The God Delusion
I finished Richard Dawkin's latest book a few weeks ago and have put off blogging about it because, well, there's so much good stuff in there that it's hard to pull out particular points - I felt pity for those points I was intending to leave behind and so decided to leave them all where they were (and just advise you to buy it for yourself). Anyway, instead of saying nothing I've decided to highlight a few obscure points Dawkins makes that I haven't come across in any other reviews or blogs, but if you want the full story on the whole God situation as Dawkins sees it look for those (good and bad) reviews or better still (here's the bit where I advise you to buy it for yourself) buy it for yourself! And if the title puts you off, could this be the reason? - "dyed-in-the-wool faith-heads are immune to argument...among the more effective immunological devices is a dire warning to even avoid opening a book like this, which is surely a work of Satan" (p5-6). If you fall into that category, as I once did, then only you can get you out of it.
Obscure quote number 1 :"Splitting Christendom by splitting hairs - such has ever been the way of theology." (p33) I love that quote, which is referring to the way that over time, small differences in beliefs between one church and another have produced all the different divisions of Christendom ("Christianities") that we see around us. Aye, from this one hair the full head of hair has sprung, and in this case it's not a good thing. One church may stand right beside another as two hairs on your head and it's members disagree on one thing only - say the physical or spiritual resurrection of Christ - and this one thing condemns to eternal damnation the members of the one, whilst the members of the other are "saved". In this religious scheme of things, it matters not what you share with the other believer, but what makes you different. How un-Christlike. May I push this metaphor too far? Go on - pluck a hair from your head. Did you choose the only true hair? What arrogance these Christians possess. The sad thing is that this collective wig they form serves the purpose of covering a bald and shiny (and scary) truth whilst having no attachment to that truth at all. The truth that exists underneath all that, easily seen if you drop the religious baggage you are carrying, is that life has only the purpose we give it.
Obscure quote number 2: "What works for soap flakes works for God". I had to laugh at that point, which refers to the way religion is "sold" in America - "precisely because America is legally secular, religion has become free enterprise" (p40). It reminded me of something the second president of the Watchtower society said to crowds of faithful Bible Students (now known as Jehovah's Witnesses) : "Advertise, advertise, advertise the king and his kingdom". The Bible Students were founded by a businessman, and are run like a business to this day - Witnesses look to the "organisation" as their guide (and one definition for organisation is business - it's a definition that fits in this case). Said H. L. Mencken "Deep within the heart of every evangelist lies the wreck of a car salesman."
Not-so-obscure quote(s) number 3: (I'll just type away here and pack in a few lines which form part of Dawkins best argument against God): "Even if we allow the dubious luxury of arbitrarily conjuring up a terminator to an infinite regress and giving it a name, simply because we need one, there is absolutely no reason to endow that terminator with any of the properties normally ascribed to God: omnipotence, omniscience, goodness, creativity of design, to say nothing of such human attributes as listening to prayers, forgiving sins and reading innermost thoughts (p77)... [referring to a statement reportedly made by Fred Hoyle: the "probability of life originating on earth is no greater than the chance that a hurricane sweeping through a scrap-yard would have the luck to assemble a Boeing 747"] ...However statistically improbable the entity you seek to explain by invoking a designer, the designer himself has got to be at least as improbable. God is the Ultimate Boeing 747" (p114).
Obscure quote number 4 - I'll put this quote here because not only is it to be found nowhere else on the web (tell me if you find it) but because it's especially relevant to the themes, the writer and the reader(s?!) of this blog. From p119-121 of the book, under the heading "Irreducible Complexity":
"It is impossible to exaggerate the magnitude of the problem that Darwin and Wallace solved. I could mention the anatomy, cellular structure, biochemistry and behaviour of literally any living organism by example. But the most striking feats of apparent design are those picked out - for obvious reasons - by creationist authors, and it is with gentle irony that I derive mine from a creationist book. Life - How Did It Get Here?, with no named author but published by the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society in sixteen languages and eleven million copies, is obviously a firm favourite because no fewer than six of those eleven million copies have been sent to me as unsolicited gifts by well-wishers from around the world.
Picking a page at random from this anonymous and lavishly distributed work, we find the sponge known as Venus' Flower Basket (Euplectella), accompanied by a quotation from Sir David Attenborough, no less: 'When you look at a complex sponge skeleton such as that made of silica spicules which is known as Venus' Flower Basket, the imagination is baffled. How could quasi-independent microscopic cells collaborate to secrete a million glassy splinters and construct such an intricate and beautiful lattice? We do not know.' The Watchtower authors lose no time in adding their own punchline: 'But one thing we do know: Chance is not the likely designer.' No indeed, chance is not the likely designer. That is one thing on which we can all agree. The statistical improbability of phenomena such as Euplectella's skeleton is the central problem that any theory of life must solve. The greater the statistical improbability, the less plausible is chance as a solution: that is what improbable means. But the candidate solutions to the riddle of improbability are not, as is falsely implied, design and chance. They are design and natural selection. Chance is not a solution, given the high levels of improbability we see in living organisms, and no biologist ever suggested that it was. Design is not a real solution either, as we shall see later; but for the moment I want to continue demonstrating the problem that any theory of life must solve: the problem of how to escape from chance.
