The God Delusion

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🙂 I’m reading Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion and I am wondering if anyone else is too. Apart from my conviction that the book is spectacularly unconvincing I am wondering what others think about it because I would like to refute some of the things he says while at the same time hearing from others as well.

A word of caution, If you are a new Christian I don’t recommend this book because it is so full of half truths and misrepresentations that it could easily confuse a person who has not studied at least about theology and natural sciences. Since Dawkins asserts that he is trying to create atheists its not suprising that he would employ such tactics, but I would not want to be responsible for someone becoming confused and having thier faith damaged because they read this thing unprepared.

So if anyone is interested I would like to discuss this and see what you all think.

PS, if this has been discussed before kindly point me to the link and I will read the text there and not retread walked over ground.
 
bogeydogg said:
🙂 I’m reading Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion and I am wondering if anyone else is too. Apart from my conviction that the book is spectacularly unconvincing I am wondering what others think about it because I would like to refute some of the things he says while at the same time hearing from others as well.

A word of caution, If you are a new Christian I don’t recommend this book because it is so full of half truths and misrepresentations that it could easily confuse a person who has not studied at least about theology and natural sciences. Since Dawkins asserts that he is trying to create atheists its not suprising that he would employ such tactics, but I would not want to be responsible for someone becoming confused and having thier faith damaged because they read this thing unprepared.

So if anyone is interested I would like to discuss this and see what you all think.

PS, if this has been discussed before kindly point me to the link and I will read the text there and not retread walked over ground.
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Oh wow, ugly book, even hated by many athiests. It mainly deals with radical fanatical issuses, not even so much on science. Try reading “The Dawkins Delusion” by Alister McGrath and Joanna Collicutt McGrath, a response to the God delusion. Very wonderful and interesting.
 
There is a poster here who has written a book that pretty much answers The God Delusion.

lulu.com/content/605271

You can preview it for free, and it is pretty cheap. A good book to spend a couple bucks on.

God Bless
Scylla
 
Mersenne said:
name a half truth or misinterreptation in the book
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Not to be cute, but how many would you like?

I, too, would recommend McGrath’s book, The Dawkins Delusion: Atheist Fundamentalism & the Denial of the Divine (InterVarsity Press, 2007). If you want a meatier treatment, McGrath has also authored Dawkins’ God: Genes, Memes, & the Meaning of Life, which is a more philosophical approach to Dawkins’s claims.

Blessings,

Don
+T+
 
Donald45 said:
Not to be cute, but how many would you like?

I, too, would recommend McGrath’s book, The Dawkins Delusion: Atheist Fundamentalism & the Denial of the Divine (InterVarsity Press, 2007). If you want a meatier treatment, McGrath has also authored Dawkins’ God: Genes, Memes, & the Meaning of Life, which is a more philosophical approach to Dawkins’s claims.

Blessings,

Don
+T+
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Try 5. Or I’ll just assume by everyone’s insistence that I go read someone else’s arguement that you have no idea what you’re talking about.
 
Just wanted to mention a Catholic book in the latest Ignatius catalog that responds to Dawkin’s book

God Is No Delusion by Thomas Creane, O.P.

Phil P
 
Mersenne << Or I’ll just assume by everyone’s insistence that I go read someone else’s arguement that you have no idea what you’re talking about. >>

Well for one Dawkins (The God Delusion, page 211-212) recommends Brian Flemming’s garbage documentary :eek: "The God Who Wasn’t There" as “a sincere and moving film advocating atheism.” Probably because Dawkins appears as part of that DVD’s extras. And he represents the best “Christian response” to that DVD as “Christians” using a couple of expletives telling atheists they’re going to hell – please! :rolleyes:

Another one he does often: he compares the infinite Judaeo-Christian God to finite Greek, Roman, or pagan gods like Zeus, Apollo, or Thor. Apples and oranges.

