Showing posts with label MCGrath. Show all posts
Showing posts with label MCGrath. Show all posts

Thursday, January 3, 2008

Dawkins delusion.

Read it some time ago-when the swedish edition came. Dawkins book The God delusion (swedish Illusionen om Gud). As a paleontologist I have known Dawkins work for a long time. Found him to be a good scientist, giving good argumentation and sound facts to support his theories in his first book (The selfish gene) as well as some later work. I was impressed, even if I did not support his quite reductionist ideas. I could never see the gene as the fundamental entity the way he does, and could support criticism by Gould and by Conway Morris (who has a view on evolution which is close to my own) - but still, Dawkins did a good job.

But not in this book. I am not fond of creationistic fundamentalism, or Christian fundamentalism in general. Even if I consider myself to be evangelic, and not liberal. I did not know that there is something like atheistic fundamentalism. Now I now there is. Propagated by Dawkins. Unscientific, manipulating, picking facts as he likes, omitting what he dislikes, no carefull analyses as I was used from him...
I am not going to give a critique of the book - that would take another book (such a one was written by Alistair McGrath, read that if you happen to be impressed by Dawkins. A good antidote). But I agree to what someone has said: if this is the best atheism can come with to its defence, atheism has very big problems indeed.

In my opinion, Christianity does not need any fundamentalistic defenders, manipulating facts and giving biassed analyses. Apparently, Dawkins, foreman of intellectual atheism, thinks atheism does need that kind of defence.

Read the books - both of them - and judge for yourself.