Almost twenty years ago I did a series of posts for VP in which I wrote down my thoughts on Richard Dawkins' book The God Delusion (henceforth, TGD). Back then I went through the book chapter by chapter, and I thought it might be worthwhile to reprise that series today since the book was so influential in shaping the beliefs of so many students and to some extent continues to be so today.
With that introduction here are some thoughts on chapter one of TGD:
The God Delusion Chapter 1:
Dawkins says in the preface that "If this book works as I intend, religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put it down."
I don't know how successful he's been in achieving that goal - although I've heard more than one person say that the book really shook them - but the effectiveness of Dawkins' polemic, in my opinion, is due more to the emotional impact of his jackhammer indictments of religion than to the rigor of his arguments against the existence of God.
In chapter one he sets out to dispel the myth that Einstein and others were religious believers. In this he is, of course, correct. Einstein used the word "God" as a shorthand for the mysteriousness of the cosmos. He did not believe in a transcendent, personal creator. Dawkins' project in TGD is to destroy the basis for belief in the latter. He's indifferent about conceptions of God which immanentize him.
He then proceeds to argue that religion and religious belief do not deserve any more respect than any other beliefs one holds.
Religious beliefs should not be deemed immune to challenge and, he argues, we should not hesitate to press people on their religious beliefs even if this causes them to be offended. I happen to agree with him on this point as well.
A man's belief in God should not be treated with the deference that we treat his belief, for example, that his wife is beautiful. In fact, I think the reason we often do treat a person's religious beliefs respectfully and deferentially is out of a certain politeness.
We have learned through long experience that most people cannot give a coherent defense of their beliefs and that to press them to defend them would only embarrass them, like pressing a man to defend his conviction of his wife's beauty. Not wishing to embarrass people, and not seeing the matter as particularly significant, we generally don't pursue such questions.
This is fine if we are inclined not to create hard feelings, but I see nothing wrong with someone like Dawkins laying down the gauntlet to religious believers, especially if those believers are themselves evangelical and concerned to encourage others to accept their faith. Christians believe, after all, that they should always be prepared to give an account for the hope that is within them.
I disagree with him, though, when soon after he tells us that "the right to be Christian seems ... to mean the right to poke your nose into other people's private lives." He has in mind here Christian opposition to the LGBTQ+ political agenda, and Dawkins thinks it's simply intolerable that Christians would publicly declare the embrace of any sexual lifestyle to be morally wrong.
This is rather an odd objection coming from the man who thinks it's just fine to poke his own nose into people's private lives and tell Christians that they're morally wrong to embrace religious faith and to raise their children in it.
In any event, the claim that any behavior is morally wrong is an odd one coming from a man who is promoting in his book the idea that there is no God and thus no basis for anything being right or wrong in a moral sense. It was Dawkins, after all, who once asked, "How can we say that Hitler was wrong? I mean that's a very difficult question."
But this discussion will have to wait until chapter 6 and 7.
