Does God exist? This is
the question that is central in Richard Dawkins' ”The God
delusion”. Dawkins is an atheist and he thinks that you should be,
too. That is why he provides arguments in favour of a scientific
explanation for our existence and deconstructs the arguments against
it and in favour of a creationist theory.
My parents are not
religious, but my grandmother is a devout Christian. We have always
been close, and some of her beliefs rubbed off on me when I was
growing up. She took me to church a few times, told me stories out of
the Bible, spoke of the importance of prayer. Religion had such an
impact on me during my early formative years that I became
superstitious about it. Was the headache I was experiencing a
punishment from God, because I had forgotten to pray? But then, when
I turned 13, I started questioning things. Why didn't God listen to
my prayers? Why was there so much suffering in the world, if God was
benevolent? All the answers religion provided seemed very
unsatisfactory to my curious mind.
Since then, I have been
calling myself an agnostic. There are things in the world that I
don't understand, that no one understands, that have stopped me from
becoming a full-blown atheist. Dawkins book gave me a firm nudge in
that direction. Just because we can't understand these things now,
with the amount of knowledge that we have today, doesn't mean that we
will never understand them, and it certainly doesn't prove that God
exists. This is just one of various ”myths” about religion that
Dawkins debunks.
The God delusion is an
intellectual and philosophical exercise on the existence of God.
Being prone to philosophical musings myself from time to time, I
found it immensely enjoyable. It touches on many religion-related
subjects, psychological and evolutionary explanations why it exists,
the reason why it is so wide-spread, etc. It was informational, both
about the history of religion but even about the influence it
currently has in other countries (mainly in the USA, but Dawkins
doesn't discriminate against any religion. He thinks they're all
unnecessary, and in many cases even dangerous). It was
thought-provoking, even thought-altering.
If there is anything that
I disliked about the book, it was his badly disguised contempt for
religious people. This is particularly evident in the first half of
the book. He makes snide remarks against believers, and that, coupled
with the fact that he delves into scientific facts without adequately
explaining what some of the terms mean (”memes”, for example, or
even natural selection for that matter), make it seem like the whole
enterprise is nothing more than Dawkins winking at the educated ones
among us (who are, of course, also atheists. Dawkins seems to imply
that you can't be highly educated without being an atheist).
If Dawkins is out to
convert (sorry about the choice of word) believers to atheism, he's
certainly not going to succeed by presenting them as small-minded
fools. He states right from the beginning of the book that he doesn't
think that religion should be dealt with with kid gloves (and I
agree) but we should make the distinction between religion and its
followers. You don't want to respect religion? Go ahead, disrespect
it! But you shouldn't disrespect people just because they are
religious.
I would recommend this
book to everyone, religious people and atheists alike. The latter
will enjoy adding arrows to their conversational quiver, the former
might enjoy the challenge of thinking outside the box. But, at the
end of the day, the only people Dawkins will probably manage to
convince will be people like myself: agnostics.
No comments:
Post a Comment