Will I enjoy Dawkins' "God Delusion" as much as I enjoyed Harris' "the End of Faith?"

Question

I recently finished Sam Harris' book and absolutely loved it. So- I picked up 'the God Delusion" today. Somebody give me a brief comparison of the books. Did I waste my time- as they are basically the same thing? Or is Dawkins even more brilliant than Sam Harris?

Julian- I love theology and learning more about why people believe what the do, the source of religion and more about religous history. True- these books won't make me any more of an atheist than I already am- and I do agree there is great wisdom from many religious scholars.

Answer 1

I thought The God Delusion was better in some ways - Dawkins goes into more on the arguments against a god, if I recall correctly. In any case, reading a good book is never a waste of time. Enjoy!

Answer 2

I don't know if I would describe Harris as brilliant--He has some ideas about cultural superiority that I find disturbing.
Unfortunately I have not been able to find a copy of the God Delusion, but I have higher expectations of Dawkins. From what I have read, I'd say he thinks things through much deeper than Harris does.

Answer 3

The "End of faith" ? is it possible ? history does not seem to point in that direction. You can dump Christianity or Judaism but you will embrace paganism and superstition at some point. Atheism has a short shelf life and usually degenerates into superstition fairly quickly over a generation or so. You can't create a perpetual "God vacuum". Did you read the death account of Stalin where he begged pardon of the chairs and tables in the room before he died ? or where Kim Jong Il has now introduced a new state religion wrapped over Juche or "self-reliance" in N. Korea, which his father and himself and are god the Father and Son doing his will in mimicry of the Christian religious sense.

Answer 4

Both are excellent and make compelling, cogent arguments. There are some philosophical and methodolgical mistakes in both - as is the case in almost any work - but they are well done, well researched, and well worth your time.

You may also want to pick up "A Letter to a Christian Nation" by Harris. It is a quick read (1-2 hours) and also well done.

Answer 5

Let's see, you already know that religion has some major errors in it, so why do you need to re-affirm this faith by reading yet another book about it?

If you already know that Christianity sucks, why don't you actually invest your time in some other philosophies and/or religions. You just might be surprised to see that some theologians are rather smart.

Boethius, consolation of philosophy, Upanishads, Plotinus.

Answer 6

I have never read the End of Faith, but The God Delusion is awesome.

Answer 7

, It seems to me that the intelligent design answer to the evolution question is irrefutable. It simply says that design in the universe is undeniable. The law of cause and effect says that wherever you find design you must have a designer somewhere. Since the cause must have everything the effect does and the effect(the universe) has intelligence, the cause(the designer) must also have intelligence. So you need an intelligent designer of this universe. But who could design a universe outside of a God. You call Him whatever you want to call Him. I call Him a God. That refutes evolution since evolution says that everything came about by random chance. The I.D. argument, it seems to me, is irrefutable. It's a simple logical argument:
Premise #1: Wherever you find design, you need a designer.
Premise #2: The universe exhibits design
Conclusion: The universe needs a designer.
The only way around that argument is to deny the second premise. Every atheist has to deny design. As I've said before, If you read Richard Dawkins two latest books('the blind watchmaker' and 'the god delusion') that's exactly what he does. He denies design. He says that there's no design in the universe, just the "appearance of design". But that's insane. You just can't logically and realistically deny that there's design all through the universe. It's all around you. You have to be blind not to see it. There are branches of science that basically just study the design in nature.........scientific disciplines such as nano-technology and bio-mimetrics. These disciplines study the design in nature.......whales,bats,dolphins... have sonar.......and try to create machines that mimic that design. Everywhere you look there's design. Where there's design there's got to be a designer. That's just common sense. Creation is not an unproven theory. It's a common sense fact that we come to by just using a little logic and reason.
Paly's argument of the 1700's still holds today. He said that if you are walking through a forest and you find a watch sitting upon a rock, you have 2 possible explanations: 1)It was designed and built by a watchmaker 2) It came about the same way the rock that it is sitting upon came about.....by random chance. Which explantion makes more sense?
Do you really believe that dumb mud could somehow bootstrap itself into intelligence over billions of years simply by random chance luck?
To Dawkins, belief in God is a projection of human longings and a type of wish-fulfillment. Such an argument works against atheism as well since an atheist wishes there is no God and therefore believes there is no God.

Answer 8

I do not know you, but God Delusion is very boring. : )

Answer 9

There is no theology per se in Dawkins' books. They are basically polemics from someone who is not learned in theology.

I have read many of Dawkins’ books and liked most of them. But in the God Delusion he seems to have left the scientific reservation and landed up in theology's back yard. He comes into the yard with no knowledge of the philosophical arguments needed to play with other theologians. Instead in his latest book he offers up nothing new, only the same rhetoric you would find, say in this forum. I would have expected a man of Dawkins’ stature to have spent some time studying philosophy and logic before writing a book that seems to resemble the same high school debates on religion vs. atheism that I experienced 30 years ago! Dawkins’ atheism often seems to be tacked onto his evolutionary biology with intellectual Velcro. His most recent books just recycle the same tired old arguments that he developed in the 1970s and 1980s. Frankly, non-believers could do much better than Dr. Dawkins. Some of his fellow atheists have noticed this as well.

