Dawkins Limits His Arguments

Getting into the first couple of chapters of The God Delusion the first thing we find out is that Dawkins does not like to see the word "God" used too broadly. He limits "God" to "supernatural creator." One of my favourite books God in All Worlds, Lucinda Vardy, ed., contains passages from many culturally diverse thinkers and, in these passages, God is understood in countless different ways, "supernatural creator," being one of many.

Secondly, he limits his definition of a religious person by excluding those like Einstein and other scientists who espouse a kind of pantheistic reverence towards the complexity of the universe and awe at the mystery. Dawkins calls these people religious non-believers, but did they call themselves atheists? Rudolph Otto in The Idea of the Holy explains that the religious impulse begins with the sense of wonder, the mysterium tremendum, and myth and ritual begin as responses to the experience in all cultures. Dawkins says the main reason people belong to any religion is simply because their parents did and they were taught to believe as children. I daresay that is so for most believers today, but that doesn't address "why religion?" in the first place. Someone remarked that if there is no God we would have had to invent one. I suppose Dawkins doesn't count as "religion" the spiritual beliefs of aboriginal peoples? How does Gitchi Manitou arise in one culture and Yahweh in another and so on? Karen Armstrong in A History of God begins in a different way: she says human beings have always looked for a system that gives meaning and value to life and most cultures have sensed something beyond ourselves, commonly known as the divine or the sacred. Thus, the idea of God is what exists, a word that attempts to describe what is beyond words, beyond thought, not definable. Armstrong notes "people dubbed atheists deny a particular conception fo the divine." The particular conception, the "delusion" according to Dawkins is that "there exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us."

Dawkins tells us that he is attacking everything supernatural, from fairies at the bottom of the garden to God. There is nothing that is not purely physical in the universe, and that cannot be explained naturally (given, of course, that there is much that hasn't been explained yet). I am looking forward to reading this book from a science perspective but I also recognize myth, symbol, metaphor, creative imagination, the non-rational (not irrational), art, aesthetics and so on as other ways of knowing.