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Technorati"I do not, by nature, thrive on confrontation," declares Richard Dawkins, the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University and one of the world's leading skeptics concerning Christianity and belief in God.
Dawkins is well known as an intellectual adversary to all forms of religious belief – and of Christianity in particular. He is one of the world's most prolific scientists, writing books for a popular audience and addressing his strident worldview of evolutionary theory to an expanding audience. Put simply, Richard Dawkins aspires to be the "devil's chaplain" of Darwinian evolution.
All this is what makes Dawkins' denial of a confrontational approach so ludicrous. It is simply false at face value. This is a man who has taken every conceivable opportunity to make transparently clear his unquestioned belief that the dominant theory of evolution renders any form of belief in God irrational, backward, and dangerous.
Dawkins set out the basic framework of his worldview in best-selling books including, The Blind Watchmaker, Climbing Mount Improbable, Unweaving the Rainbow, and, most famously, The Selfish Gene. Now, in The God Delusion, Dawkins brings his attack on Christianity to a broader audience. Interestingly, Dawkins' new book is released close on the heels of two similar works. Fellow skeptics Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett have written similar books released since late summer. Taken together, these three books represent something of a frontal attack upon the legitimacy of belief in God.
There are few surprises in The God Delusion. Dawkins is a gifted writer who is able to popularize scientific concepts, and he writes with an acerbic style that fits his purpose in this volume. His condescending and sarcastic tone set the stage for what he hopes will be a devastating attack upon theism.
Dawkins admits his "presumptuous optimism" in hoping that his book will cause persons to set aside their faith. "If this book works as I intend, religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put it down," he asserts. Time will tell.
Though The God Delusion is intended more as an attack upon theism than as a defense of evolutionary theory, the framework of evolution is never far from Dawkins' mind. In his opening chapter, he argues that most legitimate scientists – indeed all who really understand the issues at stake – are atheists of one sort or another. He defines the alternatives as between a stark atheism (such as that Dawkins himself represents) and a form of nonsupernatural religion, as illustrated by the case of Albert Einstein. "Great scientists of our time who sound religious usually turn out not to be so when you examine their beliefs more deeply," he explains. As examples, Dawkins offers not only Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking but also Martin Rees, currently Britain's Astronomer Royal and President of the Royal Society. According to Dawkins, Rees "goes to church as an 'unbelieving Anglican . . . out of loyalty to the tribe.'" As Dawkins explains, Rees "has no theistic beliefs, but shares the poetic naturalism that the cosmos provokes in the other scientists I have mentioned. He cites Einstein to the effect that he was a "deeply religious nonbeliever" – moved by the majesty of the cosmos but without any reference whatsoever to a supernatural being.
As Dawkins explains, real scientists are naturalists. As such, they eliminate entirely the question of a supernatural being's existence. "The metaphorical or pantheistic God of the physicists is light years away from the interventionist, miracle-wreaking, thought-reading, sin-punishing, prayer-answering God of the Bible, of priests, mullahs and rabbis, and of ordinary language. Deliberately to confuse the two is, in my opinion, an act of intellectual high treason."Continue »
