Dawkins comes across as a pompous ass and tries to apply natural selection to everything. If you can get past his elitism it's still a very interesting and scientific read.
"'The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas-covered planet going around a nuclear fireball ninety million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.'"
I love this last chapter, because the truth is that science reveals a beautiful universe, of jaw-dropping complexity and improbability (see above), and its explanations for what things are and how they work and develop (including, by the way, natural selection) are elegant and awe-inspiring.
That's it. No 'however' needed.
"'The-Brights.net' [is]... an American initiative to rebrand atheists as 'Brights'..."
...which is typical of the American idolatry of intelligence. Your IQ is like your rank.
Dawkins wants it both ways: to decry the Catholic Church's abduction of Jewish children baptized by their Catholic nannies as inhuman abuse, and yet to suggest that those who know better perhaps could be excused for freeing, say, Amish children from the repressive, faith-blinded indoctrination by their parents.
What kind of hatred of religion must it take for a man to elevate the familial religious education of children above the sexual abuse of children? What kind of lack of self-knowledge, for a grown childhood-sexual-abuse victim?
I mean, the scope and extent of his anger, and the general sloppiness of his argumentative logic, suggests that something more primal, less rational, than his reason is driving him here. Something more akin to religious fervor than scientific detachment.
"Only religious faith is a strong enough force to motivate such utter madness in otherwise sane and decent people."
Of course. Obviously. There's no need to substantiate this. Any reasonable person can see that it's absolutely true. Dawkins, to his credit, recognizes that this is an unsupportable generalization, and at least tries to shore it up. A few pages later:
"It might be said that there is nothing special about religious faith here. Patriotic love of country or ethnic group can make the world safe for its own version of extremism, can't it? Yes it can... but religious faith is an especially potent silencer of rational calculation, which usually seems to trump all others." [emphasis mine]
So, from a subjective observation -- religious faith is "especially potent" in its ability to foster extremism, and it "usually seems" (to Dawkins?) to trump all others -- Dawkins jumps to an absolute ...
I keep posting notes on this and then regretting them, removing them. I don't know how much is due to my bias and how much to Dawkins's approach.
Dawkins reminds me of the man with the hammer, to whom everything looks like a nail. He's so intelligent, but he seems obsessed with applying the theory (law?) of natural selection to every unsolved problem of propagation he can see, including the development of the universe.
The "who designed the designer" problem isn't explained away by natural selection: although Darwin's theory is an elegant, simple, and almost certainly correct explanation for the progress of life, it doesn't attempt to address how those simple one-celled or even sub-cellular flora or fauna got here in the first place, nor can it.
Dawkins advances the anthropic principle as his best case against this problem: sure, the spontaneous generation of life is almost insurmountably improbable, given the unbelievable vastness of space and the minute calibration of the variables needed to sustain (much less generate) life, but here we are, so we must be just the kind of planet to have beaten those odds.
The anthropic principle strikes me as a sort of word game. "Because we exist, we must be the kind of planet where life spontaneously generated, however astronomically improbable that is." Kind of like, "because ...
Additional information
- Pages: 464
- ISBN: 0552774294
- EAN: 9780552774291
- Binding: Paperback
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"This chapter has contained the central argument of my book, and so... I shall summarize it...
"1. One of the greatest challenges to the human intellect, over the centuries, has been to explain how the complex, improbable appearance of design in the universe arises.
"2. The natural temptation is to attribute the appearance of design to actual design itself. In the case of a man-made artefact such as a watch, the designer really was an intelligent engineer. It is tempting to apply the same logic to an eye or a wing, a spider or a person.
"3. The temptation is a false one, because the designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer. The whole problem we started out with was the problem of explaining a statistical improbability. It is obviously no solution to postulate something even more improbable. We need a 'crane,' not a 'skyhook ...
glitterdown replies...
The anthropic principle is strikingly self-evident, but powerful in its simplicity. It's a lot like Occam's Razor in that way. A useful tool.
glitterdown replies...
In browsing through your quotes backwards, perhaps I need to explain this further in retrospect. The attraction I have to the anthropic principle is one of wonder. It's a curious gem to tussle about. I tend to discredit any attempt to quantify the "chance" of life arising on a particular planet as terribly lacking in evidence and having no basis beyond pure speculation. However, regardless of whether or not it's a long-shot or incredibly common or whether it was divine or natural, one factor is self-evident, and that is that life did arise on Earth whatever the chance, and life of a sort that could ponder its own existence. That factor directly and fantastically colors any extrapolation one tries to then make about the world/universe etc. This sole factor makes a few things simultaneously and intriguingly possible, one that life is exceedingly rare and precious (what we have could truly ...
jnonfiction replies...
I completely agree. The issue with the anthropic principle as a way of artificially inflating the probability of something happening is that it only applies to the instance, not the variable. I flip a coin; it lands "heads up"; this does nothing to increase or decrease the probability that any coin will land "heads up." But as a mindblower, you're absolutely right. It's mindblowing that we're here.