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Richard Dawkins

Martin

Active Member
This author came recommended to me by a good friend (well, actually, by Douglas Adams, but one can dream, can one not?), and I recently bought two books by him, namely The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker. Both these books are basically about evolution:

The Blind Watchmaker:

The watchmaker belongs to the eighteenth-century theologian William Paley, who made one of the most famous creationist arguments: Just as a watch is too complicated and too functional to have sprung into existence by accident, so too must all living things, with their far greater complexity, be purposefully designed. It was Charles Darwin's brilliant discovery that put the lie to these arguments. But only Richard Dawkins could have written this eloquent riposte to the creationists. Natural selection -the unconscious, automatic, blind, yet essentially nonrandom process that Darwin discovered- has no purpose in mind. If it can be said to play the role of the watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker.
Acclaimed as perhaps the most influential work on evolution written in this century, The Blind Watchmaker offers an engaging and accessible introduction to one of the most important scientific discoveries of all time.


This author comes recommended by other famous authors, such as the aforementioned Douglas Adams, but also Bill Bryson and Isaac Asimov.

Does anyone know this feller, or has anyone read anything by him?

Cheers
 
Yeah, as a matter of fact I was working for Longman, his original UK publisher, when The Blind Watchmaker came out--must've been '86 or so? I know his then-editor.

It's a great book. He's a very erudite, entertaining guy.
 
I read The Blind Watchmaker a long time ago, and I remember finding it very interesting. I have The Selfish Gene, but have yet to read it.

I've heard Dawkins is very outspoken, and has very strong opinions against the concept of religion, intelligent-design, etc.

You can find more info:

http://www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/dawkins/WorldOfDawkins-archive/index.shtml, which has some articles, and essays by him, as well as other general information. I'm always open to reading his stuff - I think he has a lot of interesting things to say.
 
Very outspoken ... against religion ... Yep. Check, check.

His new book dispenses with all the surrounding stuff and gets down to his hobby horse. It's called The God Delusion, which is all you need to know. I'm about to start reading it.

If this book works as I intend, religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put it down. What presumptuous optimism! Of course, dyed-in-the-wool faith-heads are immune to argument, their resistance built up over years of childhood indoctrination using methods that took centuries to mature (whether by evolution or design). Among the more effective immunological devices is a dire warning to avoid even opening a book like this, which is surely a work of Satan.
 
I read one of Dawkins's books a while back. I can't remember now if it was The Blind Watchmaker or The Selfish Gene, although I think it was the former. I really enjoyed it. The writing was clear and entertaining and provided much food for thought. I didn't agree with everything Dawkins was saying but I prefer that in non-fiction books, it inspires me to write big arguments in the margins!

He's quite tub-thumpy. Almost an evangelical Darwinist!
 
The Blind Watchmaker and The Selfish Gene come very highly recommended from a friend of mine. I have yet to pick them up though. Currently Dawkins' book on evolution - The Story of Evolution I think it is called and I'm too lazy to check is available as a remainder. I do find the topic interesting but I'm not sure I find it booklength interesting. The God Delusion certainly looks interesting though.
 
I think Dawkins is at his best when he's letting religion be and just writing about evolution. The Ancestor's Tale is my favourite book of his - it takes you all the way back from mankind to the dawn of life, and explains how every other species on Earth fits in. It's worth getting the hardback version if you can, which is as beautiful as a coffee table book (but far more readable). The only blemish in it is a couple of tedious digs at Bush and Blair, but they're easily overlooked.
 
IThe Ancestor's Tale is my favourite book of his - it takes you all the way back from mankind to the dawn of life, and explains how every other species on Earth fits in. It's worth getting the hardback version if you can, which is as beautiful as a coffee table book (but far more readable). The only blemish in it is a couple of tedious digs at Bush and Blair, but they're easily overlooked.

Why would I overlook digs at those who beg for them? ;)

The Ancestor's Tale, that's the book that's available as a remainder in softcover for $12.99 right now. It looks good I'm just not sure I'd pay that much attention to it.
 
A friend of mine loaned me his copy of The Blind Watchmaker. I will eventually get to it I suppose.
 
