There's an inherent problem with this book: Dawkins lays claims (and, given his career, rightfully so) to the height of scientific principles, those of rationality, empirical evidence, and objectivity. The third component of that holy triumverate presents Dawkins's first problem. Dispassionate objectivity is the claimed essence of "science" at large, but many people will tell you what a false claim this is, that science, being a human endeavor, is subject to the same cultural and emotional biases that all constructs operating within a social sphere feature. I agree with this claim and point out that Dawkins himself provides evidence here - the anti-religious sentiment that drives the writing of this book is clear, and he makes no effort to hide it. For something that is supposed to be an objective look into the possibility of the existence of God, this work contains a slew of derogatory commentary aimed towards theologians, religious leaders, and the general religious public. The text is riddled with ad hominem arguments and repeatedly engages in semantic games (labeling reli as "abuse" and "evolutionary misfirings," etc.) that attempt to put religion, outside of whatever rational or irrational bases it may have, in a negative light. This is not to say that Dawkins's motivation for such attacks is not well-intended. I do believe that on a fundamental level, he finds religion to be a threat to secular society and perceives these dangers as real and worthy of combat. But the pretense that he is Captain Rational-Objective come to save the day is just that, a pretense, and his claim to "pure science" is a dubious one.
I also found his attempts to bring religion into the secular sphere to be disingenuous in tone if not in actual content. The introduction of the book contains an extended riff of, essentially, "I don't understand why religion gets such a protected, exalted status within our culture. Everything else is subject to criticism; what makes religion so special?" I would never claim that religion should not be subject to criticism. I would also not, however, pretend that I don't understand why its defenders are so ardent in their efforts to keep it out of the realm of the questionable. "Religion" - and I have an entire other set of thoughts about the lunacy of reducing all of history's spiritual beliefs to this uberlump category - is, by nature, a set of statements about the end-all be all, the highest of human concerns and stuff of the utmost import. Its tenets are de facto a tautological statement on what it is to be holy. People's SOULS are at stake, for all of eternity. When such a construct is in place and believed - if one in fact considers the stakes to be at their highest imaginable value - AND you believe that human concepts such as rationality are by definition beneath these holy concepts - then it is not surprising at all that you do not want the highest of the high questioned by this lower endeavor. Again, not claiming that this is any way "right" or "rational," just that the reasoning behind it is clear: questioning the religion carries too high a price.
So when Dawkins frames the entire work with this "I don't get it" frame of incredulity as to why anyone would want to maintain a belief set that sits outside the realm of questioning, I have an extraordinarily hard time taking the following arguments seriously. Dawkins himself is making a sort of holy appeal to rationality and logical positivism / empiricism as the highest of highs. I would not equate this with "faith" of the same degree that most religions require, but it is an appeal to a system that ultimately cannot prove its own validity. And he is entitled to find this okay and admit that he is being pragmatic, that his scientific empirical system is the best predictor thus far discovered and that he chooses to adhere to this system not based on its access to big T truth but more based on its effective outcomes as a predictor. And that would be fine, but at no point does he do this; he repeatedly maintains a stance of "here I am sitting with access to Truth, and you continue to demand that your religion be beyond questioning; I don't get it." Roughly translated and reduced, Dawkins is saying he is rational and the religions are irrational, and then he is questioning why the irrational systems are not subject to his rational inquiry. I don't believe for a moment that Dawkins can't see this aspect to the debate, that he and the religious are operating in different modes. I think he is choosing to ignore this obvious circumstance in deference to a construction that frames it as "here I am being *smart* and there you are being *stupid*. As such, the entire argument becomes an attack, and not a "let's step back and consider what is occurring here" investigation.
