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Richard Dawkins you are wrong, there is god, and it is you!
The First Chapter of The God Delusion:
Also available here at NYTimes.com
The boy lay prone in the grass, his chin resting on his hands. He suddenly found himself overwhelmed by a heightened awareness of the tangled stems and roots, a forest in microcosm, a transfigured world of ants and beetles and even - though he wouldn't have known the details at the time - of soil bacteria by the billions, silently and invisibly shoring up the economy of the micro-world. Suddenly the micro-forest of the turf seemed to swell and become one with the universe, and with the rapt mind of the boy contemplating it. He interpreted the experience in religious terms and it led him eventually to the priesthood. He was ordained an Anglican priest and became a chaplain at my school, a teacher of whom I was fond. It is thanks to decent liberal clergymen like him that nobody could ever claim that I had religion forced down my throat.
In another time and place, that boy could have been me under the stars, dazzled by Orion, Cassiopeia and Ursa Major, tearful with the unheard music of the Milky Way, heady with the night scents of frangipani and trumpet flowers in an African garden. Why the same emotion should have led my chaplain in one direction and me in the other is not an easy question to answer. A quasi-mystical response to nature and the universe is common among scientists and rationalists. It has no connection with supernatural belief. In his boyhood at least, my chaplain was presumably not aware (nor was I) of the closing lines of The Origin of Species - the famous 'entangled bank' passage, 'with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth'. Had he been, he would certainly have identified with it and, instead of the priesthood, might have been led to Darwin's view that all was 'produced by laws acting around us':
Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
Carl Sagan, in Pale Blue Dot, wrote:
How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, 'This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant'? Instead they say, 'No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.' ........................................
through dawkins, and in dawkins' own language, atheism has become the meme, instead of a part of the analysis of memes. it's become a thought written down, when it should be something woven into the fabric of the blank paper that thought is writ upon
__________________ they made soup out of my research turtles.
through dawkins, and in dawkins' own language, atheism has become the meme, instead of a part of the analysis of memes. it's become a thought written down, when it should be something woven into the fabric of the blank paper that thought is writ upon
I'll read anything by Dawkins except for the God Delusion because I just don't think I'm the audience he had in mind. But I'm happy about how well it's selling in the US.
i went to a talk with dawkins, steve jones and martin rees on the enlightenment a while back, it was like an hour of wetting myself. i love dawkins but steve jones puts himself across far, far better. and also has a great sense of humour.
i can see this debate is really going somewhere. consisting as it does of quotes, doctor who trivia and smileys. but onward and upward:
reasoning with religious types is like reasoning with people who think they're napolean, they are inherently unreasonable; so dawkins' book's only purpose is to make atheists feel good about themselves and give the religious a target for their ire, which is all good, but it's hardly special. telling people that you're an atheist is like telling people you're not napolean, the only people it should be of interest to is all the napoleans.
i liked dawkins' books about evolution
i love steve jones, no spittle on his lips.
anyway i've not read the book and i believe in fairies, so perhaps i'll unsubscribe
__________________ they made soup out of my research turtles.
i went to a talk with dawkins, steve jones and martin rees on the enlightenment a while back, it was like an hour of wetting myself. i love dawkins but steve jones puts himself across far, far better. and also has a great sense of humour.
I just finished listening to a BBC radio interview with Jones. The interviewer said creationism is on the rise in the UK.
