Friends, forgive this-here miserable sinner for launching a thread on something probably already discussed in three dozen other places on this board. But yea verily I just can't be bothered sifting through all the round'n'round discussion on the matter to see where it best belongs.
As an agnostic, I view atheists as people who are convinced, as a matter of blind faith, of something they couldn't rationally be at all sure about. And, as with Bertrand Russell's sneering dismissal of the Church of England (by means of which he imagined he was somehow disproving theism), there's a note of zealotry in what I've read by Dawkins on the subject.
The biologist H. Allen Orr puts it rather nicely in this article from
The NY Review of Books.
Quote:
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Quote by: Orr (...) One of the most interesting questions about Dawkins's book is why it was written. Why does Dawkins feel he has anything significant to say about religion and what gives him the sense of authority presumably needed to say it at book length? The God Delusion certainly establishes that Dawkins has little new to offer. Its arguments are those of any bright student who has thumbed through Bertrand Russell's more popular books and who has, horrified, watched videos of holy rollers. Dawkins is obviously entitled to his views on God, ballet, and currency markets. But I doubt he feels much need to pen books on the last two topics.
The reason Dawkins thinks he has something to say about God is, of course, clear: he is an evolutionary biologist. And as we all know, Darwinism had an early and noisy run-in with religion. What Dawkins never seems to consider is that this incident might have been, in an important way, local and contingent. It might, in other words, have turned out differently, at least in principle. Believers could, for instance, have uttered a collective "So what?" to evolution. Indeed some did. The angry reaction of many religious leaders to Darwinism had complex causes, involving equal parts ignorance, fear, politics, and the sheer shock of the new. The point is that it's far from certain that there is an ineluctable conflict between the acceptance of evolutionary mechanism and the belief that, as William James putit, "the visible world is part of a more spiritual universe." Instead, we and Dawkins might simply be living through the reverberations of an interesting, but not especially fundamental, bit of Victorian history. If so, evolutionary biology would enjoy no particularly exalted pulpit from which to preach about religion. (...) |
Rest here.