Sigh. More reviews for “The God Delusion”, this time from the usually reputable Independent: a beautiful example of fine writing, polite debate and apalling reasoning:
Then there's the enormous amount he takes for granted. “For the umpteenth time,” he wails, “natural selection is the very opposite of a chance process.” For the umpteenth time, explain.
For the umpteenth time, get “The Selfish Gene” out of the library. It's good, it's very readable, and if you don't suddenly think 'ah' and watch your idea of evolution fall into place while reading it then you should probably read it again. Then we have a lovely chestnut:
The long one goes something like this: the question “Who made God?” only makes sense if one assumes that the Divine nature is subject to a kind of inverted evolutionary process by which the complex is preceded by the still more complex, but why on earth should we assume this? Why should God be subject to any version of a biological theorem? Why not the laws of physics, or of chemistry?
Er… last I checked the laws of biology were a simplification of the laws of chemistry, which are a simplification of physics. Further, even if we accepted that God were outside of 'reality' (a definition possibly devoid of any but semantic meaning) it still becomes a victim of Occam's Razor – there are more simple solutions.
And on Russell's lovely Teapot he really goes off the rails:
The analogy fails spectacularly because it's predicated on the fallacy of “all things being equal”, that “all things being equal” we should have no reason to suppose that a God existed. But all things aren't equal: to think otherwise is to indulge in counterfactuality. To put it another way, the “delusion” of God is here opposed by the illusion of a human history devoid of religion. The fact is that a belief in transcendent powers of one sort or another is, so far as we can tell, as old as humanity, and has been upheld by some of its greatest minds. So no, a teapot won't do really.
On this basis, Judaism wins and Christianity has the task of explaining why it is a better solution. Further, under these rules those who don't believe in the various myths – dragons, the undead, Atlantis: all of which which predate Christianity – must disprove them. But of course this is ridiculous: one doesn't assume dragons exist because of tradition, one instead looks at the evidence and notes the causes of the myth. And so one must approach religion – look at the evidence, both for the literal interpretation and for a factually false but useful social construct, and the evidence lies clearly on one side.
The remainder is marked by similar arguments – full of assertions without evidence and dubious logic. Surely the religious side can do better than this? Or, if not, why just not admit it's irrational but that you don't care? – it's entirely possible that admission would stump us and you'd get a bit of peace.
