Books this year: a book diary

I became interested in this book because it is about a former atheist who turned to Christianity because of rational considerations. I had hoped that he would talk a little more about what those considerations were, but it never really came up.

This is a rebuttal to Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion, a book which I have never read. I have seen a few lectures and interviews with Dawkins and feel I know where he’s coming from. To me, it seems like he thinks atheists as a group are misunderstood and attacked, particularly in America. As such, atheists need to get angry and verbally attack religious people, in particular Christians who believe in Creationism or Intelligent Design. He thinks it is a good strategy to compare people’s belief in God with a childish belief in Santa Clause and doubts whether most Christians will respond to anything other than an emotivist attack.

So, on to The Dawkins Delusion. I didn’t really learn much from the book. One interesting point which I’d never heard before is in answer to the claim that there is an infinite regress in causality so it doesn’t make sense to look for a final cause of the world. The authors say that this is precisely what physicists look for when they search for a “Theory of Everything”. I don’t know how true this is. I’m reminded of Hawking’s musings in A Brief History of Time that, even after discovering the single set of equations that describe all of nature, we will still have to wonder what breathes life into them.

I was unsettled by the authors’ rejection of the idea of “viruses of the mind” and “memes”. I always thought these were some of Dawkins’s most loved devices among academics, but the authors’ of this book seem to think it’s superfluous to use memes to understand culture and belief, and that many academics don’t think memes exist.

I was also happy to see the authors’ refutation of Dawkins’s belief that atheists are nonviolent. The authors’ bring up historical cases such as the Soviet’s destruction and elimination of churches and priests between 1918-1941 and other violent persecution of Christians in the name of Atheism. The authors’ also make the point that, based on Robert Pape’s study, Dying to Win, suicide bombings have a political rather than religious motivation, and that religion is neither sufficient or necessary to account for such radicalism.

Well, I’m still not religious, and I think the author isn’t going to get any converts out of this, despite the authors hope in the introduction that the book would be read by atheists as well as Christians. It might change some people’s minds about being militant a la Dawkins, but I think that’s unlikely and it will probably serve Christians looking for refutation more than anything else.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 7th, 2010 at 8:49 am and is filed under Books read by Levi, 2010. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.