If "irrational" did not have its "crazy" and "stupid" connotations, I feel that it would be okay to label religion as an irrational enterprise. Simply put, faith entails irrationality by its very "belief without evidence" requirement. So again, it's completely legitimate for Dawkins to question religion, but he should do so in a matter that recognizes the non-overlapping areas of the two systems of thought. Dawkins faults in his auto-claim that rational thought / empiricism should govern all. He is hard pressed and really makes no effort to support this claim. He even alludes to aspects of human life - sexuality, love, art, poetry - that clearly have huge irrational components and holds them up as worthy objects of pursuit in the place of religion. To me, that smacks of an incoherent rational system that claims one set of irrational beliefs and values is okay and worthy while another is not. What is the basis for the validity of art - why is art "real" and religion "a misfiring?" Is the value of everything reduced to its Darwinian attributes? I don't think Dawkins would claim this or the slippery nihilism path it would entail, but I do think he arbitrarily embraces some forms or irrationality while claiming the rational science pulpit. And I believe he is doing so knowingly, so I find it hard to read this as an honest assessment. He's arguing for a point, not seeking out pure objective evidence, and consequently, he's shading his arguments in a manner akin to the theologians he so clearly despises.
Dawkins defense, of course, works when he's on his home court. Where Dawkins should have focused the efforts of this book is on the fact that it is where religion tries to step into the empirical world that it is clearly flawed. If Dawkins had limited his commentary to "here is a rational / empirical account of why biblical claims to the way the universe operates are wrong," he would have been completely in his proper domain. These aspects of the book are compelling. Even if they are a rehashed account of what scientists have been saying for years, they are a very clear and concise account of scientific evidence for evolutionary theory as an explanation for the universe we see today. I will employ some Dawkinsian rhetoric here and say that it should be clear that using the bible as a pragmatic tool or as a literal, historical account of the real world is patently ludicrous - the earth is not only 6000 years old, Noah did not place two of every species in a boat, there was no Roman census where everyone had to travel back to the place of a 1000 years dead ancestor's birth. Those claims are just inaccurate and rather preposterous - I am not even delving into the questionability of miracles and virgin births and the like, I am just saying that rationally and historically, there are inaccuracies in the bible. Dawkins account of the material world, and his ability to explain the features of it using scientific theory, are not flawed in the slightest. RD's science is patently better at the physical explanation game. He also presents the usual bevy of classical "rational" arguments for the existence of God and dissects them accordingly. His presentation and subsequent refutation of the arguments are fairly rudimentary, but he effectively demonstrates that on the physical, rational level, the god traditionally purported by the major religions is not rationally acceptable.
And he should have stopped there, because really, if the point is to claim that reli has deleterious effects and it is clearly wrong, then "mission accomplished." He presents effective evidence for why the religions and the concept of god as traditionally understood could not really be literally correct. But Dawkins takes this victory, trades it in and goes for the "there is no god" kill. His central argument is something he calls the "Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit," which you can read over at Wikipedia if you like. Here is his central argument:
Without delving into the specifics too much, the big flaw I find with this reasoning is hidden in step three. It is true that physically, we find that things created either have a complex designer or that have evolved up from simple beginnings. But the key word there is "physically." The concept of "God" is hardly limited to one of a physical being; if anything, one would be inclined
- One of the greatest challenges to the human intellect, over the centuries, has been to explain how the complex, improbable appearance of design in the universe arises.
- The natural temptation is to attribute the appearance of design to actual design itself. In the case of a man-made artefact such as a watch, the designer really was an intelligent engineer. It is tempting to apply the same logic to an eye or a wing, a spider or a person.
- The temptation is a false one, because the designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer. The whole problem we started out with was the problem of explaining statistical improbability. It is obviously no solution to postulate something even more improbable. We need a "crane" not a "skyhook," for only a crane can do the business of working up gradually and plausibly from simplicity to otherwise improbable complexity.
- The most ingenious and powerful crane so far discovered is Darwinian evolution by natural selection. Darwin and his successors have shown how living creatures, with their spectacular statistical improbability and appearance of design, have evolved by slow, gradual degrees from simple beginnings. We can now safely say that the illusion of design in living creatures is just that – an illusion.
