Is your faith simply a delusion?
Wednesday, November 1, 2006 at 10:17PM 
I love reading stuff that is challenging. The book that I am dipping into at the moment is "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins.
It makes for very interesting reading indeed. Of course it has caused quite a stir among religious people! Dawkins pulls no punches. However, in the process of trying to take a digg at religious fundamentalism, he makes the mistake of naively believing that all religious persons are to be painted with the same brush.
I read a review of this book that is even better than the book itself! You can read the whole review here. It is skillfully writen and has a keen insight into both Dawkins' style and his aim.
Here are a few extracts from the review. (P.S. I do still encourage scholars, theologians, and persons of faith to read this book. It is always a good idea to be informed on what people may be thinking about you and what you believe! However, this book is not for the faint hearted - if you're not sure what you believe, it is probably not worth reading.)
A comment on Dawkins' theological insights:
Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don?t believe there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth understanding. This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince.
A critique of Dawkins' concept of God:
Dawkins speaks scoffingly of a personal God, as though it were entirely obvious exactly what this might mean. He seems to imagine God, if not exactly with a white beard, then at least as some kind of chap, however supersized. He asks how this chap can speak to billions of people simultaneously, which is rather like wondering why, if Tony Blair is an octopus, he has only two arms. For Judeo-Christianity, God is not a person in the sense that Al Gore arguably is. Nor is he a principle, an entity, or ?existent?: in one sense of that word it would be perfectly coherent for religious types to claim that God does not in fact exist. He is, rather, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever, including ourselves. He is the answer to why there is something rather than nothing. God and the universe do not add up to two, any more than my envy and my left foot constitute a pair of objects.
And lastly, some insight into Dawkins' favourite subject!
In its admirably angry way, The God Delusion argues that the status of atheists in the US is nowadays about the same as that of gays fifty years ago. The book is full of vivid vignettes of the sheer horrors of religion, fundamentalist or otherwise. Nearly 50 per cent of Americans believe that a glorious Second Coming is imminent, and some of them are doing their damnedest to bring it about. But Dawkins could have told us all this without being so appallingly bitchy about those of his scientific colleagues who disagree with him, and without being so theologically illiterate. He might also have avoided being the second most frequently mentioned individual in his book ? if you count God as an individual.
In the light of his love for himself, maybe the title of the book should have been "The Richard Dawkins delusion"?
Need I say more? Read the book, but also read this wonderful book review by Terry Eagleton.
Reader Comments (4)
Hey brutha D, I think I should mention that your readers could buy the book here (for about R177): http://www.kalahari.net/e-trader/referral.asp?toolbar=mweb&linkid=5&partnerid=2322&sku=30137677" REL="nofollow"> The God Delusion Looks good.
I like to profiteer from my friend's blogs! (Will buy you a lolli pop)
Yup, that's right folks. Support a starving grad student (or at least help him to pay what he owes me in student fees! ;-)
I love that review... "God does not in fact exist"... brilliant, cos God only exists if we have faith, but faith does not require fact to be true, so God doesn't exist in fact, He exists in faith!
Woohoo
I have been a HUGE of Dawkins for years, he is trully the clearest writer of Natural Selection and his knowledge of Evolution and Neo-Darwinism is second to none... but he's a lousy theologian. Someone needs to tell him that! I will still be a huge fan, and I will still read ALL his books (eventually: three down...)
nice post uncle D
There is also a good review at "Ship of Fools". I agree with Murray that Dawkins is a very good writer. But this time around he has plunged into the shallow end of the pool, and is struggleing to stay afloat.