Has anyone of strong religious read 'The god delusion' by Richard Dawkins? What did you think?

Answer 1

I have read many excerpts, though not the whole thing cover to cover. I believe, and this is the case on both sides, not pointing fingers or anything, I do believe that Richard Dawkins is working under some false assumptions, or at the very least, assumptions that are not accepted in mainstream Christianity. Just as many atheists only know the little they read from the Bible, or the negative things shown in the media. (In the same way, many "Christians" know only very limited, very narrow scoped facts about atheists)

These false assumptions when we think we know what the other side is looking at and thinking is a bad way of doing business. To be honest, frankly I don't know super much about atheistic beliefs, I do know most of the basics, and some of the more advanced things, but all in all I'm no expert. I think that many Christians would be wise to realize the same thing.

Atheists would also be wise to realize that the hearsay that goes on is not what the real picture of things is in the majority of Churches in America. Are there horror stories? Sure there are, but not everyone who proclaims to be a Christian truly is. Just like not every nutjob who preaches on the corner of New York really knows what they are talking about.

We need to start being learned adults on both sides of the coin and truly do our homework. Richard Dawkins book is very limited in true knowledge of how the Church body works and interacts. There is a lot of supposition and straw man arguments made, and surely there are some good arguments made as well. However, if I were to write a book that would counter the arguments of the other side (atheism) I would make sure I took my arguments to a broad cross-section of the true atheistic believers and find what they really believe.

Again this goes for both sides; You'd be surprised in what you come up with when you stop being arrogant and think you know everything. When we are humble and admit that we know nothing, that is when we are in the correct state of mind to find out what is really going on.

Humility is the beginning, and the mark, of true knowledge and wisdom.

Answer 2

nicely, if some thing is unobservable, then this is often not recognized as genuine. yet i will humour you, as i've got examine not the God fantasy however the Blind Watchmaker, the God fantasy's precursor. The God fantasy isn't attacking God, or truly faith. If it does in any respect, this is definitely no worse than how non secular human beings mindlessly assault atheism. The God fantasy elaborates on the wider factors of evolution, asserting that that's a likely perception gadget. besides the shown fact that, the biggest merchandising factor of The God fantasy is that persons would desire to easily come to their own conclusions. If that end is to have faith in God, then the extra power to you. Atheists are not continuously non secular extremists attempting to transform all and sundry to their concept. Richard Dawkins, different than for being a genius, is purely a scientist. he's attempting to grant his outcomes some possible status floor. And as I reported, Dawkins (or maybe I) don't think in something that's unobservable.

Answer 3

No, I havn't read it, but now that its come up so much on this site, I will have to read it. Same as the Da-vinci code, after about three years of all the squauking, I picked up a copy. - Big Deal. So What?

Answer 4

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 5

I have never heard of dawkins...