- We don't yet have an equivalent crane for physics. Some kind of multiverse theory could in principle do for physics the same explanatory work as Darwinism does for biology. This kind of explanation is superficially less satisfying than the biological version of Darwinism, because it makes heavier demands on luck. But the anthropic principle entitles us to postulate far more luck than our limited human intuition is comfortable with.
- We should not give up hope of a better crane arising in physics, something as powerful as Darwinism is for biology. But even in the absence of a strongly satisfying crane to match the biological one, the relatively weak cranes we have at present are, when abetted by the anthropic principle, self-evidently better than the self-defeating skyhook hypothesis of an intelligent designer.
to call it a spiritual entity. So applying our rational, empirical observations we have made about the material world to an immaterial entity is something of a sleight of hand. The philosophy version of this complaint is that Dawkins is implicitly assuming that everything in the universe is physical - he is assuming materialism. But an assumption that everything is physical entails the assumption that spiritual things do not exist, and therefore God does not exist. So his Darwinian, probability based argument against the existence of God is a big fat philo 101 example of
BEGGING THE QUESTION!!!
And this time, it's the right application of that phrase, because the initial assumptions entail the very thing you are trying to prove. Dawkins has essentially only shown that God is not a mere physical entity, to which your average theologian would probably respond, "Duh."
Dawkins then goes on for several hours (or pages, in the traditional sense) acting as though his argument is QED unstoppable and ranting about the particular aspects of religion he dislikes, conveniently picking his examples and misinterpreting arguments at his leisure. He rather inhumanly dismisses sexual abuse in one section (weirdly telling how he was once fondled by a priest but "it was no big deal") and claims that the psychological abuse done by the church is far worse. (However true that thought is or that he thinks it may be, he really could have been more tasteful in the presentation of the idea). He gives an extended "PC language" type diatribe against calling children "a Christian child or a Jewish child," equating this with insensitive language about race. He thinks it's preposterous that a child is capable of formulating his own thoughts about the nature of the world so why should we label him thusly, again implicitly (and erroneously) assuming that the adoption of religion is a rational process and that these labels are something more than cultural markers - he says we would never call a child a "Marxist child" or the like. (Is he really ignorant of the cultural distinction here, that a religious label like Catholic child means "raised in a Catholic community/family" whereas Marxist, Marxism being a rational social theory, means "rationally believes in the tenets of Marxism?"Again, he is basely missing the point that religion is not a rational entity, so equating it with rational social theories is invalid). In another section, he argues against atheism as permissive of immoral acts by claiming that "no one has ever done anything evil in the name of atheism," seemingly missing point that it is not "in the name of atheism," that such acts would be committed, but in the amoral context that atheism allegedly promotes. As seems typical in my limited reading of Dawkins, he concludes by overstepping his bounds and conjecturing on the deeper meanings of what science has revealed to us. He makes the comments about art and poetry mentioned above without indicating their relationship to "rational thought," and even has the gall to wax poetic about how, on some level, we don't even realize what we are capable or incapable of imagining about the workings of the universe. Some have pointed out that this kind of contemplation, one would think, would RATIONALLY cause one to be cautious and fairly agnostic about the definitive nature of present scientific theories, like, hmmmm, maybe, absolute statements re: God's existence.
It should be clear that I did not enjoy this book and found it to be a failure on many levels. The opinionated writing and obvious slanted argument the author was trying to make lent itself to a very superficial account of the problem at hand. Dawkins dismisses the work of theologians and philosophers and social theorists - especially continental philosophers, grrrr - as though they were peons. (His one paragraph dismissal of semantic relativism - he essentially made the "at the end of the day, if you are accused of murder, you will use conventional meaning to explain your alibi" argument - was particularly egregious because it not only attempted to use humor as an illogical appeal, but it also missed the obvious point that his "at the end of the day" scenario is a particular social context, so of course you would use the appropriate meaning in that context). Mr. Dawkins, "Scientist," behaved nothing like one, only reinforcing notions that the objectivity of science is a smoke and mirrors operation. Rationality, whether he likes it or not, is a social construct subject to the same deconstruction as any social construct, and while he has some good things to say about his own jurisdiction of the physical and material world, his attempts to expand this into The World were flimsily executed. He successfully, as countless others have already done, presents reasons as to why religions are not rationally coherent systems of thought, but the arrogance and audacity with which he tries to extend this to a definitive statement about the nature of the universe is severely flawed and dishonest. If you want to claim the grandness of science - a system with its own flawed history and history of inflicting undue suffering, by the way - you should at least attempt to maintain the objectivity and even presentation that the discipline purports to require. Dawkins failed in that entirely.
