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Sat 9 Aug, 2014 11:06 am
Context:
Perhaps you feel that agnosticism is a reasonable position, but
that atheism is just as dogmatic as religious belief? If so, I hope
Chapter 2 will change your mind, by persuading you that 'the God
Hypothesis' is a scientific hypothesis about the universe, which
should be analysed as sceptically as any other. Perhaps you have
been taught that philosophers and theologians have put forward
good reasons to believe in God. If you think that, you might enjoy
Chapter 3 on 'Arguments for God's existence' - the arguments turn
out to be spectacularly weak. Maybe you think it is obvious that
God must exist, for how else could the world have come into being?
How else could there be life, in all its rich diversity, with every
species looking uncannily as though it had been 'designed'? If your
thoughts run along those lines, I hope you will gain enlightenment
from Chapter 4 on 'Why there almost certainly is no God'.
Far from pointing to a designer, the illusion of design in the living
world is explained with far greater economy and with devastating
elegance by Darwinian natural selection. And, while natural selection
itself is limited to explaining the living world, it raises our conscious-
ness to the likelihood of comparable explanatory 'cranes' that may
aid our understanding of the cosmos itself. The power of cranes such
as natural selection is the second of my four consciousness-raisers.
@OmSigDAVID,
Just retrieved this thread.