A Near-Final(?) Response to The God Delusion

Predictions are dangerous, but now that I've read the God Delusion I think this may be my final blog posting on it, save one that will come out concurrent with a newspaper editorial next Saturday.

To respond fully would be tiresome. Dawkins does have some arresting arguments, some points that are worth pondering. They are so wrapped around, however, with straw men and distortions that spending time on either the good or the bad in the book seems hardly worth the effort.

The gist of his argument, in so many places, is that because he can point to some awful example of a religious person, religion is awful. That's especially true in chapters eight and nine, where he tells what he thinks is so awful about religion and why it amounts to serious child abuse. It seems rather cheap for him only to tackle the worst of it. I can agree with him that an abortion clinic bomber like Paul Hill should be soundly censured and strongly prosecuted. (I can't agree with him--because there is strong data to the contrary--that abortion really tends to improve women's lot emotionally. The best he could say is that the evidence is mixed.) I don't agree that someone like Paul Hill is representative of Christianity.

His argument for how we can have morals without religion was interesting--except it left out a crucial part. He explained how evolution could have given persons a sense of moral feelings or moral urges. He did not even discuss whether it can lead to an awareness of actual right and wrong. Is there such a thing or not? The whole message of the book does seem to assume there is, and that religion is wrong. How could it be so bad when all we're talking about is moral feelings or urges? This is a serious hole in his argument.

Perhaps the most interesting section was on how morality has changed over the centuries. I was waiting for his explanation of why it seems always to move, as he says it does, in a certain (generally more liberal) direction. At the key moment, he said he wasn't qualified to say why that might be. That was disappointing to me; there might have been something worth hearing there.

So much else has been written on the book, I'll let it go at that, other than the piece I have coming up next Saturday.

Posted: Mon - February 5, 2007 at 05:52 PM |

Thinking Christian by Tom Gilson getCategoryName("<$CategoryUUID$>");

A Near-Final(?) Response to The God Delusion

Thinking Christian by Tom Gilson