Opus 2026-511: The God Caricature

I usually don’t get around to reading “best sellers” until they arrive on the discount table at used book sales.  On occasion I might find one at the library but usually they are checked out.  At a recent Friends of the Library annual sale I picked up Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion.  Over the years I have heard references to it and in my circles none of it was good.  My two points of contact with Dawkins did not add any value.  First, he was a member of a group called The New Atheists.  The title amused me because there is nothing new in atheism.  Another member of the group, Christopher Hitchens, appeared too often on The Hugh Hewitt Show.  In listening to him I found him to be a foul-mouthed talking head who deliberately distorted facts to make his points.  Since he knew he was distorting facts that makes him an unreliable liar.  My only contact with Dawkins himself was from the documentary Expelled with Ben Stein.  When confronted with the data that pointed out life could not have originated by evolution Stein asked him where life came from.  His answers:  Aliens or Crystals.  

And he thinks religion is full of nonsense.

I’ve only read through page 21.  Obviously you can’t expect a full argument to be developed in the first few pages but so far there has been nothing but the kind of attitude of a little boy who yells at a friend, “You… You… You stupid.  You’re just a big stupid.”

There have  been a lot of quotes, but I find the documentation of references really lacking.  The only ones that he quotes that I seem to have heard of are dead like Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein.  When I went to look for the source of his Einstein quotes, I found absolutely nothing.  I don’t know if this is just laziness or deliberately giving poor research.  Maybe I am looking in the wrong place.

One of the claims he makes is how many people have been killed in the name of religion.  In looking in the index, I noticed that communism and socialism are not mentioned at all.  I looked to see if the Gulag was mentioned, no luck.  It remains to be seen if this is going to go anywhere. So far it’s just a bunch of quotes and a bunch of preconceived opinions.  I will try to endure but I make no promises.

Dawkins, Richard.  The God Delusion.  New York:  Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006.

homo unius libri