More on the God Delusion

Still more interesting stuff today. Finished Chapter 4 "Why God Almost Certainly Doesn't Exist." Some very funny stuff in here... Dawkins really tickles my "dry" sense of humor.

Dawkins did a lot of deconstruction of the Intelligent Design variant of the God/Science issue in this chapter. It was remarkable how all of the arguments for Intelligent Design fail to account for the fact that someone/something would have had to design the designer! I also thought it was really interesting to read Dawkins' excerpts from some of the theological writings on "irreducible complexity." I had thought this was an old term, but apparently it was coined in 1996. It's a term that refers to the argument that some things (like eyes, wings, etc.) are so irreducibly complex that they could not have evolved, thus there must be God. The problems Dawkins sees with this argument seem to fall into two main categories: (i) the proponents don't have a rigorous way of determining if something is truly irreducibly complex other than "I can't imagine a way for it to have come about in incremental steps;" and (ii) a God that could "design" something truly irreducibly complex would have to be so complex that it would in turn have to have been designed.

Another thing that struck me in this chapter was the "gap" arguments. I have heard people in real life talk about "gaps" in the fossil record and how that must mean that evolution couldn't have happened. Dawkins so thoroughly dispatches these "gap" arguments, essentially calling their proponents intellectually lazy. "There's a gap in the record, so there must be God = there's a gap in the record, so don't go looking for explanations or evidence or anything else that might explain it."

I said yesterday that there's a difference between a non-believer and an atheist, an important difference. I am an atheist. One of the writers Dawkins talks about (I can't remember which one and I'm too lazy to go look it up) being a "radical atheist" so as to distinguish himself in the minds of his readers from all variants of agnosticism or non-believerhood.

I find it interesting how my gut instinct has been toward atheism for a long time, at least 20 years now, but that intellectually I haven't taken the time to do the reading and research to solidify what I really think. Dawkins references so many other books that I want to go read now too.

As always, so many books, so little time.