On the arguments for God: although Dawkins does address some of these superficially in a chapter or two, he gives little indication he’s read the sophisticated Christian theologians and philosophers – which he should do if he expects people to wind up atheists after reading his book: “If this book works as I intend, religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put it down.” (preface, page 5). Well then, how about annihilating the arguments of William Lane Craig and Peter Kreeft and interacting with their books for starters! 👍 (He does refer to Swinburne, and Aquinas/Anselm, Pascal’s Wager, etc).

I’m not saying the book is terrible, but there are much more sophisticated “defenses” of atheism out there, such as George Smith’s The Case Against God, and Michael Martin’s Atheism: A Philosophical Justification. Not that Dawkins should be expected to write a sophisticated book on atheism since he isn’t a professional philosopher, but a biologist/zoologist.

Phil P
 
Mersenne said:
name a half truth or misinterreptation in the book
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OK, Dawkins stubborn insistence that God must have a cause and/ or be a derived being. Over and over again he refutes the exisistence of God as being the least likely explanation for the phenomena of the universe at large. He pays a minute lip service to the actual theist/ Judeo- Cristian understanding of God but does so only in a derisive fashion. His main problem is that he asks a theological question and then ushers all theological answers out the door so he can superimpose his own idea of a derived God and go back to his refutation of such. He offers up a weak defense against the, “I don’t believe in the God you don’t believe in,” argument but does so only so far “the old man sitting on a throne in outer space.” In doing this he deliberately is misleading the uninformed reader about the theist idea of God without ever allowing the theist argument to speak for itself and then having to argue against the idea.
 
When Yahweh reveals Himself to Moses in the dessert He tells Moses that he will go in the name of “I am.” What is the significance?

The theist idea of God is that God is a self-existent being. A being in whom rests the power of existence and such a being could never have begun to exist or be derived in any fashion. Why? Because if God had begun to exist then He would have had a progenitor, and that progenitor would be necessary in order for God to exist and therefore God’s existance would be dependant upon something else in which case He could not be self-existent. Also God must exist eternally. Why? Because if God could not have derived His existance from some other source then He could have begun to exist, He also could not have created Himself because then God would have to be His own antecedent cause, or God would have had to exist before He existed (a cannot be a and not a at the same time in the same relationship). Since God cannot create Himself and cannot be derived then He is an eternal being, or in other words He is a Being without cause.

“AH!,” says the skeptic,“Now you’ve stepped into it. You assert that God is uncaused but cause/effect demands that everything must have a cause!”

Well no, actually cause/ effect demands that every effect have an antecedent cause. Just because we may not know what the cause may be (David Hume) does not mean the cause does not exist. We may fairly state that we do not know what causes some observed phenomenon but we may absolutely know that if the phenomenon is an effect then it does have a cause. However, if it is possible for anything to exist which is not an effect of something else, then we may rest assured that that existance is uncaused.

This is the error Bertand Russel made which Dawkins picks up on and runs with without ever examining it or allowing the theist’s explanation on the matter.

In fact Dawkins absolute silence on the theistic explanation coupled with his blunt and admitted refusal to even seriously broach the subject speaks of obscurantism and opens the door wide to Dawkins’ own narrow-mindedness and his deep need to apply Darwin’s Crane to everything.

Undoubtedly Darwin got a lot of things right, which BTW the Catholic Church does not deny, but to try and force his very good idea into every nook and cranny does not speak of Dawkin’s intellectual might, but rather his deep seeded religious faith in neo-Darwinism. It is immensly unsatisfying and condescending while at the same time being a deliberate misstating of the perameters of the argument and that is a half truth and misrepresentation, there is no getting around it.
 
bogeydogg said:
OK, Dawkins stubborn insistence that God must have a cause and/ or be a derived being.
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That is neither a half truth or a misrepresentation, it’s a conviction based on his own reasoning. I personally find it rather to the point, believing anything else while also argueing that god is proved through the complexity of the universe and the need for an explination is a case of special pleading. It’s not to say that every arguement for god fails on the idea of god himself needing a cause, but many of them do, and in those cases he raises that point. Regardless, even if you disagree with the reasoning, it’s not a half truth or a misrepresentation. He’s not stating that christians believe that god is caused. In fact, it is their belief in the opposite that allows him to show the paradox in their reasoning.
This is the error Bertand Russel made which Dawkins picks up on and runs with without ever examining it or allowing the theist’s explanation on the matter.
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Well, if that’s the “theist’s explination” then I’m not suprised he didn’t include it, because it made no sense at all. Your first paragraph wasn’t really an explination so much as a overly verbose decleration of your beliefs, and then you seem to try to justify the obvious paradox with what seems to me to be “well, some effects can have unknown causes” which I don’t see how that addresses the problem at all.

