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The God Delusion
by Richard Dawkins

Review by Michael Strong

Although in England and Europe church attendance is at an all-time low, the United States is one of the most religious nations on earth; 90% of us believe in life after death. Up to the present it would have been inconceivable for two such books as Sam Harris' THE END OF FAITH and Richard Dawkins' THE GOD DELUSION to become bestsellers. Certainly nothing like it has occurred in the past, though we know all too well those bestseller lists clogged with "inspirational" hooey. It well may be (and it is devoutly to be wished) that having been exposed to faith-based fascism, Americans have finally had enough. At all events we humanists can only gasp with relief that someone has finally stood up and said: "The emperor has no clothes!"

Ever since the days of T.H. Huxley, "Darwin's bulldog," science and religion have pursued a policy of mutual nonintervention, as if a clergyman should say to a scientist, "I won't call you a devil, if you won't call me a moron." But this sciento/religious detente is changing, if only because terrorism has convinced many that we can no longer afford to indulge religious fanaticism. From there it's just a step to question religion itself.

And the government's faith-based attempts to block stem-cell research have surely provoked scientists' retaliation.

Among these, Richard Dawkins, the Oxford biologist, is the most forthright. Whereas Sam Harris makes allowance for "spirituality" and meditation, Dawkins has no concern but to critique all religion, and the supernatural.

He particularly addresses the theory of "intelligent design", which postulates that it is most improbable that life's organized complexity could have arisen by chance; hence, a creator. Dawkins replies that life did indeed not arise by chance but by natural selection. The hypothesis of God has no explanatory power at all, because any conceivable God would have to be more complex and more improbable than any phenomena it seeks to explain. "A designer God cannot be used to explain organized complexity because any God capable of designing anything would have to be complex enough to demand the same kind of explanation in his own right. God presents an infinite regress from which he cannot help us escape." We immediately confront this regress if we try to answer the familiar question, "And who made God?"

Scientists are indeed fighting back! The N.Y.Times reports that at La Jolla this month the Science Network held a forum: "Beyond Belief: Science, Religion, Reason, and Survival", wherein religion was sharply debunked. Another purposed of the forum was to critique the egregious Templeton Foundation, which seeks to smudge the line between science and religion. A typical award is $1.5 million, calculated to exceed the Nobel Prize. If only money could buy truth...! One forum participant, Prof. Richard Sloan, has published to attack "garbage research" financed by Templeton, on the healing effects of prayer.

These issues are hardly trivial, as certain local events in the Hudson Valley show. Benedictine and Kingston Hospitals are now discussing the possibility of a merger. In 1997 the same merger was proposed but defeated after a petition campaign, because the merger "would have forced Kingston Hospital to be subject to Catholic Directives which prohibit access to in-hospital reproductive health care." (Woodstock Times, 11/23/06, pp.22-23.)

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty!

--Michael Strong