An interesting read.
I admire his writing style and choice of words. The book encourages arguments in the reader's mind for and against the idea being debated. It helps you ask more questions to yourself and understand the God in you a little better and be one level stronger, spiritually.
Technically, the book is not so much of an attack on the God hypothesis as it is on religion. Calling the book God Delusion may not be acceptable for people who believe in God but take the religious beliefs with a pinch of salt. Labelling God a delusion, for the flaws of religious beliefs is like saying patriotism is a vice because they cause wars.( Interestingly countries are virtual constructs too.) He argues desperately for the non existence of God and speaks against agnostic views and that seemed to me to be fanatic. He has not been successful in convincing the reader that he is not a fanatic in forcing his theory to people who do not believe in it.
The argument against the existence of God , put forth by Dawkins, is the theory of evolution. However, for argument's sake, evolution and God are not mutually exclusive. Even if there is a physical God overlooking the day to day activities in the universe, evolution theory can still coexist with this idea. Evolution can only prove that the religious texts are fictional, at least parts of them.
Religion has led to the idea of creationism and has laid down numerous rules to lead lives. I am glad that the school I went to did not drill in any such ideas into the heads of its Christian and non-Christian students.(There are exceptions). We understood that the Bible was not meant to be taken literally. We learnt about evolution in Biology and we embraced the idea. No parent had a problem with that. As a student, it was absolutely agreeable to me to believe that there could be a God and he could have a hand in "designing" the idea of evolution. If there is an omnipotent God, what a marvelous way to design a universe where the only simple rule is for all genes to strive hard to thrive. There is no better credit to any God than that of designing Evolution.
I am agnostic about the existence of the widely accepted idea of God ( I say this at the risk of sounding clichéd ). According to me, God is a personal idea and it varies from person to person. What is right and what is wrong does not matter; what works for me may not work for you. My idea of God is one that is evolved from the time I heard about it and is still a work-in-progress. I am happy that my grandmothers were able to tell me about God with enough embodiment of the idea for the kid in me to understand and enough abstraction for me to later develop my own concept. My parents told me that God is to life what salt is to food. We all like it to be just right for our taste.
Here is my answer to Dawkins. I am with Dawkins in all his protests against religion and its evil side effects. I agree that being overly dependent on anything or anybody other than your own self is not appropriate. I agree with the biologist in that there is most certainly no God who supervises the world as we know it. However, there definitely is a God in my head. If I want an entity called God to exist, it is because I would like to believe that the things happening to me and around me are not entirely random and chaotic. I would like to see a pattern, a theory with which it works. If this is in our genes, it is pretty thriving and we have not evolved into anything better yet. If we are wired to see patterns and if this is my natural constitution, I don’t see a reason why I would want to disturb it by strongly opposing the instinct in me to believe in my God. It helps me be optimistic. It helps me dream and want to achieve more. My God is the poetry in my life. My God is Hope-personified. And Professor, yours is maybe, science. We just call them differently.
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