Really, I think your insistence that Dawkin’s “must have been” intentionally dishonest is bizzare and unjustified. Really, I think it’s far more likely that you’re intentionally misunderstanding his book and doing what is known as “projection” by making him out to be dishonest and a religious fanatic.
 
As a Weddings and Funerals Catholic that is more a deist. But trying to change. I can say that Dawking was dishonest in many levels.
One. I remember that in almost one line in the whole book, he discards the hipotesis that religion might have a genetic root saying that in not clear what good get the believer from religion.
Is he is going to be fair he should have quoted medical evidence that religious people live generaly longer and have more children than non religious people, a clear evolutive advantage for the religious. And they endure certain medical treatment better. He should habe asked the believers what good they got from religion. But since he suscribes to the atheist mantra that religions is only a useless way to control people he did not ask the question and focused on the negatives of fundamentalist religion. I found his comparation of chilhood religious indoctrination as worse that childhood sexual abuse realy offensive.
Also I seem that he is not clear about the Judeo- Christian God. By trying to apply the laws of biological science to that God, laws that started with the Big Bang, and cannot be appliyed to a God that existed before that.
He also recognized that modern science comes out of medieval (read Catholic) christianity and that calculus comes from Islam, but trying to make his point about religion being a negative and useless feature of the human experience he did not explain how science came out of religion. And why there was no modern science when christianty was not around.
Dawkins forgot that science and politics does not make a good mix, and religion does not need to be theistic. The most murderous religion of all is socialism and is a agnostic and atheistic religion. Atheists socialists murdered more people in the XX century that in all the wars of religion combined.
 
Mersenne said:
He’s not stating that christians believe that god is caused. In fact, it is their belief in the opposite that allows him to show the paradox in their reasoning.
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No, Dawkins never exposes the paradox you claim exists, he simply asserts that it does exist and never follows it any further. Actually, by refusing to lay out the actual theist position on the being of God Dawkins herds all belief into what he considers to be only possible explanation for God which is that God is a derived being. Well of course such a being is fiction because it traps God into an infinite regress and such a being could not exist, which Dawkins dutifully points out. However, because he allows only this explanation for God’s existence he nessecarily creates a straw man and such a tactic is intellectually dishonest.
Mersenne said:
Well, if that’s the “theist’s explination” then I’m not suprised he didn’t include it, because it made no sense at all. Your first paragraph wasn’t really an explination so much as a overly verbose decleration of your beliefs, and then you seem to try to justify the obvious paradox with what seems to me to be “well, some effects can have unknown causes” which I don’t see how that addresses the problem at all.
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You missed the point here. What I was saying is not that God has an unknown cause but that God is not an effect and therefore has no cause. The reason I mentioned David Hume and unknown causes, which BTW Dawkins idea of the infinite regress began with Hume, is to contrast the theist position. When Hume posited that there are unknown causes, many including Immanuel Kant declared that he had undone causality all together. Of course that was wrong, what Hume had done is introduced unkown causes to observed effects but he did not posit uncaused effects. The reason such an observation is important is because Thomas Aquinas had built his proofs, which I readily acknowledge are nothing of the kind but rather statments about the nature of causality and nessecary being, and those who felt that Hume had undone causality opened the door fpor Russel much later on. The problem is Russel asked the question what caused God? Its a fair question but it is an irrelevancy to the theist’s God because the theist posits that God is not caused in any fashion. While you may dislike this answer I feel compelled to point out that the theist is not stating just a philisophical position but a truth claim based upon the idea of nessecary being and Dawkins’ refusal to acknowledge that and take it head on is strange for someone seeking converts to atheism.
Mersenne said:
Really, I think your insistence that Dawkin’s “must have been” intentionally dishonest is bizzare and unjustified. Really, I think it’s far more likely that you’re intentionally misunderstanding his book and doing what is known as “projection” by making him out to be dishonest and a religious fanatic.
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I never said Dawkins “Must have been” intentionally dishonest so please do not attribute words to me that I did not say. However, I did say that he deliberately misleads people and in this you are quite right. I have no evidence that Dawkins is doing anything of the sort and I apologize for the statement. However, given the nature of the book I felt that there were only two possibilities to explain it’s tone;
  1. Dawkins is fantastically ignorant of the theist’s position on God.
  2. Dawkins is not ignorant and is intentionally misleading people.
If you would be so kind as to tell me which you prefer I will follow this route in the future, and I do think these are the possibilities because Dawkins does make vague mention to the theist’s position but never explores it or attacks it directly. I suppose a third option would be he finds it to be rational and therefore won’t attack it, but that sort of falls under option two listed above.

