User:LindsayH/my evidence

I write reviews of books i read; these are two of them, clearly showing that i don't bother to keep mine opinions to myself as i write ~ NPOV i'm not!

The God Delusion

Richard Dawkins

I was curiously disappointed in Dawkins in this book. For some years i have read about him ~ i think i've read one or two of his previous works, but i can't be certain ~ and read a number of refutations of him and, more particularly, this work, and he has been built up as a great and terrible foe of the Church, of God (or any god) and of religion. I expected, then, to be challenged, to be logically argued into submission, to read strong and convincing prose of a scientific nature. Not what happened. In fact i found that Dawkins wrote in a fashion that, to my perception, is surprisingly close to what he stands against with all his force: The book reminds me of nothing so much as an evangelical preacher ensuring that the choir stay convinced and and strangers in the congregation are whipped along into following him. I'm afraid that his arguments generally were, to say the least, unconvincing, and he attempted to cover that up by using rhetoric designed to bludgeon his readers into agreeing. Let me explain.

Towards the beginning of the book Dawkins writes that he amused himself by noting in the margin of a book he was reading the false arguments used by one or other of his opponents; i have a healthy respect for books, and library books in particular, so i did not actually do so, but i noted in my mind at least a dozen times during Dawkins debating points at which i would have written BISS in the margin as a comment on the paucity of his argument: It solely consisted of “This is so, Because I Say So”, which really is not at all convincing as a means of persuasion. He does this, for example, in dismissing the idea of NOMA (non-overlapping magisteria) as suggested by Stephen Jay Gould, among others. He does not really argue against NOMA, other than to say that there is no reason to think that, if there are questions science cannot answer, they may be questions religion is capable of answering ~ or even exploring. There are, as i indicated above, a number of occasions on which Dawkins uses this argument from authority; it's simply a shame that the authority he uses ~ his own ~ is not actually sufficient to support the argument he makes. It is possible that NOMA is a poor idea, but not possible to discover that by reading this book; as far as Dawkins' argument goes, there is nothing wrong with NOMA at all ~ except that he doesn't like it.

The second point at which i found the book frustrating is the style. I likened him earlier to someone preaching to the choir; to explain that image a little let me point out that he uses rhetorical devices which are frequently and usefully used by preachers on Sunday mornings in church services to carry the congregation along a path they already believe and travel willingly: humour, exaggeration, straw man arguments, appeal to authority, and others. The most annoying, maybe offensive, was the use of humour; i find it offensive, i'm afraid, from a couple of perspectives, because it feels as though i am being patronised since he clearly believes i'm stupid enough to be convinced something is wrong if i can be made to laugh at it, and because on many occasions his humour is more vitriolic than funny, especially when he is relating anecdotes (and when did a personal anecdote become a strong logical argument?) about how he either has or should have demolished his opponents with his wit. It may be the case, as has been argued elsewhere, that harm to someone else in one or another form is the basis of all humour; when taken to extremes, however, it serves no purpose other than to make me uncomfortable and to rather dislike the instigator.

To be honest, quite a lot of the book seems surprisingly personal to Dawkins, as though he takes it as a personal affront that anyone should disagree with him (i suppose that this links back to my feeling that BISS was his major argument). That this is so is illustrated by the anecdotes i mentioned above as well as by the authorities he tends to appeal to. It may not be that they are the most common in the book, but certainly high among his authorities are Carl Sagan, admittedly a scientist, though more of a science-explainer than an active discoverer, and Douglas Adams, an author (non-scientific) and comic. The two primary reasons Dawkins seems to appeal to them are that he liked them personally, and they both agreed with his point of view. Neither of these is a sufficient reason.

A further way in which the book seems personal rather than reasoned is the way in which Dawkins seems to go out of his way to be offensive to theologians for no other reason than that they are theologians. He argues that there is no reason to be polite about religious beliefs, that religion is given a free pass in society because people are not willing to offend one another over their God and faith. The truth, of course, is that, in fact, there are all sorts of things people do not say to one another (i cannot imagine, for example, that Dawkins would be comfortable saying to a stranger, “Goodness, your wife is ugly”, or “What a stupid daughter you have”), because we have evolved (within the species, genetically, or in society, through trial and error, i do not know) a certain self-censorship over what we say in order that society may function. Religion falls into this category of Things We Are Polite About, yet Dawkins is attempting to remove from the category with no explanation or justification. Indeed, he treats it as falling in the opposite category, Things We Can Be Vitriolic About, as he all but personally insults theologians. Not, i am afraid, the actions of the reasoned, reasoning man he would portray himself as.

In the end, as i mentioned above, i found reading this book disappointing. I expected a real challenge to my thinking capacity, but what i found was similar to a secondary school level response to Bertrand Russell's Why I Am Not A Christian ~ from the other perspective, of course! Less than satisfying, i'm afraid.

Does God Believe in Atheists?

John Blanchard

Quite a few things i need to critique about this book, ranging from the trivial to the potentially very damaging. A brief overview, first, to set the scene. Blanchard is writing to combat any possibility that atheists can make coherent or cogent arguments against the existence of God (or gods, i suppose). He begins by giving a very brief history of philosophy and religion; he then examines, again briefly, half a dozen or so major world religions; next comes a questioning of science and whether or not it has anything to say on the existence of God; he moves, finally to the Bible and orthodox Christianity and proves to his satisfaction that the only coherent option is a belief in the God of the Bible and Jesus.

