Dawkins on the God Delusion
by Alex
I often use Dawkin’s outrage with religion as an example to my anthro students that science, too, is a culture. Rather than use interviews with him now, there’s a “whole new book”:http://www.amazon.com/God-Delusion-Richard-Dawkins/dp/0618680004/sr=8-1/qid=1162357679/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-0329361-8750447?ie=UTF8&s=books that I will have to look over in my Copious Free Time.
You might also share this Terry Eagleton review with your students.
Oops. No HTML allowed? Here is the URL:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n20/eagl01_.html
fantastic book. I probably agreed with 98% of what he was saying.
Also see the Cosmic Variance post by science blogger Sean Carrol
http://cosmicvariance.com/2006/10/29/the-god-conundrum
It’s more a meta-review of Dawkins’s book, and response to the Eagleton review.
there was a huge debacle about it at the valve but to be honest I don’t think it really went anywhere.
The most intellectual of my progeny who has a strong distaste and disdain for religious proselytizing once commented that the worst of these proselytizers are the atheists. I’m inclined to agree and probably won’t be reading this.
Silly atheists, always getting together on specific days in large groups and funding atheist evangelism in other countries that creates widespread cultural displacement….demanding that people with minority sexual habits be punished by the law…seeking control of certain substances due to their militant atheism…demanding that women give up control over their bodies, because of their unremitting atheistic worldview….those suicide atheist squads crashing airplanes into buildings…
Damn! No wonder you think atheists are the worst of the proselytizers. I’m sure glad religious proselytizers don’t do any of those things.
Michael
On the culture of science if somewhat obliquely-
“What We Believe but Cannot Prove: Today’s Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty.” John Brockman, ed.
A series of statements that have a nice bathroom-book length. Interesting and occasionally leads me to reflect on our deep predisposition for metanarrative.
You might also like this interview with Dawkins:
http://newhumanisteditor.blogspot.com/
NH Editor