I enjoyed that one up to about halfway, ions, and thereafter I found it increasingly hard going and gave up. Good luck though...
 
Here's my Amazon review of The God Delusion. I realise B&R folk may want to go into more detail - restricted by Amazon's 1,000 word limit - so ask away on any specific points...

If you're reading this, the chances are you're either a 'radical atheist' (the preferred term of Dawkins' late friend Douglas Adams, to whom the book is dedicated), hoping that The God Delusion will give you a good satisfying dose of anti-religion rhetoric; or you're a devout believer, hoping to be roundly appalled and outraged.

Either way, you could be disappointed. For the first half or more, The God Delusion is more rigorous and scientifically demanding than we have been led to expect (Jeremy Paxman in interviewing Dawkins called it 'entertaining': well, yes and no). Dawkins goes to great, and occasionally tiresomely great, lengths to detail why the existence of the universe, the development of life and the variety of creation can be comfortably explained by science and probability. And then he gets to grips with traditional justifications for the existence of God, disposing of them in his own neat way. Perhaps these sections seemed superfluous to me as someone who is satisfied that Dawkins is right and there is no God; and doubtless they will seem equally superfluous - in another sense - to those who believe in God and not in Dawkins.

(It's worth saying at this point that when Dawkins means 'God', he means a personal, supernatural creator of the religious scriptures, a God-being rather than the more progressive notion of God as something nebulous that exists in all of us. This is after all the commonly understood meaning of God, which children are taught and most Christian, Islamic and Jewish adults continue to believe in. For sophisticated modern believers, who do not take the scriptures literally, Dawkins doesn't really regard you as religious at all; and you can take that as an insult or compliment as you see fit.)

All this is worthwhile but when the book was more than half over, by page 200, and we were still on "The Roots of Religion," I couldn't help wondering when it would all get going. I needn't have worried. Dawkins, who has been quite restrained up until now - his disrespect limited to the odd sneer of 'faith-heads' or referring to the God of the Old Testament as a 'psychotic delinquent' - lets fly with the passion of his true feelings once the subject turns to morality.

And it is a thrilling, invigorating display. Dawkins systematically dismantles all arguments for morality being connected to religious belief in any sense (indeed shows how diametrically opposed much religious teaching is to widely accepted morality), addresses tricky issues like the Darwinian explanation for altruism, disposes of a few sacred cows along the way (Mother Teresa is "sanctimoniously hypocritical [with] cock-eyed judgement," God an "evil monster"), and horrifies us with religion's historical and present-day cruelties and injustices.

The other principal benefit of The God Delusion is that it gives us an opportunity to see all Dawkins' religious arguments in one place, having previously experienced them only in snippets of other books, newspaper articles and TV programmes. And he wastes no time in reiterating some of his favourite rhetoric:

I think we should all wince when we hear a small child being labelled as belonging to some particular religion or another. Small children are too young to decide their views on the origins of the cosmos, of life and of morals. The very sound of the phrase 'Christian child' or 'Muslim child' should grate like fingernails on a blackboard.
I have found it amusing strategy, when asked whether I am an atheist, to point out that the questioner is also an atheist when considering Zeus, Apollo, Amon Ra, Mithras, Baal, Thor, Wotan, the Golden Calf, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and almost all the other gods that have been invented since the dawn of man. I just go one god further.
And having put the fear of, well, God into us by detailing the dark side of religious belief (Dawkins would argue that there is no bright side: if your good morals and deeds are determined solely by a God you believe in, he argues, you are an "immoral person we should steer a clear passage around"), he is too professional to leave us floundering. Instead he injects the last ten pages with a soaring essay on the passion of science, which "widens the window" on what we can see, and leaves us with a lasting taste of the freedom that can be ours if we can only dare to think for ourselves. It is reminiscent of this beautiful passage from his earlier book Unweaving the Rainbow, which seems a good place to end, letting the wonder of what's really there speak for itself:

Fling your arms wide in an expansive gesture to span all of evolution from its origin at your left fingertip to today at your right fingertip. All across your midline to well past your right shoulder, life consists of nothing but bacteria.