Dawkins then goes on for several hours (or pages, in the traditional sense) acting as though his argument is QED unstoppable and ranting about the particular aspects of religion he dislikes, conveniently picking his examples and misinterpreting arguments at his leisure. He rather inhumanly dismisses sexual abuse in one section (weirdly telling how he was once fondled by a priest but "it was no big deal") and claims that the psychological abuse done by the church is far worse. (However true that thought is or that he thinks it may be, he really could have been more tasteful in the presentation of the idea). He gives an extended "PC language" type diatribe against calling children "a Christian child or a Jewish child," equating this with insensitive language about race. He thinks it's preposterous that a child is capable of formulating his own thoughts about the nature of the world so why should we label him thusly, again implicitly (and erroneously) assuming that the adoption of religion is a rational process and that these labels are something more than cultural markers - he says we would never call a child a "Marxist child" or the like. (Is he really ignorant of the cultural distinction here, that a religious label like Catholic child means "raised in a Catholic community/family" whereas Marxist, Marxism being a rational social theory, means "rationally believes in the tenets of Marxism?"Again, he is basely missing the point that religion is not a rational entity, so equating it with rational social theories is invalid). In another section, he argues against atheism as permissive of immoral acts by claiming that "no one has ever done anything evil in the name of atheism," seemingly missing point that it is not "in the name of atheism," that such acts would be committed, but in the amoral context that atheism allegedly promotes. As seems typical in my limited reading of Dawkins, he concludes by overstepping his bounds and conjecturing on the deeper meanings of what science has revealed to us. He makes the comments about art and poetry mentioned above without indicating their relationship to "rational thought," and even has the gall to wax poetic about how, on some level, we don't even realize what we are capable or incapable of imagining about the workings of the universe. Some have pointed out that this kind of contemplation, one would think, would RATIONALLY cause one to be cautious and fairly agnostic about the definitive nature of present scientific theories, like, hmmmm, maybe, absolute statements re: God's existence.
It should be clear that I did not enjoy this book and found it to be a failure on many levels. The opinionated writing and obvious slanted argument the author was trying to make lent itself to a very superficial account of the problem at hand. Dawkins dismisses the work of theologians and philosophers and social theorists - especially continental philosophers, grrrr - as though they were peons. (His one paragraph dismissal of semantic relativism - he essentially made the "at the end of the day, if you are accused of murder, you will use conventional meaning to explain your alibi" argument - was particularly egregious because it not only attempted to use humor as an illogical appeal, but it also missed the obvious point that his "at the end of the day" scenario is a particular social context, so of course you would use the appropriate meaning in that context). Mr. Dawkins, "Scientist," behaved nothing like one, only reinforcing notions that the objectivity of science is a smoke and mirrors operation. Rationality, whether he likes it or not, is a social construct subject to the same deconstruction as any social construct, and while he has some good things to say about his own jurisdiction of the physical and material world, his attempts to expand this into The World were flimsily executed. He successfully, as countless others have already done, presents reasons as to why religions are not rationally coherent systems of thought, but the arrogance and audacity with which he tries to extend this to a definitive statement about the nature of the universe is severely flawed and dishonest. If you want to claim the grandness of science - a system with its own flawed history and history of inflicting undue suffering, by the way - you should at least attempt to maintain the objectivity and even presentation that the discipline purports to require. Dawkins failed in that entirely.
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