The Internet was never a bastion of sound reasoning, so I guess it shouldn’t surprise me that stuff like this comes out of it. However I thought this particular product of fallacious thinking was rather fun:

So what are they saying here? It’s a rather simple point. Christianity has varied wildly over the centuries while atheism has remained simple and unchanged. Then they (incorrectly) apply Occam’s Razor to shave off Christianity and leave Atheism, thus invalidating Christianity as a viable theory; voila!

Well what’s the problem? Again, it’s a simple point. Considering the branches and divisions in Atheism and Christianity as a point of contrast creates a false comparison. In this sense they are treating atheism as a philosophical proposition and Christianity as a religion or worldview. A proper comparison of propositions would be between atheism and theism. Here’s a fixed edit of the image:

What’s more, Atheism can be treated as worldview as Christianity was in the first image, and then we can see that it, too, shares the same fate of schism and division as Christianity has. The atheism of some ancient Greek sects is very different from the atheism of Bolshevism, or the atheism of Bertrand Russell. To say that their atheism is the same is to treat it like a proposition. To do the same for Christian groups would be to say that their theism is the same, which is true.

Tom Gilson of Thinking Christian has posted a review of Michael Novak’s new book No One Sees God.

The book seems to be a call to both atheists and believers to put aside the polemics and try to find common ground; to remember that we are all human and all share the trait of not being able to “see God.” It would be nice if such collaboration was likely, however I forsee many falling back on the old question begging standpoint: “Why should I deign to comport with someone who is wrong?”

Hopefully that’s just the cynic in me.

[Ed: This is an old post that never made it through the whole publishing process because, well, life got in the way and so did my server's ability to boot without going into kernel panic. I'm going to continue on with reviewing The God Delusion because I promised someone I would.]

Alright. This is the first real entry on my iterative analysis of Richard Dawkins’ new book The God Delusion (go here for the first). It’s going to be short, though, because the first chapter really doesn’t say much all that necessary of further dissection. The chapter divides into two sections, Deserved Respect and Undeserved Respect. The first is a clarification between two kinds of religion: “supernatural religion” and “Einsteinian religion”. Einsteinian religion, as Dawkins calls it, is that “quasi-mystical response to nature [that] is common among scientists and rationalists.” ^[1] This type of religion is in juxtaposition to the supernatural religion of “religious people”, and it is the gods of supernatural religion that Dawkins is calling delusional. I’m not sure why he called this section Deserved Respect. Possibly he meant it as a contrast to what gets Undeserved Respect.

What is it that gets this undeserved respect? Why religion, of course. Dawkins provides of litany of areas where religion is provided with unthinking respect that it should not have. Or, rather, it is provided with respect merely because it is religion, and not because of any trait that would make the respect deservéd. That’s actually fine with me. I don’t think we should give respect unthinkingly. Religious ideas should be able to be freely questioned just like any other, and both suppoorters and detractors should have a voice.

Notice, however, that there is a difference between questioning religious ideas and haranguing religious people with sophmoric polemics and pejoratives. The two should not be equated. Also note that a failure to understand why there is generally respect for religion does not mean that, ergo, you should disrespect religion and religious people. It might be the case that people do not merely respect religion ipso facto, but for other reasons as well.

One final note: in this chapter, Dawkins makes the following quote: “Some men think that because they have achieved a high degree of learning in one field, they are qualified to express opinions in all.” ^[2] I’m going to step out on a limb and make a prediction here: By the end of this book we are going to see Dawkins eat those words. I know Richard is a very, very intelligent person; much moreso than I, and I know that his interests probably scale numerous disciplines. But I also know that his professional fields are zoology and biology. From what I’ve seen in other reviews (and this is borne out in the table of contents), he makes philosophical and moral objections to God’s existence. That would be fine, of course, if he were properly a philosopher. In fact, I think it would be fine if were a sailor, or a barista. What’s not fine is making such a complaint and then commiting the very same thing yourself. My bet is that Dawkins’ philosophical objections are going to be the same old rehashed arguments that have been dealt with time and again. Why would he do this? Because those areas of scholarship are not his field.

I don’t mean to say that I’m going to set Dawkins straight every place he’s wrong, but I do hope to provide rebuttals to some of his arguments. I am in no way a professional in the area of philosophy, but it’s where my passion lies. In contrast I don’t have much practical knowledge in the area of evolution and intelligent design, which Dawkins spends several sections on. That’s a topic of study that really doesn’t bear much interest for me, at least not enough to wade through the morass of contending books and papers. I feel if I were to respond in an authoritative way I would most assuredly be coming from a standpoint lacking a solid base of knowledge. So if my critique of the “scientific” sections of his book is sub-par, I apologize in advance. I’m sure there are reviews out there that do his arguments much more justice.

1. Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. 11.
2. Ibid. 16.

As I said a few posts ago, I’ve been reading (ever so slowly) through Mark Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. The book really is excellent, and I recommend it to anyone who wants to get a grasp on why Christian Thought is the way it is today. In this post I want to highlight one of Noll’s better strengths: charting the changes in the Christian mind through history.

He does this in several ways in the book, each delineated in its own chapter: the university, American culture, politics, science, etc. He points to the shifts and changes through time that show the effects that the deficiency in Christian thinking has had on each institution. At the end of the chapter on the “Intellectual Disaster of Fundamentalism” Noll makes an aside that I just found too interesting to pass up.

The rest follows after the jump.

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