Turning Watchtower's page, we find the wonderful plant known as Dutchman's Pipe (Aristolochia trilobata), all of whose parts seem elegantly designed to trap insects, cover them with pollen and send them on their way to another Dutchman's Pipe. The intricate elegance of the flower moves Watchtower to ask: 'Did all of this happen by chance? Or did it happen by intelligent design?' Once again, no of course it didn't happen by chance. Once again, intelligent design is not the proper alternative to chance. Natural selection is not only a parsimonious, plausible and elegant solution; it is the only workable alternative to chance that has ever been suggested. Intelligent design suffers from exactly the same objection as chance. It is simply not a plausible solution to the riddle of statistical improbability. And the higher the improbability, the more implausible intelligent design becomes. Seen clearly, intelligent design will turn out to be a redoubling of the problem. Once again, this is because the designer himself (/herself/itself) immediately raises the bigger problem of his own origin. Any entity capable of intelligently designing something as improbable as a Dutchman's Pipe (or a universe) would have to be even more improbable than a Dutchman's Pipe. Far from terminating the vicious regress, God aggravates it with a vengeance.
Turn another Watchtower page for an eloquent account of the giant redwood (Sequoiadendron giganteum), a tree for which I have a special affection because I have one in my garden - a mere baby, scarcely more than a century old, but still the tallest tree in the neighbourhood. 'A puny man, standing at a sequoia's base, can only gaze upward in silent awe at its massive grandeur. Does it make sense to believe that the shaping of this majestic giant and of the tiny seed that packages it was not by design?' Yet again, if you think that the only alternative to design is chance then, no, it does not make sense. But again the authors omit all mention of the real alternative, natural selection, either because they genuinely don't understand it or because they don't want to.
The process by which plants, whether tiny pimpernels or massive wellingtonias, acquire the energy to build themselves is photosynthesis. Watchtower again: ' " There are about seventy separate chemical reactions involved in photosynthesis," one biologist said. "It is truly a miraculous event." Green plants have been called nature's "factories" - beautiful, quiet, nonpolluting, producing oxygen, recycling water and feeding the world. Did they just happen by chance? Is that truly believable?' No, it is not believable; but the repetition of example after example gets us nowhere. Creationist 'logic' is always the same. Some natural phenomenon is too statistically improbable, too complex, too beautiful, too awe-inspiring 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. And science's answer to this faulty logic is also always the same. Design is not the only alternative to chance. Natural selection is a better alternative. Indeed, design is not a real alternative at all because it raises an even bigger problem than it solves: who designed the designer?"
Obscure quote number 1 :"Splitting Christendom by splitting hairs - such has ever been the way of theology." (p33) I love that quote, which is referring to the way that over time, small differences in beliefs between one church and another have produced all the different divisions of Christendom ("Christianities") that we see around us. Aye, from this one hair the full head of hair has sprung, and in this case it's not a good thing. One church may stand right beside another as two hairs on your head and it's members disagree on one thing only - say the physical or spiritual resurrection of Christ - and this one thing condemns to eternal damnation the members of the one, whilst the members of the other are "saved". In this religious scheme of things, it matters not what you share with the other believer, but what makes you different. How un-Christlike. May I push this metaphor too far? Go on - pluck a hair from your head. Did you choose the only true hair? What arrogance these Christians possess. The sad thing is that this collective wig they form serves the purpose of covering a bald and shiny (and scary) truth whilst having no attachment to that truth at all. The truth that exists underneath all that, easily seen if you drop the religious baggage you are carrying, is that life has only the purpose we give it.
Obscure quote number 2: "What works for soap flakes works for God". I had to laugh at that point, which refers to the way religion is "sold" in America - "precisely because America is legally secular, religion has become free enterprise" (p40). It reminded me of something the second president of the Watchtower society said to crowds of faithful Bible Students (now known as Jehovah's Witnesses) : "Advertise, advertise, advertise the king and his kingdom". The Bible Students were founded by a businessman, and are run like a business to this day - Witnesses look to the "organisation" as their guide (and one definition for organisation is business - it's a definition that fits in this case). Said H. L. Mencken "Deep within the heart of every evangelist lies the wreck of a car salesman."
Not-so-obscure quote(s) number 3: (I'll just type away here and pack in a few lines which form part of Dawkins best argument against God): "Even if we allow the dubious luxury of arbitrarily conjuring up a terminator to an infinite regress and giving it a name, simply because we need one, there is absolutely no reason to endow that terminator with any of the properties normally ascribed to God: omnipotence, omniscience, goodness, creativity of design, to say nothing of such human attributes as listening to prayers, forgiving sins and reading innermost thoughts (p77)... [referring to a statement reportedly made by Fred Hoyle: the "probability of life originating on earth is no greater than the chance that a hurricane sweeping through a scrap-yard would have the luck to assemble a Boeing 747"] ...However statistically improbable the entity you seek to explain by invoking a designer, the designer himself has got to be at least as improbable. God is the Ultimate Boeing 747" (p114).
