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Alvin Plantinga
The Dawkins Confusion
Naturalism 'ad absurdum'.Richard Dawkins is not pleased with God:
The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all of fiction. Jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic-cleanser; a misogynistic homophobic racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal….
Well, no need to finish the quotation; you get the idea. Dawkins seems to have chosen God as his sworn enemy. (Let's hope for Dawkins' sake God doesn't return the compliment.)
The God Delusion is an extended diatribe against religion in general and belief in God in particular; Dawkins and Daniel Dennett (whose recent Breaking the Spell is his contribution to this genre) are the touchdown twins of current academic atheism.1 Dawkins has written his book, he says, partly to encourage timorous atheists to come out of the closet. He and Dennett both appear to think it requires considerable courage to attack religion these days; says Dennett, "I risk a fist to the face or worse. Yet I persist." Apparently atheism has its own heroes of the faith—at any rate its own self-styled heroes. Here it's not easy to take them seriously; religion-bashing in the current Western academy is about as dangerous as endorsing the party's candidate at a Republican rally.
Dawkins is perhaps the world's most popular science writer; he is also an extremely gifted science writer. (For example, his account of bats and their ways in his earlier book The Blind Watchmaker is a brilliant and fascinating tour de force.) The God Delusion, however, contains little science; it is mainly philosophy and theology (perhaps "atheology" would be a better term) and evolutionary psychology, along with a substantial dash of social commentary decrying religion and its allegedly baneful effects. As the above quotation suggests, one shouldn't look to this book for evenhanded and thoughtful commentary. In fact the proportion of insult, ridicule, mockery, spleen, and vitriol ...
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James
I think you are misguided in putting such reviews behind a pay wall. You thereby guarantee a relatively limited readership for what is a powerful rebuttal to a best seller book. I realize your magazine needs to be funded, but some things you should make available to the wider public. It would also be more Christian and charitable.
Michael
I couldn't agree more with you Joel. Thank you for your comment.
Paul T Kidd
Dawkins and his book The God Delusion are a manifestation of what has gone wrong with science and some scientists. Here one sees scientific fundamentalism at work, which is not much different from religious fundamentalism. Both have the potential to lead to disaster for humanity. There are also many flaws in the book, too many to mention here, so the interested reader will find a quite long critique, based on the philosophy of science, at my blog site: http://paultkidd.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/the-god-delusion-or-science-delusio n.html. It is time to build a new productive relationship between religion and science, based on mutual respect, and the value of The God Delusion is that it clearly demonstrates the need for this new paradigm.
Jerome
I agree with Zach. The God Delusion is horrible book on Philosophy. At best it's diatribe against belief in God and religion mostly with emotional laden content.
Zachary Uram
Joel you are the one who is confused. I'm sure Dr. Plantinga, a world renowned philosopher and scholar of the highest caliber is able to read and know what the book is talking about. He DID respond to the merits of the arguments Dawkins presented and the philosophical assumptions and presuppositions Dawkins made. If it is the best book you ever read you clearly need to read much more widely!
Joel
One of the best books I have personally ever read. The review definitely does not do this book justice whatsoever. The book shows the point of view from a scientific perspective and gives debate against the beliefs in God, any God (much more so a God with laws and authority) He even accepts the fact that there could be a God, but that we are not inclined to believe, (much less worship) in that God without proof that they exist and the knowledge of who God is. There is much journalism in the book though considering much of it is simple disagreement with how Yahweh handled certain things (The gang rape of Lot's daughters, the human sacrifice of Jephthah's daughter, the many stories of primitive warmongering & taking peaceful humanitarians, or "good Samaritans," as slaves by command of Yahweh [or so the warmongers said,] etc.) He finishes the book toward the end with an analysis that suggests atheism is not a depressing view, but a view that truly takes in how magnificent life truly is
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