See:
http://www.americanscientist.org/template/BookReviewTypeDetail/assetid/28365;jsessionid=aaa4KxL1uKYE6
http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/the-ruse-dennett-briefwechsel-the-clash-between-evolution-and-evolutionism/

Let’s look at what Dawkins has to say. He states in The God Delusion, quote

"I need to call attention to one particularly unpalatable aspect of its [the Bible’s] ethical teaching. Christians seldom realize that much of the moral consideration for others which is apparently promoted by both the Old and New Testaments was originally intended to apply only to a narrowly defined in-group. ‘Love thy neighbor’ [Leviticus 19:18] didn’t mean what we now think it means. It meant only ‘Love another Jew. As for the New Testament interpretation of the text, Hartung puts it more bluntly than I dare: ‘Jesus would have turned over in his grave if he had known that Paul would be taking his plan to the pigs" end quote.

Pigs being, of course, Gentiles. Here Dawkins just demonstrates extremely bad hermeneutics, ignoring Leviticus 19:33-34 or Christ's gloss on Leviticus 19:18 in the parable of the Good Samaritan. That the question would be posed to Jesus, or by Luke, is evidence to me that the meaning of the law was not obvious or settled in antiquity. Dawkins’s air of genteel familiarity with Scripture, quickly evaporates under the slightest scrutiny by the learned.

In the same book Dawkins will argue that evolution of complex things like a God requires time therefore God could not have existed outside of time. This is the same Dawkins who in his earlier book, "Unweaving the Rainbow", remarks that, quote

"further developments of the [big bang] theory, supported by all available evidence, suggest that time itself began in this mother of all cataclysms. You probably don’t understand, and I certainly don’t, what it can possibly mean to say that time itself began at a particular moment. But once again that is a limitation of our minds..." end quote.

So which is it Dr. Dawkins? Time has always existed or it started at the big bang?

Then there is the matter of atheism in The God Delusion. Dawkins finds atheism incapable of malevolent intent--why would anyone go to war for the sake of an absence of belief? Yet there has been continual violence against religion--In the French Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, the Soviet Union, and in China. In three of these events the eradication of religion was part of a program to reshape societies by excluding certain forms of thought, by creating an absence of belief. Neither sanity nor happiness appears to have been accomplished by these efforts. The kindest conclusion one can draw is that Dawkins has not acquainted himself with the salient history of modern authoritarianism.

Not satisfied, Dawkins even picks on the Amish, quote

"There is something breathtakingly condescending, as well as inhumane, about the sacrificing of anyone, especially children, on the altar of ‘diversity’ and the virtue of preserving a variety of religious traditions. The rest of us are happy with our cars and computers, our vaccines and antibiotics. But you quaint little people with your bonnets and breeches, your horse buggies, your archaic dialect and your earth-closet privies, you enrich our lives. Of course you must be allowed to trap your children with you in your seventeenth-century time warp, otherwise something irretrievable would be lost to us: a part of the wonderful diversity of human culture" end quote.

Here Dawkins ignores the fact that the Amish are pacifists whose way of life burdens our troubled planet as little as any to be found in the Western world and merits not even a mention. Just how strained must Dawkins' arguments become before we are forced to exclaim, "methinks [he] protesteth too much"!

Surely anyone with a rational bone in their body can see through the naiveté of these schoolyard arguments and inconsistencies. In the end we find that Dawkins' atheism is not a rational decision, but rather a moral one. Atheism's key focus is to remove external constraints so that one can live as one wishes, without true regard to an authority. Dawkins imagines himself as a liberator. In reality, Dawkins is a proponent of the first lie told in Eden.

I urge you review what other minds have to say about Dawkins’ arguments. For example, see Alvin Plantinga’s review of The God Delusion at: http://www.christianitytoday.com/bc/2007/002/1.21.html. If you don’t know who Platinga is then you have not been reading enough of the right literature about science and religion.

One of the best critiques of the God Delusion is at the link below. Dr. McGrath's lecture is reasoned and rational; two things that Dawkins leaves behind at the opening flap of his book and never looks back. Furthermore, Dr. McGrath's lecture is a model of the type of discussions I had hoped to find in the Yahoo R&S Forum: logical, cogent, articulate, recognizing the good and flawed points of a position, all while making reasoned arguments to support a personal worldview.

I encourage anyone, believer or not, to review the lecture in the link below, if for nothing else just to imagine what is possible for Yahoo R&S. The question of whether there is a God, and what that God might be like, has not despite the predictions of overconfident Darwinians gone away since Darwin, and remains of major intellectual and personal importance. Some minds may be closed; the evidence and the debate, however, are not.

http://www.st-edmunds.cam.ac.uk/cis/mcgrath/lecture.html

Answer 10

They're different, but you'll enjoy both.