Theists of all stripes love to hate Richard Dawkins' because he wrote an entertaining book and called it "The God Delusion". In this book, they think he mocked their theistic belief system. What I saw as hilarious was seen as offensive. What I saw as a keen sense of humor, theists saw cheap shots taken at their expense.
The theists do have a point. When posing unanswerable questions Dawkins could have stopped short of rubbing it in. But, how would the theists treated him and his book if he had taken a milder approach? Well, this is not entirely a sepculative question. We do have another book that pretty much presents the same kind of arguments as that of The God Deluison, but with some important differences, (i) it has a very humble and academic title, "The God Hypothesis", (ii) the arguments are presented in a very gentle fashion, and (iii) the author is a much beloved and gentle Carl Sagan. But none of this makes any difference, the theists reject Carl Sagan with just as much antipathy as they do Richard Dawkins.
In Chapter 6 of this book Sagan takes on the usual arguments we have seen played out here in various threads and systematically dismantles them all. The entire chapter is a must read for even the confirmed theists whose faith is rock solid, as at the very least it will show where we atheists are coming from, and that may persuade them to treat us atheists with a little less hostility.
I will try to give as much original text from Chapter 6 as possible. Those interested in the entire chapter of about 14 pages, please PM me and I will try to get it to you in pdf format.
From The God Hypothesis, Chapter 6:
"If we are to discuss the idea of God and be restricted to rational arguments, then it is probably useful to know what we are talking about when we say “God.” This turns out not to be easy. .... Now, there is a constellation of properties that we generally think of when we in the West, or more generally in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, think of God. .... We think of some being who is omnipotent, omniscient, compassionate, who created the universe, is responsive to prayer, intervenes in human affairs, and so on.
But suppose there were definitive proof of some being who had some but not all of these properties. Suppose somehow it were demonstrated that there was a being who originated the universe but is indifferent to prayer. . . . Or, worse, a god who was oblivious to the existence of humans. That’s very much like Aristotle’s god. Would that be God or not? Suppose it were someone who was omnipotent but not omniscient, or vice versa. Suppose this god understood all the consequences of his actions but there were many things he was unable to do, so he was condemned to a universe in which his desired ends could not be accomplished. These alternative kinds of gods are hardly ever thought about or discussed. A priori there is no reason they should not be as likely as the more conventional sorts of gods.
... The range of hypotheses that are seriously covered under the rubric “God” is immense. A naive Western view of God is an outsize, light-skinned male with a long white beard, who sits on a very large throne in the sky and tallies the fall of every sparrow.
Contrast this with a quite different vision of God, one proposed by Baruch Spinoza and by Albert Einstein. And this second kind of god they called God in a very straightforward way. Einstein was constantly interpreting the world in terms of what God would or wouldn’t do. But by God they meant something not very different from the sum total of the physical laws of the universe; that is, gravitation plus quantum mechanics plus grand unified field theories plus a few other things equaled God. And by that all they meant was that here were a set of exquisitely powerful physical principles that seemed to explain a great deal that was otherwise inexplicable about the universe. Laws of nature, as I have said earlier, that apply not just locally, not just in Glasgow, but far beyond: Edinburgh, Moscow, Peking, Mars, Alpha Centauri, the center of the Milky Way, and out by the most distant quasars known. That the same laws of physics apply everywhere is quite remarkable. Certainly that represents a power greater than any of us. It represents an unexpected regularity to the universe. It need not have been. It could have been that every province of the cosmos had its own laws of nature. It’s not apparent from the start that the same laws have to apply everywhere.
Now, it would be wholly foolish to deny the existence of laws of nature. And if that is what we are talking about when we say God, then no one can possibly be an atheist, or at least anyone who would profess atheism would have to give a coherent argument about why the laws of nature are inapplicable.
I think he or she would be hard-pressed. So with this latter definition of God, we all believe in God. The former definition of God is much more dubious. And there is a wide range of other sorts of gods. And in every case we have to ask, “What kind of god are you talking about, and what is the evidence that this god exists?”
more later ....
