The God Delusion Part II

Today I finished The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, and I am going to list the chapter titles and drop a brief set of the more memorable ideas uncovered in each. At the outset I want to say that I have been deeply challenged by the presentation of his alternative to faith, and although the jury is still out concerning my belief in God, I am seriously leaning towards seeing atheism as a realistic resting place for my worldview. I'm interested in hearing from as many as I can who can either agree with or rebut the matter of the importance (or lack thereof) of religion.

First off, in the Preface, there is a potent paragraph that I think is worthy of inclusion in this personal summary. It states:

"I suspect - well, I am sure - that there are lots of people out there who have been brought up in some religion or other, are unhappy in it, don't believe it, or are worried about the evils that are done in its name; people who feel vague yearnings to leave thier parents' religion and wish they could, but just don't realize that leaving is an option. If you are one of them, this book is for you. It is intended to raise consciousness - raise consciousness to the fact that to be an atheist is a realistic aspiration, and a brave and splendid one. You can be an atheist who is happy, balanced, moral, and intellectually fulfilled."

I have been a firsthand witness to many who grew up in a religion their parents have thrust upon them from infancy and who only went through the motions of faith because they have no idea there is a legitimate alternative. This book, as the paragraph above suggests, presents a most remarkable opt-out.

I. A Deeply Religious Non-Believer
In this opening chapter Dawkins does a terrific job at pointing out the absurdity of how much religion is so often unchallenged. I like this sentence:

"A widespread assumption, which nearly everybody in our society accepts - the non-religious included - is that religious faith is especially vulnerable to offence and should be protected by an abnormally thick wall of respect, in a different class from the respect that any human being should pay to any other."

This, of course, results frequently in a "no questions asked" mentality, and allows leadership to dupe the followers further and further into stupidity.

II. The God Hypothesis
Chapter 2 opens with a bang, and I'll let it speak for itself:

"The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, capricious malevolent bully."

III. Arguments For God's Existence
In the 3rd chapter Dawkins writes about the many reasons individuals give for belief in God, such as Thomas Aquinas' 'Proofs', The Ontological Argument and Other A Priori Arguments, Beauty, Personal 'Experience', Scripture, the words of Admired Religious Scientists, Pascal's Wager, etc. I was personally moved by the following lines:

"A designer God cannot be used to explain organized complexity because any God capable of designing anything would have to be complex enough to demand the same kind of explanation in his own right. God presents an infinite regress from which he cannot help us escape."

IV. Why There Almost Certainly Is No God
This is a very lucid chapter and makes such a strong case I was almost convinced to forego belief on the spot. A couple of interesting quotes follow, first a paraphrase of Fred Hoyle, then a good comment by the author on natural selection:

"...the probability of life originating on Earth is no greater than the chance that a hurricane, sweeping through a scrapyard, would have the luck to assemble a Boing 747."

"What is it that makes natural selection succeed as a solution to the problem of improbability, where chance and design both fail at the starting gate? The answer is that natural selection is a cumulative process, which breaks the problem of improbability up into small pieces. Each of the small pieces is slightly improbable, but not prohibitively so."

V. The Roots Of Religion
As Dawkins suggests there are a number of theories concerning both the advent and the proliferation of religion, namely that it gives consolation and comfort, fosters togetherness and satisfies our yearnings for an explanation of our existence. The authors theory can be gleaned from the following:

"I am one of an increasing number of biologists who see religion as a by-product of something else. More generally, I believe that we who speculate about Darwinian survival value need to 'think by-product'. When we ask about the survival value of anything, we may be asking teh wrong question. We need to rewrite the question in a more helpful way. Perhaps the feature we are interested in (religion in this case) doesn't have a direct survival value of its own, but is a by-product of something else that does."

