.

One of the measures of a good book is the extent to which it captures your imagination. Fiction or non-fiction, the books that I want to read are the books that I think about constantly. Though it can be hit and miss, this is certainly one of those books.