tearoom

Sorry, ampak tole bo kar v angleščini, ker gre v bistvu za povzetek emailov med mano in sošolko, pa se mi ne da prevajat.

There’s been literally hundreds of negative reviews of Dawkins’s “The God Delusion” since it came out a year ago, and virtually all of them have one thing in common: they keep on accusing Dawkins of claiming things which not only is he in fact not saying, but actually takes quite some time to explain why this is not what he’s saying. Some of the critics even decided to use Dawkins’s success for their own purposes: let’s have our own 15 minutes of fame, plus let’s make some money. After all, the number of people who hate Dawkins is much larger than the number of those who like him, so more people should be buying our books than his, right? So they’ve decided to publish their own books criticizing “The God Delusion”, and to adorn them with inventive titles, such as “The Dawkins Delusion”. Which would have been perfectly OK if all of them didn’t have STRAWMAN written all over them. In large, red letters. On each and every page.

And now, here’s a reviewer of one of these books, and, oh boy, did she piss me off!! I’m just really fed up with these moronic accusations. How about reading the goddamn book before you make an ass of yourself by mocking people for saying things they’ve actually never said?

First, Ms. Vickers makes a big point about Dawkins being stupid for condemning a whole practice just because some people adhering to it chose to do evil things:

• This is rather like suggesting that all science is dangerous because it has brought nuclear weapons; or that all education is mistaken because children have been whipped by so-called educators.

Now, this is stupid for two reasons: first, crusades, genocides, Spanish inquisition, subjugation of women, etc. were committed in the name of religion - that is, because the holy text told these people that this was the right thing to do, and not regardless or in spite of it. The connection between religious teachings and those tragic events and practices is not merely contingent in the same sense as “Hitler, Stalin, and Saddam all had mustaches, therefore ….”. Second, Dawkins’s primary argument against religion is based on its being irrational and anti-science, not on its being dangerous. The reviewer doesn’t even mention that.

Further, Dawkins is well aware of the fact that “only religious nutcases take the Creation story literally.” This is why he doesn’t merely take on biblical literalists, but also those who think it’s perfectly OK to cherry-pick the Bible and only choose principles one likes already. The reviewer’s claim that “Therefore, it is perfectly respectable to “pick and choose” when reading the Bible,” of course completely disregards the fact that one needs a higher moral principle in order to be justified in doing that. If she’d actually bothered to read “The God Delusion”, she might have learned something about Socrates’ Euthyphro dilemma. Not that that would have necessarily shaken her faith in god being the source of all moral values.

Next, she commits a ludicrous fallacy that has little to do with not reading “The God Delusion”, and more with being completely ignorant of the subject known as Common Sense 101.

• Dawkins uses the image of a virus and employs a Darwinian model to explain how cultural ideas spread.

Followed by:

• Religion as disease, and more pertinently, the religiously inclined as disease-carriers, this is dangerous talk. Dawkins might try substituting “Jews” or “blacks” for “religiously inclined” and he would see why.

Say what?! She just said that Dawkins refers to all cultural ideas as viruses (which is very simplified anyway), so how can this talk be discriminatory of only certain cultural groups is beyond me.

Her final paragraph is the most ridiculous of all, and proves without doubt that she hasn’t read a single sentence of a book she so eagerly criticizes:

• Not that any of this is likely to alter the minds of the antiGod squad. They “know” they are right - that least scientific of attitudes since it precludes changes of heart or openness of mind.

Orly? Now, this is just pathetic. Dawkins explains very thoroughly in the first chapter of the book that we can, of course, never know anything with absolute certainty, and, above all, we can never know that something doesn’t exist. We should, strictly speaking, be agnostic about everything, but for the purposes of our everyday lives, we normally take that different claims have different chances of being true, and god is the kind of entity of which we should be equally agnostic as we are of the existence of Santa, tooth-fairy, and unicorns.

But then again, if only she’d read the book, she would have noticed all that, now wouldn’t she.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 7th, 2007 @ 3:53 pm on the category filozofija, ateizem. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.