Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins preaching to the choir again. The title comes from Keats’ poem Lamia; the poet complains that the rainbow was once awe-inspiring but is now “In the dull catalogue of common things…”. Dawkins’ theme, then, is that the natural world and scientific investigation of it are more wonderful than anything poets can produce, and he goes on to explain using rainbows, spectroscopy, music, DNA, paleontology, and genetics as examples, while jumping on pseudoscience and postmodernism with both feet. By and large I’m in his camp; but now it seems sometimes like the tide has turned; you can only mock postmodernism so much before that mockery gets kind of old.

There are a couple of things that bear a little more analysis; one is Dawkins comments on law and lawyers. Dawkins criticizes the systematic exclusion of people who have some knowledge of probability theory and/or science from juries in cases where probability or science is relevant. On the surface, this seems reasonable; why wouldn’t you want experts on the jury? After all, a juror who had a PhD in mathematics could see through probabilistic arguments by the lawyers and presumably render a more accurate judgement. The catch here is that juries are supposed to base their judgement solely on the arguments presented by the lawyers, not on their own knowledge. If a legal case involves probability and/or science, and there is a scientist or mathematician on the jury, that juror effectively becomes an expert witness who cannot be cross-examined.

Another is Dawkins’ comments on Stephen J. Gould. Dawkins concedes that Gould is a skilled and “poetic” writer, but holds that Gould is also misleading which makes his writing skill that much more dangerous. Dawkins uses a quote by John Maynard Smith to illustrate: “Gould occupies a rather curious position, particularly on his side of the Atlantic. Because of the excellence of his essays, he has come to be seen by non-biologists as the preeminent evolutionary theorist. In contrast the evolutionary biologists with whom I have discussed his work tend to see him as a man whose ideas are so confused as to be hardly worth bothering with…”. This might be a little too harsh; Gould was certainly somewhat off the wall when it came to the “Cambrian explosion”, but his other writings are not that far off base.

I don’t want to seem too critical; this is overall an excellent book. Again bringing up Gould vs. Dawkins, Gould is a better writer than Dawkins, but Dawkins is a better explainer. No illustrations, footnotes, or endnotes, and the index is sparse; I couldn’t find some things I wanted. But there are lots of literary and poetic quotations that illustrate Dawkins theme and ideas.… (more)

God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

BIBLIOGRAPHIC DETAILS
-PRINT: © October 18, 2006; ‎ 978-0618680009; Mariner Books; First Edition; 416 pages; unabridged (Hardcover Info from Amazon.com)
-DIGITAL: © January 25, 2011; 0552774294; Mariner Books; Reprint edition; 468 pages; unabridged (Digital version info from Amazon.com)
- *AUDIO: © July 17, 2008; Tantor Audio; 13 hours, 52 minutes; unabridged (Audio info from Amazon.com)
-FILM: Not specifically. But Mr. Dawson has aired various programs on this and related subjects.

SERIES: No

CHARACTERS:
N/A

SUMMARY/ EVALUATION:
-SELECTED: Don had added this to our Audible library years ago. I wasn’t sure I could tolerate listening to someone for 11 hours who I was going to disagree with, but I do like to learn about different theories and beliefs. And I figured, to take up eleven hours, this fellow must feel strongly about his.
-ABOUT: This book contains a great deal of information, not just about a variety of religions and denominations within them, but about science, the window through which the author prefers to view the wonders of the Universe.
As with the previous non-fiction book I read, rationality is important to the author.
He addresses the many arguments for the existence of God that he has encountered, and why he remains unconvinced, hoping to persuade the reader. In fact, he discusses why the religions of Abraham leave him more than a little horrified-from Old Testament stories (and even, in some cases, the New Testament) to a multitude of prejudices and the excuses to harm (and so often, kill) others that have run through the ages.
-OVERALL IMPRESSION: I thought it was well written. The author is very well versed on various theologies and in the arguments and counter arguments for the existence of God. He approaches the subject from a multitude of angles.
The mockery and sarcasm that is occasionally used when describing certain religious beliefs, that seem a bit stripped of context, are likely not well received by those he would like to persuade, but I suspect many of his objections are widely met with some degree of agreement. Personally, I do not find the natural selection argument as an unguided sole active force in creation persuasive, and hold that a fair conclusion might be that the baby has been tossed out with the bathwater.

AUTHOR: Richard Dawkins: Excerpt from Wikipedia
“Richard Dawkins FRS FRSL (born 26 March 1941)[3] is a British evolutionary biologist and author. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, and was Professor for Public Understanding of Science in the University of Oxford from 1995 to 2008. His 1976 book The Selfish Gene popularised the gene-centred view of evolution, as well as coining the term meme. Dawkins has won several academic and writing awards.[4]

Dawkins is well known for his criticism of creationism and intelligent design as well as for being a vocal atheist.[5] Dawkins wrote The Blind Watchmaker in 1986, arguing against the watchmaker analogy, an argument for the existence of a supernatural creator based upon the complexity of living organisms. Instead, he describes evolutionary processes as analogous to a blind watchmaker, in that reproduction, mutation, and selection are unguided by any sentient designer. In 2006, Dawkins published The God Delusion, contending that a supernatural creator almost certainly does not exist and that religious faith is a delusion. He founded the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science in 2006.[6][7] Dawkins has published two volumes of memoirs, An Appetite for Wonder (2013) and Brief Candle in the Dark (2015).”

