Excerpt of The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins
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Contents.
CONTENTS
Preface
1. A DEEPLY RELIGIOUS NON-BELIEVER
Deserved respect
Undeserved respect
2. THE GOD HYPOTHESIS
Polytheism
Monotheism
Secularism, the Founding Fathers and the religion of America
The poverty of agnosticism
NOMA
The Great Prayer Experiment
The Neville Chamberlain school of evolutionists
Little green men
3. ARGUMENTS FOR GOD’S EXISTENCE
Thomas Aquinas’ ‘proofs’
The ontological argument and other a priori arguments
The argument from beauty
The argument from personal ‘experience’
The argument from scripture
The argument from admired religious scientists
Pascal’s Wager
Bayesian arguments
4. WHY THERE ALMOST CERTAINLY IS NO GOD
The Ultimate Boeing 747
Natural selection as a consciousness-raiser
Irreducible complexity
The worship of gaps
The anthropic principle: planetary version
The anthropic principle: cosmological version
An interlude at Cambridge
5. THE ROOTS OF RELIGION
The Darwinian imperative
Direct advantages of religion
Group selection
Religion as a by-product of something else
Psychologically primed for religion
Tread softly, because you tread on my memes
Cargo cults
6. THE ROOTS OF MORALITY: WHY ARE WE GOOD?
Does our moral sense have a Darwinian origin?
A case study in the roots of morality
If there is no God, why be good?
7. THE ‘GOOD’ BOOK AND THE CHANGING MORAL ZEITGEIST
The Old Testament
Is the New Testament any better?
Love thy neighbour
The moral Zeitgeist
What about Hitler and Stalin? Weren’t they atheists?
8. WHAT’S WRONG WITH RELIGION? WHY BE SO HOSTILE?
Fundamentalism and the subversion of science
The dark side of absolutism
Faith and homosexuality
Faith and the sanctity of human life
The Great Beethoven Fallacy
How ‘moderation’ in faith fosters fanaticism
9. CHILDHOOD, ABUSE AND THE ESCAPE FROM RELIGION
Physical and mental abuse
In defence of children
An educational scandal
Consciousness-raising again
Religious education as a part of literary culture
10. A MUCH NEEDED GAP?
Binker
Consolation
Inspiration
The mother of all burkas
Appendix:
A partial list of friendly addresses, for individuals needing support in
escaping from religion
Books cited or recommended
Notes
Index
I don't try to imagine a personal God; it suffices to stand in awe at the
structure of the world, insofar as it allows our inadequate senses to
appreciate it. —Albert Einstein
DESERVED RESPECT
The boy lay prone in the grass, his chin resting on his hands. He suddenly
found himself overwhelmed by a heightened awareness of the tangled stems
and roots, a forest in microcosm, a transfigured world of ants and beetles and
even – though he wouldn't have known the details at the time – of soil
bacteria by the billions, silently and invisibly shoring up the economy of the
micro-world. Suddenly the micro-forest of the turf seemed to swell and
become one with the universe, and with the rapt mind of the boy
contemplating it. He interpreted the experience in religious terms and it led
him eventually to the priesthood. He was ordained an Anglican priest and
became a chaplain at my school, a teacher of whom I was fond. It is thanks
to decent liberal clergymen like him that nobody could ever claim that I had
religion forced down my throat.*
* Our sport during lessons was to sidetrack him away from scripture and
towards stirring tales of Fighter Command and the Few. He had done war
service in the RAF and it was with familiarity, and something of the affection
that I still retain for the Church of England (at least by comparison with the
competition), that I later read John Betjeman's poem:
Copyright © 2006 by Richard Dawkins. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company