Obscure quote number 4 - I'll put this quote here because not only is it to be found nowhere else on the web (tell me if you find it) but because it's especially relevant to the themes, the writer and the reader(s?!) of this blog. From p119-121 of the book, under the heading "Irreducible Complexity":
"It is impossible to exaggerate the magnitude of the problem that Darwin and Wallace solved. I could mention the anatomy, cellular structure, biochemistry and behaviour of literally any living organism by example. But the most striking feats of apparent design are those picked out - for obvious reasons - by creationist authors, and it is with gentle irony that I derive mine from a creationist book. Life - How Did It Get Here?, with no named author but published by the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society in sixteen languages and eleven million copies, is obviously a firm favourite because no fewer than six of those eleven million copies have been sent to me as unsolicited gifts by well-wishers from around the world.
Picking a page at random from this anonymous and lavishly distributed work, we find the sponge known as Venus' Flower Basket (Euplectella), accompanied by a quotation from Sir David Attenborough, no less: 'When you look at a complex sponge skeleton such as that made of silica spicules which is known as Venus' Flower Basket, the imagination is baffled. How could quasi-independent microscopic cells collaborate to secrete a million glassy splinters and construct such an intricate and beautiful lattice? We do not know.' The Watchtower authors lose no time in adding their own punchline: 'But one thing we do know: Chance is not the likely designer.' No indeed, chance is not the likely designer. That is one thing on which we can all agree. The statistical improbability of phenomena such as Euplectella's skeleton is the central problem that any theory of life must solve. The greater the statistical improbability, the less plausible is chance as a solution: that is what improbable means. But the candidate solutions to the riddle of improbability are not, as is falsely implied, design and chance. They are design and natural selection. Chance is not a solution, given the high levels of improbability we see in living organisms, and no biologist ever suggested that it was. Design is not a real solution either, as we shall see later; but for the moment I want to continue demonstrating the problem that any theory of life must solve: the problem of how to escape from chance.
Turning Watchtower's page, we find the wonderful plant known as Dutchman's Pipe (Aristolochia trilobata), all of whose parts seem elegantly designed to trap insects, cover them with pollen and send them on their way to another Dutchman's Pipe. The intricate elegance of the flower moves Watchtower to ask: 'Did all of this happen by chance? Or did it happen by intelligent design?' Once again, no of course it didn't happen by chance. Once again, intelligent design is not the proper alternative to chance. Natural selection is not only a parsimonious, plausible and elegant solution; it is the only workable alternative to chance that has ever been suggested. Intelligent design suffers from exactly the same objection as chance. It is simply not a plausible solution to the riddle of statistical improbability. And the higher the improbability, the more implausible intelligent design becomes. Seen clearly, intelligent design will turn out to be a redoubling of the problem. Once again, this is because the designer himself (/herself/itself) immediately raises the bigger problem of his own origin. Any entity capable of intelligently designing something as improbable as a Dutchman's Pipe (or a universe) would have to be even more improbable than a Dutchman's Pipe. Far from terminating the vicious regress, God aggravates it with a vengeance.
Turn another Watchtower page for an eloquent account of the giant redwood (Sequoiadendron giganteum), a tree for which I have a special affection because I have one in my garden - a mere baby, scarcely more than a century old, but still the tallest tree in the neighbourhood. 'A puny man, standing at a sequoia's base, can only gaze upward in silent awe at its massive grandeur. Does it make sense to believe that the shaping of this majestic giant and of the tiny seed that packages it was not by design?' Yet again, if you think that the only alternative to design is chance then, no, it does not make sense. But again the authors omit all mention of the real alternative, natural selection, either because they genuinely don't understand it or because they don't want to.
The process by which plants, whether tiny pimpernels or massive wellingtonias, acquire the energy to build themselves is photosynthesis. Watchtower again: ' " There are about seventy separate chemical reactions involved in photosynthesis," one biologist said. "It is truly a miraculous event." Green plants have been called nature's "factories" - beautiful, quiet, nonpolluting, producing oxygen, recycling water and feeding the world. Did they just happen by chance? Is that truly believable?' No, it is not believable; but the repetition of example after example gets us nowhere. Creationist 'logic' is always the same. Some natural phenomenon is too statistically improbable, too complex, too beautiful, too awe-inspiring 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. And science's answer to this faulty logic is also always the same. Design is not the only alternative to chance. Natural selection is a better alternative. Indeed, design is not a real alternative at all because it raises an even bigger problem than it solves: who designed the designer?"
Labels: book, Dawkins, evolution, religion, The God Delusion, Witnesses
posted by John Doran-Armstrong at 10:29 AM
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