NARRATOR: Richard Dawkins: Excerpt from Wikipedia
“Dawkins was born Clinton Richard Dawkins on 26 March 1941 in Nairobi, the capital of Kenya during British colonial rule.[8] He later dropped Clinton from his name by deed poll.[3] He is the son of Jean Mary Vyvyan (née Ladner; 1916–2019)[9][10] and Clinton John Dawkins (1915–2010), an agricultural civil servant in the British Colonial Service in Nyasaland (present-day Malawi), of an Oxfordshire landed gentry family.[8][11][12] His father was called up into the King's African Rifles during the Second World War[13][14] and returned to England in 1949, when Dawkins was eight. His father had inherited a country estate, Over Norton Park in Oxfordshire, which he farmed commercially.[12] Dawkins lives in Oxford, England.[15] He has a younger sister, Sarah.[16]

His parents were interested in natural sciences, and they answered Dawkins's questions in scientific terms.[17] Dawkins describes his childhood as "a normal Anglican upbringing".[18] He embraced Christianity until halfway through his teenage years, at which point he concluded that the theory of evolution alone was a better explanation for life's complexity, and ceased believing in a god.[16] He states: "The main residual reason why I was religious was from being so impressed with the complexity of life and feeling that it had to have a designer, and I think it was when I realised that Darwinism was a far superior explanation that pulled the rug out from under the argument of design. And that left me with nothing."[16] This understanding of atheism combined with his western cultural background, informs Dawkins as he describes himself in several interviews as a "cultural Christian" and a "cultural Anglican".[19][20][21]”

NARRATOR Lalla Ward: Excerpts from Wikipedia
“Sarah Jill "Lalla" Ward[1] (born 28 June 1951)[2] is an English actress, voice artist and author. She is best known for playing the role of Romana II in the BBC television series Doctor Who from 1979 to 1981.”
“Ward has recorded audio books, including Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct and Shada by Gareth Roberts and Douglas Adams. She co-narrated The Selfish Gene, The Ancestor's Tale, The God Delusion, The Blind Watchmaker and The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution with her then husband. In the 1980s. She also wrote two books on knitting and one on embroidery. Ward is a keen chef, and she contributed a recipe to The Doctor Who Cookbook which was edited by Gary Downie.[13]

She also provided illustrations for Climbing Mount Improbable[14] and Astrology for dogs (and owners) by William Fairchild (1980).[15]”

*Yes, I’m glad to see Wikipedia confirm what I thought I’d heard. That his co-narrator was his wife. They made a good narration team.

GENRE: Non-fiction; Psychology; Religion; Science; Philosophy; autobiography

LOCATIONS: N/A

TIME FRAME: Contemporary (first edition written in 2006)

SUBJECTS: Values; Psychology; Philosophy; King James Bible; Darwin; Creationism; Science; Religion; Salmon Rushdi; Religions; Hinduism; Britain; America

DEDICATION: “In Memoriam Douglas Adams 1952-2001 Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”

SAMPLE QUOTATION: Excerpt From Chapter 1
“The one thing all his theistic critics got right was that Einstein was not one of them. He was repeatedly indignant at the suggestion that he was a theist. So, was he a deist, like Voltaire and Diderot? Or a pantheist, like Spinoza, whose philosophy he admired: ‘I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings’?
Let’s remind ourselves of the terminology. A theist believes in a supernatural intelligence who, in addition to his main work of creating the universe in the first place, is still around to oversee and influence the subsequent fate of his initial creation. In many theistic belief systems, the deity is intimately involved in human affairs. He answers prayers; forgives or punishes sins; intervenes in the world by performing miracles; frets about good and bad deeds, and knows when we do them (or even think of doing them). A deist, too, believes in a supernatural intelligence, but one whose activities were confined to setting up the laws that govern the universe in the first place. The deist God never intervenes thereafter, and certainly has no specific interest in human affairs. Pantheists don’t believe in a supernatural God at all, but use the word God as a non-supernatural synonym for Nature, or for the Universe, or for the lawfulness that governs its workings. Deists differ from theists in that their God does not answer prayers, is not interested in sins or confessions, does not read our thoughts and does not intervene with capricious miracles. Deists differ from pantheists in that the deist God is some kind of cosmic intelligence, rather than the pantheist’s metaphoric or poetic synonym for the laws of the universe. Pantheism is sexed-up atheism. Deism is watered-down theism.
There is every reason to think that famous Einsteinisms like ‘God is subtle but he is not malicious’ or ‘He does not play dice’ or ‘Did God have a choice in creating the Universe?’ are pantheistic, not deistic, and certainly not theistic. ‘God does not play dice’ should be translated as ‘Randomness does not lie at the heart of all things.’ ‘Did God have a choice in creating the Universe?’ means ‘Could the universe have begun in any other way?’ Einstein was using ‘God’ in a purely metaphorical, poetic sense. So is Stephen Hawking, and so are most of those physicists who occasionally slip into the language of religious metaphor. Paul Davies’s The Mind of God seems to hover somewhere between Einsteinian pantheism and an obscure form of deism—for which he was rewarded with the Templeton Prize (a very large sum of money given annually by the Templeton Foundation, usually to a scientist who is prepared to say something nice about religion).
Let me sum up Einsteinian religion in one more quotation from Einstein himself: ‘To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious.’ In this sense I too am religious, with the reservation that ‘cannot grasp’ does not have to mean ‘forever ungraspable’. But I prefer not to call myself religious because it is misleading. It is destructively misleading because, for the vast majority of people, ‘religion’ implies ‘supernatural’ Carl Sagan put it well: ‘ . . . if by “God” one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying . . . it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.’”

RATING: 3.5 stars.

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