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Title: A Devil's Chaplain : Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love by Richard Dawkins ISBN: 0-618-33540-4 Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Co Pub. Date: 29 September, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.81 (27 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Common sense can be beautiful.
Comment: There are certain books which everyone in a country that considers itself "enlightened" should be required to read, at least before (s)he's out of school. The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan comes to mind immediately, as does this book by the brilliant Richard Dawkins, a man who thankfully continues to turn people away from superstition and ignorance and assists them in focusing on WHAT IS, rather than WHAT SOME PEOPLE WISH COULD BE (to further their own agendas).
Common sense, beautiful prose, striking contrasts between science and other so-called belief systems, and sterling examples of weighty evidence favoring clear-cut science and critical thinking over pseudo-sciences like astrology (as science is the only general school of thought that actually delivers) all serve to make this, like all of Dawkins's other books, brilliant and inspiring from cover to cover. In a culture in which it hasn't been "okay" to be SMART in many decades (this is no coincidence, folks), Dawkins tries to get the reader to remember that (s)he has a brain, and that that brain is more than capable of perceiving hoaxes and ulterior motives.
It becomes obvious after reading Dawkins's prose that one's natural sense of wonder can be fulfilled quite well by science
-- better than all other disciplines, in fact -- because scientific discoveries far outweigh any creation myth or new-age con job in regards to having the ability to strike the reader with eye-popping awe (and make one feel "special" as a living being on this planet).
BUY THIS BOOK. Buy one for your best friend. It's quite necessary, in this world of ever-shrinking sensibilities. It's a good thing we still have a few good guys left. Dawkins is one of them. Let's hope he inspires enough people to champion the individual brain over the mass hallucination -- before there ARE no good guys left.
Rating: 5
Summary: Startling Sermons
Comment: Charles Darwin said that there was grandeur in his view of life produced by natural selection, but it was not all a pretty picture. He wrote his friend Joseph Hooker in 1856: "What a book a Devil's Chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low and horridly cruel works of nature." Richard Dawkins has taken the quotation for the title of a collection of his writings, A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love (Houghton Mifflin). Darwin also wrote of a particular wasp: "I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living body of caterpillars." But as Darwin (and Dawkins) would remind us, the evolutionary process has produced wonderfully designed creatures, and a wasp who cares for its young by letting them hatch within a hapless caterpillar is simply doing a competent job of getting the young off to a good start. It might be distasteful to us (and should have been to a supreme being), but nature just doesn't care. It isn't kindness of the mother wasp, or cruelty to the caterpillar, but simply amoral nature.
But as chaplain, Dawkins notes that while wasps and caterpillars can do nothing about such amorality, we can. "At the same time as I support Darwinism as a scientist, I am a passionate anti-Darwinian when it comes to politics and how we should conduct our human affairs." There is no inconsistency here any more than in the physician who studies cancer, but is bent on eliminating it. And as devil's chaplain, Dawkins urges us to use our evolution-given brains, reject the pacifiers of faith in immortality, and rejoice in our short lives because they are all we have. Dawkins, you see, besides being an eminent Darwinian whose books like The Blind Watchmaker have wonderfully well laid out what evolution means, is also possibly the world's most famous atheist. You will find here his views on religious beliefs and creationists (or their newest incarnation as advocates of Intelligent Design), of course, but on "alternative medicine," crystal healing, homeopathy, and so on. Besides the rants, there is good humor and some warm tributes to friendship, especially in his memorials to his friends Douglas Adams and Stephen Jay Gould. The final chapter, "A Prayer for My Daughter," is a letter he wrote to her when she turned ten, to let her know how he thought she should select what to believe. The great question to ask in all disputes: "What kind of evidence is there for that?"
Readers will be reminded of the belligerence of Thomas Henry Huxley, "Darwin's Bulldog," but evolution is only one theme here. Included is his hilarious review of the book by the hoaxer Alan Sokal who submitted a nonsense paper to a postmodern journal and had it accepted. He rages against postmodernism, with its "all views are equal" stance making his scientific view equivalent to a voodoo view. He expresses his doubts about the jury system, and in a wonderful chapter ("Genes Aren't Us") discounts just how important genes are for personality. Another chapter makes us wonder at just how close we are to our ape cousins. Throughout, he is witty, and above all informative on a wide-range of subjects, not just on his refusal to accept what he sees as the diverse delusions of most of the world. Anyone who has admired his previous writings of science popularization will find these personal essays to be very appealing sermons from an accomplished chaplain.
Rating: 3
Summary: No God is allowed
Comment: In this book Dawkins has reprinted his favorite essays, reviews, and addresses. The book's title is taken from a letter Darwin wrote to his friend Joseph Hooker in 1856. Like Darwin, Dawkins argues that evolution is a blind process, demonstrating no concern for suffering because suffering is 'an inherent consequence of natural selection.' Dawkin's evolutionary perspective concludes that the universe is a silent box, empty of all intention and design. Everything within the box must be explained in terms of purely naturalistic materials and processes. No God is allowed. The cosmos, and everything within it, is, he admits, marvelous--although often malevolent-ultimately created by a set of accidents of nature. Dawkins' hostility toward religion in general and Christianity in particular, is very evident from his earliest writings. In his popular articles for secular humanist and atheist periodicals, he identifies atheism as the only credible intellectual option in our modern age. Dawkins makes it very clear in this book that he sees Christianity--and all forms of theistic belief--as intellectual viruses that must be destroyed. On page 117 in a chapter titled "The Infected Mind" he argues that all theistic religion is a sickness, a mind parasite (his words). He adds that he is both hostile and contemptuous to religion, all religion, both organized and disorganized religion. But we underestimate Dawkins if we assume that his concerns are merely academic. To the contrary, Dawkins aspires to be a social engineer and to bring the evolutionary worldview into a firm place in the public square in order to revolutionize everything from politics, culture, economics, and every other dimension of life. The title of his newest book is more than a literary choice. Dawkins openly sees himself as an evangelist for Darwinism and as the high priest of naturalism. He sees all forms of religious belief as the enemy, and wants to expunge from public life all religious arguments, concepts, and traditions. As a militant atheist, Dawkins is living out the inevitable consequences of his Darwinian worldview and working hard to achieve his goal (with the blessing of many high level persons in the church in England, I might add). Ultimately, Dawkins would like to clear the public square of all religious believers as well. In this book this goal comes through clearly, albeit tactfully. I could add that he is making good progress on achieving his goal. He clearly is not just opposed to extreme forms of religion (as most people are) but ALL religion, as his own words clearly explain.
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Title: Freedom Evolves by Daniel C. Dennett ISBN: 0670031860 Publisher: Viking Press Pub. Date: 10 February, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design by Richard Dawkins ISBN: 0393315703 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: September, 1996 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder by Richard Dawkins ISBN: 0618056734 Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Co Pub. Date: 05 April, 2000 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins ISBN: 0192860925 Publisher: Oxford Press Pub. Date: September, 1990 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Nature Via Nurture : Genes, Experience, and What Makes Us Human by Matt Ridley ISBN: 0060006781 Publisher: HarperCollins Pub. Date: 29 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $25.95 |
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