Donald Noble's Website

I have just finished reading “The God Delusion“, Richard Dawkins. He has written an interesting and thought provoking book, and although I do not agree with everything he says, I would tend to agree with his general viewpoint. If you are religious and easily offended, please look away now.

He starts off to explain why he does not believe there is a God. Or at least one that created the universe (especially in 7 days!) and listens to people’s prayers and thoughts (and that may even decide to act on these).

More interestingly, he then goes on to discuss why Religion is endemic throughout the human race and what possible evolutionary advantage it may have. His theory (which is shared by many other people) is that religion arises as a by product of the evolutionary advantage of believing your elders. By learning from parents and other older, wiser people, we can short cut the trial and error process, and learn more. The downside of this, is that we believe their ‘hopes’ of eternal life (for example) as true fact. When we are young, we do not question the knowledge of the minister/priest/rabai…. Then, because we believe this, we teach our children, and so on ad infinitum.

One of Dawkins’ main criticisms with religion is that that people blindly indoctrinate children into a movement they have little choice but to accept. While not teaching children religion is an admirable ideal, would be extremely tricky in the real world. English speaking parents don’t generally bring their children up to speak only French! In the same way Christian parents will likely bring their children up as Christians. However, the child should also have the opportunity to learn science in a non-religeous school, and then be free to choose a religion or not.

He also suggests that religious fanatics’ viewpoints are made less extreme by the presence of mainstream religion, and that without religion there would be fewer extremists. I don’t think this holds true, while it is semantically correct to say that in a world without religion, there would be less religious extremists, I doubt it would seriously affect the number of extremists. They would use just another avenue, such as racism or homophobia. There may be fewer wars in a world without religion, as many people have suggested, but this is a practically unprovable hypothesis.

These, and many other points, are dealt with in a much more articulate fashion than I can manage to write here, so I will direct you to his book to fully understand them.

One criticism is that I found that his writing style can be a bit annoying, in that he keeps referring to things he will tell you later in the book. I would much prefer to have a brief summary of the argument there, and then, expand it in the later chapter, perhaps with a reference back to the original summary and related points. But this is a minor flaw, and perhaps more of a personal preference.

This was a book I had been meaning to read for quite some time, and seeing in New Scientist that Waterstones were selling it at half price I went out a bought a copy for the princely sum of £4.50. It was an interesting book, and I am now tempted to look out for some of his other writings on the subject. More on them later, perhaps…

This entry was posted on Saturday 7th July 2007 in Blog, Reviews and tagged book-review, religion, Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.