I just read Richard Dawkins book "The God Delusion". It's an incredibly frustrating book to get through because every couple pages there is a jab at some straw man religious person or idea. The conclusion of each very apparent stupidity is that it thus proves that God doesn't exist... And the rule is if you say it enough times it makes it true...
...AND he isn't even an athiest. The position of atheism, as anyone smart enough to actually think about it knows (including Dawkins), is a logical contradiction. The only way to say that God doesn't exist is if you know everything about everything... but if you did know everything about everything then You would be God because that is a necessary quality of what it is to be God...
...But even this doesn't stop him talking about atheism the rest of the book or encouraging others towards that path...?
...And connundrum...
...His main theory is something that he can't prove, but IF he could prove would mean that God doesn't exist...
...That theory being an offspring of the anthropic principle... the anthropic principle for the theory of evolution says that life can be possible on a privileged planet with privileged conditions given enough chance and time. Privileged in this case meaning that of all the planets in the Universe (billions possibly) the earth is one of those with the right balance of heat and other elements to have the possibility to form life. The amount of time that life had a chance to be formed in the 'primordial soup' gives enough possibility that on one of these privileged planets, in one of these lightning strikes, that life was created... and the proof that this theory is true is that we exist now...
...Impeccable logic...
...Something along the lines of the infinite improbability drive in the "Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy", where if you can figure out the chance of some improbable event happening in the universe it would necessarily happen...?
...To carry this anthropic principle to Dawkins theory he says that this same anthropic principle of probability could be used with this galaxy if there were an incredibly large amount of galaxies and the one we're in just happened to be the one that supported life... These numbers of galaxies could possibly be created in black holes... but we don't know yet... and it's this unproven theory that Dawkins is basing his atheism on... unproven!?
...And even with all of these theories it still doesn't even begin to answer what originally brought all of these things into existence... Not saying God, but if we don't know then how can we make a judgment call on it...
...And, oh ya, God isn't an answer for all of this because according to Dawkins the simple answer is always the best answer and a God that could design everything in the universe would be too complicated to be plausible in comparison with said unproven theory...? And that's it... case closed...?
...I'm reminded of a prof I had in university that quoted some other famous dude when he said that 'for every complex problem there is usually a simple, neat and elegant solution, and that solution is usually wrong.'...
...almost the whole rest of the book is dedicated to discrediting and making fun of the old testament, dark age thinkers, and religious fundamentalists... aimed at what I believe to be impressionable minds just leaving their fundamentalist backgrounds... and in hopes that the ridiculousness of the stories persuades these impressionables to utterly reject God from the beginning and never ever look back to see if maybe there was even one real thing in all that superstition...
...In conclusion I think the book is more about Dawkins' bias towards God and his intent to get people to reject the church and reject God based on the straw man religion and the straw man God that he outlines in the book than it is about actually discovering truth about anything. He's obiously a smart guy so why doesn't he do what we're taught in University and use the strongest arguments situated in their best light for both sides... not the weakest ones for God and the strongest ones for science? The End.
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