Sunday, September 27, 2009

Richard Dawkins - The God Delusion

I was given this book by a very dear and good individual after a brief altercation on the relationship between religion and science. The book is a best - seller and the author Richard Dawkins is a famous biologist.

To be fair to Richard Dawkins I started out with a negative bias against him. I wanted to find holes in his arguments right from the first line. But I gave up the efforts after the initial few pages. I found that he was also writing with a biased frame of mind and there are numerous instances to prove that. It is like when your elders keep on telling you about the benefits of not consuming alcohol and the harm caused by drinking alcohol, you make up your mind to taste it more out of rebellion than to investigate whether the elders are right about the effects of alcohol on the body. You have already made up your mind that the elders are not right and there is nothing wrong with alcohol. Richard Dawkins seems to nurture certain animosity deep inside towards the activities of the Christian faith which he himself fails to recognize.

Richard Dawkins simply concentrates on the western concept of physical God. He concentrates on Christianity. To him Buddhism is not a religion but a philosophy of life. He does not bother to go into details of what Jesus said but restricts himself to what the church and ordinary folks do in the name of religion. He is against the practices as well as the tall claims in the name of religion. I have nothing against any of his arguments. I myself do not believe in an external God. Religion to me is inside the body and inside the mind. So, I am in total agreement with and supportive of Richard Dawkins.

Richard Dawkins makes a valiant attempt, using all the force of argument at his disposal along with thoughts from every published material available till date, to put forth his conclusion that God does not exist. The sincerity of his efforts does not miss the eyes of the reader and he cannot but applaud Richard Dawkins for this. To me the fallacy of this effort is first the western world makes every attempt to create a physical God and then suffers at the hands of another westerner who guns it down. Such a waste of time for everyone.

Interestingly Richard Dawkins does not have put forth any alternate theory on God and the creator except for saying that ‘the origin of life was the chemical event or series of events whereby the vital conditions for natural selection first came about’. According to him after that chemical event took place the postulates of Charles Darwin known as natural selection took over. Thankfully or disappointingly (depending on which side of the border you stand) Richard Dawkins stays close to science and restricts himself to knowledge that is known. He hopes that one day physics will produce something as powerful as Darwinism and he will stand vindicated.

Being such a capable man, Richard Dawkins could have contributed a lot more had he dwelt on the psychological and emotional need for religion in the life of human beings. Then he could have blasted a lot of myths from across the world and churned out the real essence of what religion means. However he dwells on vague and artificial reasons for the need of religion which to me seemed like a deliberate attempt to ridicule. To that extent I am a bit disappointed with Richard Dawkins.

But the book is important and should be written so as to balance the ideas which are circulating in the western world in the name of religion. All youngsters should read the book so that they develop an unbiased and fearless view about life and more important that they realize that it is perfectly normal to carry and express a view which goes contrary to the popular view.

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