Richard Dawkins: The God Delusion (Hardcover); 2006 Edition

A very difficult book to read, I had to sit with a dictionary next to me to look up a lot of the words but well worth it. I have been a Christian for many years. This book rocked my world and since reading it I have been meditating regarding my beliefs. I am open to discussion about a number of religions and found this book to be most enlightening.

I love how it tears thru any religious beliefs with practical sense that any fool should be able to see thru.Religion is a crutch for weak minded individuals to lean on.

I love this book!

Great book to make you think. Mind opening. Helps to look at different perspectives involving faith or the lack of. Personally, help to confirm some of my inner struggles.

I find it curious that Professor Dawkins rates himself at 6 on his own 7-point spectrum ranging from 1 (strong theist) to 7 (strong atheist). In this respect, it seems to me that Professor Dawkins is viewing the existence of God as an ontological issue. There is his amusing example about being agnostic about God in the same way that he is agnostic about fairies at the bottom of the garden. Why does Professor Dawkins hedge, even if just a little bit?Why not move from an ontological basis to a logical basis? From here, the claim moves from ‘God does not exist’ to ‘God cannot exist.’ God is a self-refuting concept. The definition of God and the properties necessary for a being to be God results in a set of logical contradictions. These are logical obstacles that prevent even the possibility that an entity such as God can exist. Professor Dawkins is at the level of supreme ontological improbability, rather than logical impossibility. That is, ontologically we cannot prove a negative but by reducing God to a set of logical claims we can show that these contradictory claims effectively prove that God cannot exist, i.e., on these terms, a negative can be proved.The logical problem arises with the use of universal quantifiers in describing the properties of God such as `all' as in `all-knowing', ‘all-powerful’ and `all-good'. I believe that any discussion about `all' or for that matter `immortality', `infinity' and ‘perfection’ is fraught with fatal difficulties as I believe it nearly impossible to construct philosophically adequate definitions of concepts such as `all', `infinity', `immortality' and `perfection'. These words have strong emotive appeal and connotative meaning but are systemically ambiguous and thus lack precise philosophical meaning and are not suitable for philosophical argumentation, they can be very misleading. We tend to use and treat these words in too simple a manner when they actually describe states that are altogether outside of human experience. Do we really have any idea of what ‘infinity’, ‘immortality’, ‘perfection’, ‘all’ or ‘absolute’ anything is? Fill in the blank here with `all' or `absolute', e.g., -goodness, -being, -knowledge etc.).How can a being be both all-good and all-powerful? These are properties commonly assigned to God. If this being is all-good, then it cannot be all-powerful because its power is constrained by the requirement to be all-good. This entity lacks the power to be anything other than all-good, it cannot therefore be all-powerful at the same time. That is, both of these properties cannot coexist within the same entity. Therefore, an entity that is all-good and all-powerful cannot exist, it is self-refuting.How can a being be both all-knowing and all-powerful? These properties are also commonly assigned to the God. The combination of these properties also leads to a logical contradiction. To be all-knowing, such a being must be able to engage in perfect prediction as well as retrodiction about the universe. For prediction to be possible there must exist regular laws or patterns of behavior that govern existence and reality. If these laws or patterns hold, then the being cannot be all-powerful, the being cannot suspend them and at the same time rely on them for prediction. If the being is all-powerful, then regular laws do not hold thus making prediction and the ability to be all-knowing impossible. Therefore, the being cannot be all-powerful and all-knowing. Again, both of these properties cannot coexist within the same entity. Therefore, an entity that is all-knowing and all-powerful cannot exist, it is self-refuting.The logical trick used by apologists to avoid this conclusion is the dreaded challenge: “You cannot prove that God does not exist”. Since an ontological negative (claim of non-existence) cannot be proven, the logical fallacy of this challenge is to turn a negation into an assertion and then demand proof for this false pseudo-assertion.I hope that it is now safe for Professor Dawkins to join me at 7 on his own scale.

Clinton Richard Dawkins (born 1941) is an English ethologist and evolutionary biologist, as well as an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford. He has written some of the most creative and challenging defenses of evolutionary theory [e.g.,  The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design , Climbing Mount Improbable ] of anyone other than the late Stephen Jay Gould. He said in the Preface to this 2006 book, "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... 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... to the fact that ... You can be an atheist who is happy, balanced, moral, and intellectually fulfilled." (Pg. 1)He asserts, "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, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” (Pg. 31)After reviewing Einstein's conceptions of God, he comments, "I wish that physicists would refrain from using the word God in their specific metaphorical sense. 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... Deliberately to confuse the two is, in my opinion, an act of intellectual high treason." (Pg. 19) Later, he adds, "the deist God is certainly an improvement over the monster of the Bible. Unfortunately it is scarcely more likely that he exists, or ever did." (Pg. 46)He clarifies, "I shall define the God Hypothesis more defensibly: there exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us. This book will advocate an alternative view: any creative intelligence, of sufficient complexity to design anything, comes into existence only as the end product of an extended process of gradual evolution." (Pg. 31)He states, "This conclusion is so surprising, I'll say it again. If the odds of life originating spontaneously on a planet were a billion to one against, nevertheless that stupefyingly improbable event would still happen on a billion planets. The chance of finding any one of those billion life-bearing planets recalls the proverbial needle in a haystack. But ... any beings capable of looking must necessarily be sitting on one of those prodigiously rare needles before they even start the search." (Pg. 138) He adds, "however small the minority of evolution-friendly planets may be, our planet necessarily has to be one of them" (Pg. 141), and "the present universe has to be one of that minority, because we are in it." (Pg. 145)He also suggests, "The key difference between the genuinely extravagant God hypothesis and the apparently extravagant multiverse hypothesis is one of statistical improbability. The multiverse, for all that it is extravagant, is simple. God, or any intelligent, decision-taking, calculating agent, would have to be highly improbable in the very same statistical sense as the entities he is supposed to explain. The multiverse may seem extravagant in sheer NUMBER of universes. But if each one of those universes is simple in its fundamental laws, we are still not postulating anything highly improbable. The very opposite has to be said of any kind of intelligence." (Pg. 148-149)He admits, "there's no denying that, from a moral point of view, Jesus is a huge improvement over the cruel ogre of the Old Testament. Indeed Jesus, if he existed (or whoever wrote his script if he didn't) was surely one of the great ethical innovators of history. The Sermon on the Mount is way ahead of its time." (Pg. 250)Dawkins' book is written so as to be deliberately provocative, of course, so opinions about it will be wildly divergent. I would simply suggest that one read it for oneself before forming any opinion.

great book in very good condion