[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.

In starting “The God Delusion Challenge” I figured that my first post would be over the first chapter, or section, but there was something in the preface that irked me. And as someone who can’t leave well enough alone, I won’t.

The preface of The God Delusion (hereafter “TGD”) is a laundry list of the chapter topics and the purposes which Dawkins says that they each serve. As the book was written to “raise consciousness” he hopes that each chapter will speak to different people, based on where they’re coming from, i.e. if they’re attached to religion because they never knew they could abandon that, he has a chapter on it; if they grew up “indoctrinated” into a certain religion, he has a chapter on it. I won’t deny that that’s a “noble pursuit”, as Dawkins says. He wants to get these ideas out there so people are made aware of them. More power to him.

Now the piece that irked me was his comment on the religious indoctrination of children. I was fully prepared to skip over it without comment and take up the issue once I got to the chapter dealing with it, but Dawkins was so passionate and unapologetically repetetive on this point that I decided to tackle it first. He says:

…if you hear anybody speak of a Catholic child’, stop them and politely point out that children are too young to know where they stand on such issues, just as they are too young to know whwere they stand on economics or politics…I shall not apologize for mentioning it here in the Preface as well as in Chapter 9. You can’t say it too often. I’ll say it again. That is not a Muslim child, but a child of Muslim parents. That child is too young to know whether it is a Muslim or not. There is no such thing as a Muslim child. There is no such thing as a Christian child. ^[1]

Does anyone notice what was conspicuously absent from that (albeit incomplete) list? The Atheist child. Now I’m going to give Dawkins the benefit of the doubt and assume that he would accept that if it is improper to label a child under any certain religious heritage then it is equally improper to label them Atheist… but it makes you wonder: would he? Or does he hold atheism over and above other belief patterns as the only safe bet for indoctrination? I guess we’ll have to wait till Chapter 9 to find out.

This topic also brings up something that I’ve been thinking about for a while: is indoctrination ever OK? Let’s say that a proposition, P, is true, and you know, beyond all necessary certainty, that proposition P is true. Would it be right to “indoctrinate” your child with assent to and belief in the truth of P? All other things being equal, would it be better for your child to be taught that P is true though they may not have an adequate understanding of P? Or would it be better to allow for the possibility of propositions with less truth content to take the place of P? I think it’s abundantly clear to everyone that if P is true and you know P is true, then safeguarding early assent to P would be good for your child. And actually, I think that we do this. Things that we know are true, and would be beneficial to our child to have belief in, we indocrinate into them though they may not have a full understanding. Just take a moment and think of all the do’s and don’ts your parents told you as a child that were beneficial though you didn’t understand (and might not have agreed!). Was it wrong for them to tell you not to play in the street? Should they have let you find out for yourself? Or is it the case that there are some things which it is dangerous to not indoctrinate your children with? (Stay away from strangers. Mind your manners.)

Now, to make a jump, if there is a proposition of a religious belief B that is true, and all other religious beliefs are to some extent false or less true, then is it good to indoctrinate belief in this proposition into children? Well if it is the case that, given the truth of B, opposing religious belief propositions have an amount of inherent danger to them (reality of Hell, lack of nourishment of the soul, abandonment of prescribed moral values), then yes it is good to indoctrinate this belief. I’m going to take a guess here and say that Dawkins probably believes that indoctrination is wrong because the child grows up unquestioning of the belief and is thus ignorant and foolish. He obviously thinks this is true of religious believers. I would respond by saying that the indoctrination of religious belief and the indoctrination of an unquestioning attitude towards that belief are two very different things, though they are regrettably often taught at the same time.

But of course, this claim of mine only goes so far. The major rebuttals would be that 1) it is not abundantly clear that any given indoctrinatable proposition is true, and thus 2) we don’t have absolute certainty on this point. I would respond by saying that there ARE some indoctrinatable propositions we know are true, and valuable to teach to children, such as the ones I gave above. And though we might not have absolute certainty, we at the very least have a measure of certainty on the probability of some propositions. If we weigh the probability that a proposition is true against the danger of indoctrinating a child with a false belief, and against the danger of NOT indoctrinating a child with a true belief, what do we come up with? I guess that’s the question.

1. Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. 3.

Yesterday I got a chance to have a good apologetically-oriented discussion with a few people on irc. It started out with someone asking if I believed that homosexuality was a sin, and I replied that yes, homosexual acts are sinful. It then sort of spiraled into a discussion on biological determinism, naturalism, and the nature of the soul. My basic argument was that:

1) It doesn’t matter how many theories are continuously propounded for biological factors which determine sexuality, because narturalism has still never given an adequate explanation of the mind and consciousness. If it turns out that you, your ego, are not your material brain then the whole house of cards tumbles.

2) Arguments offered from the existence of homosexual animals are nonsensical for the reasons above. It wouldn’t matter if we were 100% biologically identical to rats, if it were also the case that we were mentally different and that mental state contained the seat of desires, beliefs, etc.

The discussion then disintegrated into how one of the persons believed that God could not exist, but since the existence of God is irrational he could never provide a reasoned argument for non-existence. I pointed out that he could still make arguments for the irrationality, and also probabilistic non-existence arguments, which he partially assented to. Then I made the point that if he truly believed God did not exist but he could only ever provide mere assertions (which were numerous), and not a reasoned, full argument, then he was chained to an irrational belief for which he has no good reason to hold on to so dearly.

After that the claim was made that Dawkins’s book, The God Delusion, had arguments that this person thought were good enough to make a case either for the impossibility or improbability of God. I said that if the persons opposing me would all assent to the arguments proffered by Dawkins, then I would read the book (which I just got last night from Amazon) and give a response.

So that’s what I’m going to do. And I will probably end up posting responses to chapters or sections on this blog so I can receive comments and constructive criticism. The book is almost 400 pages, however, and appears to have quite a bit of content so I imagine this will take a long time. Look here for updates to come.