Richard Dawkins is known for his best-selling books The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion. As a scientist Dawkins has argued for evolution throughout his career and has been notable for his advocacy of atheism. In The God Delusion, he argued against the existence of God at all, which is understandably a lot for any “believer” to deal with. Most of the people affected by The God Delusion were agnostics or people who were sitting on the fence about the existence of God. The natural skeptic in me had already concluded there was no God long before I read that book. But of course the book provided me with some logical arguments to help should I find myself in a debate with any type of believer from any faith, including my least favorite Evangelicals.
The Greatest Show On Earth while narrower in focus is sure to be easier to digest by some sane religious people. The subject matter is evolution and this book just plainly presents the undisputable evidence for it. To understand Dawkin’s argument you don’t have to be a scientist, or an atheist. You just have to be a semi-rational person (because being fully rational would tend to guide you back towards being an atheist).But we can never underestimate the blinders that someone stricken with an extreme case of religiosity can put on.
You see as Dawkins notes, an embarrassingly large percentage of fully grown ADULT Americans believes that human beings existed with dinosaurs and that the earth is only a few thousand years old. These same people probably think the Flintstones is a documentary. I’m going to change my tone. But I think we have to grow and become more intellectually mature as a people. So even if you already know in your heart of hearts that evolution is true without the evidence for it you are just as bad as a creationist. After reading this book and arming yourself with facts, you will have done the one thing no creationist can do, which is to use a rational argument to arrive at a reasonable conclusion. But if you think the world was made in six days and God took a breather on the seventh there is no hope for you.
This book lays out the science for you, and does a pretty thorough job presenting evidence of evolution in nature and explaining the writings of Charles Darwin. I would recommend this book primarily for my fellow culture warriors who take every opportunity to shine a light on ignorance. It's not enough to ridicule your opponents' point of view you must have a fully developed alternative (I wish Republicans understood this). So begin formulation one with science and not just conjecture. A creationist is just a holocaust denier, a slavery apologist, a global warming denier, someone with no leg to stand on. As one of my favorite quotes goes "You're entitled to your own opinions but not your own facts".
0 comments:
Post a Comment