I like Dawkins, I think he is a brilliant man and a good writer but I think he has stepped out of depth here and in doing so is puttling people at risk, remember I am a theist and I do believe such risk is real, and for this reason I feel compelled to speak up about it.
 
Mersenne said:
Try 5. Or I’ll just assume by everyone’s insistence that I go read someone else’s arguement that you have no idea what you’re talking about.
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Of course, this would be a complete non sequitur, since the sources cited might accurately reflect the poster’s own viewpoint, and he may very well be siting them simply to save time.

On my reading of Dawkins, for example, these brief essays do a fine job of outlining some of the problems I found in The God Delusion, and there are many more than five:

faithandthecity.org/issues/social/articles/The-Dawkins-Delusion.shtml
skepticalchristian.com/br_goddelusion.htm
skepticalchristian.com/r_dawkins.htm
christianitytoday.com/bc/2007/002/1.21.html
theage.com.au/news/book-reviews/the-god-delusion/2006/11/24/1164341383277.html
godandscience.org/apologetics/the_god_delusion1.html
godandscience.org/apologetics/the_god_delusion2.html
arn.org/docs/williams/pw_dawkinsfallacies.htm

The bottom line is that, as a biologist, Dawkins is brilliant; as a philosopher and theologian, however----well, he needs to keep his day job.

Blessings,

Don
+T+
 
Mersenne said:
Try 5. Or I’ll just assume by everyone’s insistence that I go read someone else’s arguement that you have no idea what you’re talking about.
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Then read mine. I am the author of the book that was so kindly mentioned.
 
Malcolm_McLean said:
Then read mine. I am the author of the book that was so kindly mentioned.
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I read the first page and didn’t see any actually arguements contained, do you think you could just point out, where Richard Dawkins states a half truth or a misinterpretation and why you think it is so?
 
Donald45 said:
Of course, this would be a complete non sequitur, since the sources cited might accurately reflect the poster’s own viewpoint, and he may very well be siting them simply to save time.
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it’s not a non-sequitur, it’s a reasonable inference based on past experience. The sources cited might accurately reflect the poster’s own viewpoint, but it’s ridiculous to expect me to read a hundred page book to answer the question “where did Richard Dawkins state a half-truth?” It’s typical BS tactics used by people who have no real idea what they’re talking about.
 
You missed the point here.
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You failed to make one.
bogeydogg said:
What I was saying is not that God has an unknown cause but that God is not an effect and therefore has no cause.
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This doesn’t answer the paradox that Dawkin’s points out, this only gives it a new name. Okay, if god is not an effect, then why cannot a non-god non-effect have started the universe? Besides, you’re not pointing out a half-truth, you’re just presenting a counterarguement, a weak one to boot.
Its a fair question but it is an irrelevancy to the theist’s God because the theist posits that God is not caused in any fashion.
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You obviously refused to even try to understand mine or Dawkins point, we understand theists state that god is uncaused, neither Dawkins or I ever state otherwise, in fact, it is central to our arguements. Intellectually dishonest indeed.
 
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