Christopher Hitchens on The God Delusion, by Richard ...
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|Christopher Hitchens on The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins : (Black Swan) |
|Guardian Review 05/12.09 |
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|There are numberless reasons for regarding The God Delusion as a modem classic and one of these reasons, I would propose, is its relative |
|superfluity. Richard Dawkins has already introduced millions of people to the rigour and beauty of the scientific worldview and shown in |
|exquisite detail the ways in which we, like all our fellow creatures, have evolved and were in no meaningful sense "created". |
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|Before the arid term "scientist" was coined in the last century, men such as Newton and Darwin were reckoned as "natural philosophers": a |
|term that suits Dawkins very well. Another scholar deserving of the same title of honour was the late paleontologist. Stephen Jay Gould, and |
|The God Delusion can be read as a response to Gould's conciliatory and wishful proposition that "science" and "faith" (or religion) occupy |
|"non-overlapping magisteria". |
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|Dawkins's energy, industry and wit, in disputing this idle view and in showing the hard, historic incompatibilities between the two, have led|
|to his being caricatured as a dogmatist in his own right, even as a "fundamentalist". What empty piffle this is. A senior teacher in the |
|vital field of biology finds his discipline under the crudest form of attack, and sees government money being squandered on the teaching of |
|drivel in schools. What sort of tutor would he be if he did not rise to the defence of his own profession? Thus the appearance of a secondary|
|work that ought not to have been needed at all, but is in fact required now more than ever. |
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|The God Delusion is, like Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell, quite respectful of the human origins of religion and of the ways in which |
|it may have assisted people in spiritual and even material ways. We are pattern-seeking primates, and religion was our first attempt to make |
|sense of nature and the cosmos. This does not give us permission, however, to go on pretending that religion is other than man-made. And the |
|worst excuse ever invented for the exertion of power by one primate over another is the claim that certain primates have God on their side. |
|It is not only justifiable to be impatient and contemptuous when such tyrannies are proposed; it's more like a duty. |
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|The atheist does not say and cannot prove that there is no deity. He or she says that no persuasive evidence or argument has ever been |
|adduced for the notion. Surely this should place the burden on the faithful, who do after all make very large claims for themselves and their|
|religions. But not a bit of it: we are somehow supposed to regard the profession of "faith" as if it were a good thing in itself. This is too|
|much to ask, and it I was high time to say so. |
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|I regret to say that I have just noticed a tiny mistake on page 177. It is not true to say that the Virgin Mary "ascended" into heaven. She |
|was "assumed" into that place, by a ruling of the Roman Catholic church that dates back all the way to the mid-19th century. Dawkins really |
|must be more careful, but he may have been busy, as ', in the chapter of Climbing Mount Improbable in which he described the 20 or so |
|separate evolution's of the eye. Readers of The God Delusion ought to press on and buy all the other Dawns volumes too: |
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