climbing back up onto the soap box

I should probably preface this entry by saying that I have not read "The God Delusion" but have only heard the author speak on its subject and read reviews. That being said, I greatly disagree with the crux of the argument, equally as one with religious convictions, as one who despises fallacious arguments.

Mr. Dawkins is immensely popular at the moment on campuses and in the intellectual community at large, not so much because of the argument he has put forth, but rather because he has lead athiests out of the proverbial closet, empowering them to embrace their beliefs. That in itself is a noble ambition, but there's a reason he's dubbed Darwin's rottweiler. Dawkins has what can be described diplomatically as an abrasive and direct manner of discourse. His book centres on the ridiculous axiom that the owness of proof is not on athiests but on religion. That faith demands proof.

Just let that sink in for a second. It's like having a debate where the two sides can't agree on the definition of the terms. Faith does not require proof, if it did, it would not be faith. But, this is the statement upon which his book rests.

To paraphrase him; he claims that most theists are partial atheists as they have already denied all other Gods but their own, he is simply taking it a step further and adding one more God. This is such a ridiculous over simplification, and is on par with that thought you had as a child, "if my religion is right then aren't all the other gods wrong?". Dawkins is a scientist, an empiricist, and a very linear thinker. Monists believe that god is unknowable and we only see him though facets of our own lives, I myself adhere to a form of monism, would Dawkins deny me this view? probably.

I think my own brother put it best when we were having a philosophical argument and I asked him if he was an athiest. He said, Nietzsche waited til he was 29 before he killed God, perhaps he should wait at least that long. In other words, this isn't a simple endeavor to be dismissed as mere superstition.

However, I would not deny Dawkins his view that morality is possible externally from religion. You need look no further than Ancient Greece where schools of philosophy became the centers of moral thought, schools like stoicism, epicurianism, neoplatonism etc... These all existed alongside but separately from the polytheism of the day. Especially if you consult the works of the emperor Marcus Aurelius, who declares his own uncertainty about the existence of the gods, but claims this has no bearing on his own morality. Virtue is it's own reward.

But to bring it back to Dawkins, I've heard him state in interviews that science, despite not knowing the answer to the creation of the universe, one day soon will. That science will give us the answers we turn to God for. But, even Nietzsche described this kind of scientific knowledge as surplus to requirement and irrelevant. Nietzsche, an avowed atheist (and philologist), would tell us that even though we know what fire looks like, can write a formula detailing it and can replicate it, we still cannot say what it is. "It's a chemical reaction" does not tell me what fire is. Similarly explaining to me that the sun rises because of an equation does not satisfy the why. Why is the sky blue? all these questions hold a beautiful mystery that we cannot explain. I myself, would not want the answer were it available. There is poetry and there is soul in all these unknowns.

"God is in the details" is not just some hyperbolic statement. It's a statement about the beauty in the world.