Many–celled, invertebrate life flowers somewhere around your right elbow. The dinosaurs originate in the middle of your right palm, and go extinct around your last finger joint. The whole history of Homo sapiens and our predecessor Homo erectus is contained in the thickness of one nail clipping. As for recorded history; as for the Sumerians, the Babylonians, the Jewish patriarchs, the dynasties of Pharaohs, the legions of Rome, the Christian Fathers, the Laws of the Medes and Persians which never change; as for Troy and the Greeks, Helen and Achilles and Agamemnon dead; as for Napoleon and Hitler, the Beatles and Bill Clinton, they and everyone that knew them are blown away in the dust of one light stroke of a nail file.
 
I think we should all wince when we hear a small child being labelled as belonging to some particular religion or another. Small children are too young to decide their views on the origins of the cosmos, of life and of morals. The very sound of the phrase 'Christian child' or 'Muslim child' should grate like fingernails on a blackboard.

I agree with this immensely! Creating religious kids is one of the worst things a parent can do. It's abusive. God is found, not indoctrined. If a person is going to be spiritual let them find that course on their own. Religion should of course be taught, but the full sphere of it.
 
Quite. Dawkins' point (and one that I agree with) is that if children were not indoctrinated, then most religions would dwindle to practically nothing, if not die out altogether. The old Jesuit saying of "Give me the child to the age of seven, and I will give you the man," is both accurate and frightening.

The other point is that if God really did exist, we wouldn't need to be taught about him: he would be apparent to us anyway.
 
Dawkins

I just adore the analogy of the outstretched arm and fingertips. And Dawkins is right. But his screeching tone, from what I gather, is not the way to bring people into the light of reason. Giving a reader the scalded dog treatment, for one who might be on the fence and ready to take the real leap of faith that is atheism, is counterproductive. If he wants to really reach out and convince people, not just reinforce talkinghead atheists with spiffy soundbites, he's going to have to draw the reader in, not shout at him or her. I have not read Dawkins other than articles here and there so he may be more winning than he appears at first glance. But, why oh why can't there be some sweet-natured atheists out there casting influence? Where's the voice that says, "Take my hand and let me show you a few things for your journey?" I remember when I just let go of all that faith junk and stepped forward into a great portion of, for lack of a better word, joy. Maybe Karen Armstrong's Spiral Staircase would work better for someone who is really questioning but not looking for a pulverization by Dawkins' smug superiority. Does he ever approach the reader as an equal? Ooooh, now I must read this.
 
Does he ever approach the reader as an equal? Ooooh, now I must read this.

His books have a different tone to his media diatribes (at least those that I've read - his latest one might be different). He always treats the reader as an equal and even his most stringent anti-religion arguments are calmly and reasonably made. I wish he would take the same care elsewhere.
 
19 I've read nearly all Dawkins' work, and found little in it for any open minded reader to argue with.

Dawkins is generally portrayed as the rabid arch-atheist, usually by creationists, but this is not a role he has chosen for himself. Rather, it is one that has been thrust upon him by the religious who don't like his work, and won't leave him in peace to get on with it. As he said on the Open University, 30 years ago he thought the debate would be over by now. He described the religious bigots as terriers around his ankles who just won't let go.

The book that stirred up all the furore was his first, The Selfish Gene. People who judged the book by the cover rather than reading it think that the title is The Selfish Gene. It isn't, it's The Selfish Gene! The essence of the book is that altruism, like everything else, evolves because it is in the self interest of the genes that produce it.

Many arguments against evolutionary biology are ‘What’s bad is false’ arguments, which is just irrational. You can’t infer what's true or false from what’s good or bad.
 
Quite. Dawkins' point (and one that I agree with) is that if children were not indoctrinated, then most religions would dwindle to practically nothing, if not die out altogether.

Paul Bloom argues in Descarte's Baby that children are in fact biologically prone to believe in God. He talks of a test made with children raised by religious parents and children raised by atheists to see whether or not upbringing had any effect on the child's belief, and it was discovered that children at a certain age, independently of their upbringing, normally accept the existence of a Creator. He argues it's the way our brains are built, since we're pattern-making, analogy-finding creatures who are also great artefact-makers, therefore it comes naturally to us to believe from an early age that Someone/Something must have created this word since it's too perfect and orderly to have come about by chance.
 
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