VI. The Roots Of Morality: Why Are We Good?
Concerning the question of why would we be good if there is no God, Dawkins writes the following:

"Posed like that, the question sounds positively ignoble. When a religious person puts it to me in this way (and many of them do), my immediate temptation is to issue the following challenge: 'Do you really mean to tell me the only reason you try to be good is to gain God's approval and reward, or to avoid his disapproval and punishment? That's not morality, that's just sucking up, apple-polishing, looking over your shoulder at the great surveillance camera in the sky, or the still small wiretap inside your head, monitoring your every move, even your every base thought.' As Einstein said, 'If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.' Michael Shermer, in The Science of Good and Evil, calls it a debate stopper. If you agree that, in the absence of God, you would 'commit robbery, rape, and murder', you reveal yourself as an immoral person, 'and we would be well advised to steer a wide course around you.' If, on the other hand, you admit that you would continue to be a good person even when not under divine surveillance, you have fatally undermined your claim that God is necessary for us to be good. I suspect that quite a lot of religious people do think religion is what motivates them to be good, especially if they belong to one of those faiths that systematically exploits personal guilt."

VII. The 'Good' Book and the Changing Moral Zeitgeist
This particular chapter in the book is such a clear explanation of how the Bible is on the same level as other books and NOT the God-breathed document I once so staunchly believed it to be, that I am puzzled how I ever gave such high regards to "the word of God". Consider this:

"To be fair, much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird, as you would expect of a chaotically cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents, composed, revised, translated, distorted and 'improved' by hundreds of anonymous authors, editors and copyists, unknown to us and mostly unknown to each other, spanning nine centuries. This may explain some of the sheer strangeness of the Bible. But unfortunately it is this same weird volume that religious zealots hold up to us as the inerrant source of our morals and rules for living. Those who wish to base their morality literally on the Bible have either not read it or not understood it..."

VIII. What's Wrong With Religion? Why Be So Hostile?
In this and the following chapter Dawkins points out just how dangerous religion is not only for adults, but children as well. Chew on this:

"More generally (and this applies to Christianity no less than to Islam), what is really pernicious is the practice of teaching children that faith itself is a virtue. Faith is an evil precisely because it requires no justification and brooks no argument. Teaching children that unquestioned faith is a virtue primes them - given certain other ingredients that are not hard to come by - to grow up into potentially lethal weapons for future jihads or crusades...Faith can be very very dangerous, and deliberately to implant it into the vulnerable mind of an innocent child is a grievous wrong."

IX. Childhood, Abuse and the Escape From Religion
There are too many valuable phrases and paragraphs in this chapter to pull one out as a summary, so let me offer this one as a morsel to tempt your better self to read the whole matter yourself:

" 'Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.' The adage is true as long as you don't really believe the words. But if your whole upbringing, and everything you have ever been told by parents, teachers and priests, has led you to believe, really believe, utterly and completely, that sinners burn in hell (or some other obnoxious article of doctrine such as that a woman is the property of her husband), it is entirely plausible that words could have a more long-lasting and damaging effect than deeds. I am persuaded that the phrase 'child abuse' is no exaggeration when used to describe what teachers and priests are doing to children whom they encourage to believe in something like the punishment of unshriven mortal sins in eternal hell."

X. A Much Needed Gap?
A power-packed final chapter left me with a boatload of questions and fascinations. I like this paragraph as an overview of all that is contained in chapter 10:

"Does religion fill a much needed gap? It is often said that there is a God-shaped gap in the brain which needs to be filled: we have a psychological need for God - imaginary friend, father, big brother, confessor, confidant - and the need has to be satisfied whether God really exists or not. But could it be that God clutters up a gap that we'd be better off filling with something else? Science, perhaps? Art? Human friendship? Humanism? Love of this life in the real world, giving no credence to other lives beyond the grave?"

All in all I'm very satisfied that I've read this book. Much thanks to Andy B. for the recommendation (and the loan!!), and I think the only way I can honestly repay him is to pass along my plug to as many as will listen. If for no other reason I think this book needs to be read to at least get a glimpse of what atheism can be like minus the usual image of the dark, twisted, bitter, pessimistic non-believer so many possess today.