Back from Thailand Mission. I read a couple of books (mainly on the plane there and back).
First, "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins. I read it because a number of people at church have been unsettled by Richard Dawkins and his new book looked like being a bigger splash than anything he's previously done. I wanted to be able to be part of conversations about the book that would inevitably arise at church. Interesting - I haven't met a non-Christian yet who has read Richard Dawkins - seems like hes getting rich from Christians reading his books.
The book sets out to argue that there is no good reason to believe in God (of any kind). Dawkins does not just argue for agnosticism (he attacks this position) but that the existence of God is so improbable as to be virtually unbelievable. Further than this he constantly wants to say that religion does great damage and the world would be far better without it.
Dawkins is funny, acidic, and deligfhltfully engaging. Like Bill Bryson in his Breif History of Everything, Dawkins takes difficult scientific ideas and explains them clearly and interestingly. But more than this he is a great debater. Reading Dawkins is like those conversations where you realise what you should have said the next day. Its only afterwards that you start to see that his arguments aren't as rock solid as they first appear. In many ways Dawkins is like the typical fundamentalist preacher he so loves to lampoon - say it confident enough, often enough, loudly enough, make it funny enough, and everyone will be nodding along in agreement (or even shouting Amen).
Overall, I found the book interesting but surprisingly shallow. Dawkins rattles off a long list of reasons for believing in God and then demolishes them one by one. However most of them are arguments no-one really bases their belief in God upon, such as Aquinas' "logical proofs" or that "God answers prayer". He then dismisses a couple of major arguments in a few superficial paragraphs. The historical reality of Jesus and his resurrection is dismissed in a disappointing half page (p XX). Likewise see his two paragraph dismissal of the Trinity because it doesn't make sense (p XX) implying that only a simpleton would not be taken in by the obvious contradictions - I'd love to see him discuss the apparently contradictory particle and wave properties of light and then dismiss the existence of light all together.
The best things to read if Dawkins does seen persuasive are John Dickson, "A Spectator's Guide to World Religions" (keep going until the last chapter which demolishes a Dawkins-like approach) and Alistair McGrath "The Rise and Fall of Unbelief" (who directly inteacts with Dawkins).
The most thought provoking section is his critique of the "separate magesterium". That you can't measure the existence of God with a thermometer, that Science tells you 'How', Christianity tells you 'Why'. But Dawkins argues that Christianity is constantly making claims that ought to be measurable - that impinge on the material world. We believe that God answers prayer, and so on. More about this in a later blog.
The second half of the book involves a long disciussion on memes. Please read Mervin Tinkler (The Breifing December 06) who has done a much better job of describing and demolishing this stuff than I could ever do.
The most annoying things about Dawkins - he constantly sets up straw men. He cities the example of someone who mistook a bird call for the voice of God and then went to the mission field, the implication being that all religious experience is just people imagining things, and all religious conviction is deluded. When I went back and re-read the "most convincing" sections again I constantly noticed the way things he hasn't proved get implied, and ideas and impressions get smuggled in and all sorts of things never proved get implied. Very disillusioning.