Having raced, extremely quickly, over the book (at just over six hundred and fifty pages, with something like sixty of those as end matter, any single paragraph about it is bound to be perfunctory), i’ll pass on to some criticisms, starting with the trivial. The first is simply about the physical appearance of the printed pages; i don’t know if it the font at fault, or the size, or some other factor, but i found the superscript numbers linking to end-notes very frustrating; on several occasions i misread them as a form of punctuation, not a number, and i had to reread in order to be sure i had not misunderstood what Blanchard was saying. This is minor, but caring for the ease of your reader is quite important, if you plan on keeping the interest and attention of that reader for long periods. Perhaps we can put this down to the publisher, who did not realise the effects of these choices.

Next are the simple mistakes, the sort of thing which ought to have been caught by a fact checker or a copy editor or some such person (though, of course, they oughtn’t be made in the first place!). An example of this is that on page 288, in which Blanchard says Erasmus Darwin wrote the poem “The Temple of Nature”, and that it was “first published in 1903”; he did write it and, while it was published posthumously, it was a century earlier than Blanchard suggests. Lest one think i am being extraordinarily picky over a simple typographical error (“1903” for “1803”), i point out that less than a page later he assigns Pasteur to a time “[n]early fifty years before Darwin’s charming composition”, whereas, of course, Pasteur lived and worked contemporaneously with Darwin’s more famous grandson, Charles. Clearly, Blanchard is highly confused at this point of chronology, if at no other, which is worrying in a book claiming to deal so firmly in fact-based arguments.

Another couple of examples of this error are to be found on page 413, where Blanchard states that “slavery was eventually abolished in 1807” while speaking of the effects of scripture on William Wilberforce. Of course, it was only the British slave trade which was abolished in 1807; slavery in the British Empire was legal until 1833, and elsewhere in the world until 1848 (French Empire), 1865 (USA), or 1888 (Brazil). In the very same paragraph as this error, Thomas Barnardo is credited with founding the first of his famous homes at the age of five ~ in 1870, immediately after his dates are given as 1865-1905; in fact he was born in 1845. These simple mistakes (and there are plenty more than the examples given) do not fill the reader with any confidence that Blanchard is any more accurate in the rest of his writing and argument.

Perhaps the next most serious critique i have is that Blanchard stacks the deck at the very beginning of the book. He gets to make his definitions clear, and clearly his definitions are not the most usual senses of the words, so he aids his argument in this rather underhanded manner before he actually starts arguing. The most obvious definitions which are manipulated are those of “atheist” and “god” or, to be precise, in the reverse order. He defines God as “a unique, personal, plural, spiritual, eternally self-existent, transcendent, immanent, omniscient, immutable, holy, loving Being, the Creator and Ruler of the entire universe and the Judge of all mankind”. This is, in essence, the God of orthodox Christianity; unfortunately, as far as i can tell, giving such a definition completely begs the question, because his second definition is of an atheist as someone who does not believe in his definition of God. The vast majority of people, then, are atheists.

Another point that concerns me, linked with these two words, is the title. I could not understand, before i picked up the book, what exactly it meant, nor could i as i was reading it; it seems particularly pointless, a play on words which doesn’t really work because it only has one meaning, and that self-evident. In fact, the only time the title is even referred to in the book is on page 497 in a postscript to a chapter giving an extended analysis of a passage in the Epistle to the Romans which (the postscript) asks, “Does God believe in atheists?” then tries to define the meaning of the question itself. The problem is that the chapter this “P.S.” is tagged on to has not had anything to do with the issue and, secondly that Blanchard answers both yes and no, depending on the definition of terms. It is of no help at all, but appears to merely be something that was added at the last minute, shortly before press time, when someone realised that the book’s title made no sense within the book itself.

Moving on to a more serious criticism, in one of his main arguments for the existence of God, in which he uses science, it seems that on a number of occasions Blanchard misunderstands the position or arguments of those he disputes. On page 381, for example, in examining the source of morality, which he claims cannot be explained by any evolutionary processes; he tries to refute Peter Atkins, who attempted to show the possibility of evolutionary morality by the very fact that people survived with morality, he does this by asking, “where is the connection between survival and morality?” and then even adds, “what is the value of survival...?” Within evolution survival is the value in itself, it is the goal; and Atkins’ point that morality has evidently helped ~ or at least not hindered ~ that survival makes it a potential evolutionary point of differentiation. Blanchard thus clearly demonstrates that he does not understand evolution, which makes it difficult to imagine he can argue against it convincingly.

Later in the book, while he is discussing mankind and its rôle, having moved beyond trying and succeeding, to his own satisfaction, to prove the existence of God, on page 473 Blanchard makes the astonishing statement that “language...[is] something which can never be accounted for by evolution”. He offers no proof for this assertion, obviously because it is both unprovable and quite easily falsifiable; even i can see that communication between animals of the same species clearly has a survival value and would be selected for, and manifestly the more complex the communication possible the better the chance of survival, leading ultimately to language as the pinnacle. Even more plainly, if Blanchard’s assertion were true, it would already have been touted and proclaimed by all sorts of anti-evolutionists as proof of their position, and many linguists would be spending huge amounts of time questioning it, trying to resolve it; that that is not the case speaks against it. Thus i have to wonder, in what way does Blanchard think that making false statements helps his case?

There are other critiques to be made, but i think i have gone far enough to indicate that the book does not live up to the billing it is given in the assorted quotes on the back cover, the inside flaps of the dust cover both front and back, in three and a half pages of affirmation prior to the title page, and in the foreword by a man with seven letters after his name! There is, it is true, much in this book to enjoy, much to learn from, much to cause the reader to think, but it is, i have tried to show, so poorly presented and argued that the job needs to be done again, by someone better qualified.