The God that Dawkins seeks to negate is the popular personal God that most of the world believes in (superhuman, our creator, answers prayers). Pantheism (or an awe for nature, its laws and beauty), he says, is just sexed-up atheism and not the target of his diatribe (though he pushes people to take a clear stand). He quotes Einstein: To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense, I am religious. In this sense, Dawkins says, he is religious too. But, it does not make sense to pray to the law of gravity. Admiration for a beautiful garden can exist without the belief that there are fairies at the bottom!
Dawkins is acidic against blind faith (fundamentalists “knows that nothing will change their minds”; as against a true scientist, who “however passionately he may believe in a theory, knows that with the right evidence he will change his mind”). His special target is the God of religious texts like Old Testament, “arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving, control freak; a vindictive, blood thirsty, ethnic cleanser…”
An entire chapter is dedicated on Why There Almost Certainly Is No God. While today’s complex life couldn’t have just evolved as a matter of chance, using God to justify the origin of life suffers from a bigger flaw: Who then created God? Scientifically, any being powerful enough to create life would be so complex itself that it cannot be at the beginning of creation. God then is just an easy term used to stop the discussion on the unknowable origin. He then offers the much more plausible Theory of Evolution to show that “organized complexity can emerge from simple beginnings without any deliberate (or divine) guidance”. Humans, with 80 year life-spans, fail to grasp the power of accumulation. The human civilization is only 10,000 years old but the universe is 14 billion years old, and had aeons to slowly evolve life. Starting with billions of years of nothing, then slowly the formation of atoms, then the first cell, and then over a further billions of years of natural selection, progressively complex life. If we marvel at, say, the human eye today in its fully evolved form, we may be tempted to ascribe a divine intervention. But look at a flatworm eye (detects light but cannot take images) and then a Nautilus eye (basic, blurred, ‘pin-hole’ camera images) and then many other forms of eyes lost to fossil, finally over a billion years, through natural selection, leading to the modern eye. Which itself, while brilliant, is not perfect (frequently bigger or smaller eye ball leading to myopia or long-sightedness; or cataract and other ailments). The larger philosophy is that phenomenon as yet un-explained does not mean un-explainable. Ergo, the use of God to explain life is a shallow and convenient attempt to shrug further analysis and discovery, a subversion of science.
Other silly examples: A plane crash killed all the 143 passengers and crew. But one child ‘miraculously’ survived with third-degree burns. The believers would use this incident to proclaim that God must exist! [Which God would kill 143 and save only one just to prove his presence?]
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Amazing
Concept of God has always been kind off a riddle, a very intriguing summary. Definitely going to read the book.
I would probably say that this is one of the best books I have ever read–certainly the most important. But also the most dense and difficult to read.
Good book for learning and thinking