Recently I commented on of Christopher Hitchen's God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, and noted that I was still looking for a more reasonable argument against Christianity and religion in general. Well, today's visit to Border's introduced me to Richard Dawkin's The God Delusion. While perhaps not likely to shake religious institutions to their core, it at least makes Hitchen's book pale like a nickel comic next to an actual novel. It has a much more academic feel to it and is not dripping with the same obnoxious hubris as Hitchen's writing. Of course, he still goads "Bible thumping" believers into giving a hostile response with his belligerent description of Yahweh in the opening of chapter 2 but even this did not strike me with the same sort of smugness as Mr. Hitchens offered.
I anticipate that the real weakness of the work, as in Hitchen's, will be that it claims that religion, by its very nature is what actually produces evil and all types of human suffering. By contrast, he would claim, science and secular atheism will be humanity's true salvation. But if religion, by its nature, inherently must produce the defective attributes of hatred and oppression, it seems to me that it does a rather poor job of it. Perhaps here one should create a "Delusion Hypothesis" as Dawkins creates a "God Hypothesis." For if it is religion that is to be blamed for creating those attributes, as perhaps evidenced in someone like Osama Bin Laden, then what does one do with the evidence of creating virtuous attributes and practices in someone like Mother Theresa or Martin Luther King Jr? For every inflamed fundamentalist who would do violence under the banner of religion, there are hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions who practice their faith with kindness and benevolence towards others. And if religion is such a curse to humanity, how does one explain all of the schools, hospitals, orphanages and humanitarian organizations that are faith based? Dawkins also warns about the dangerous sexual repressions caused by religion and points frequently to the Catholic priests' sexual abuse scandals. While those incidents are truly shameful, I do not believe they invalidate Christianity or religion any more than the experience of a doctor who commits malpractice invalidates all of modern medicine.
I have the book on hold at the library. I will be interested in exploring his presentation and how he might handle objections along these lines.
2 comments:
I read the Selfish Gene by Dawkins. I was unimpressed. He jumped through all the same rhetorical hoops and made all the same logical errors as lesser writers, but he did it with more style. Big deal. I don't read non-fiction of his sort for style, I read it for substance.
Oh, you angry angry atheists... when will you learn to stop justifying your incredible faith in nothing and just become apathetic secularists like everyone else?
Post a Comment