The God Delusion Richard Dawkins Bantam Press, 2006

The God Delusion Richard Dawkins Bantam Press, 2006

The temptation with a rallying cry such as Dawkins’s latest effort is to join the chorus of praise or boos, or note dismissively that it is a popular book not really worthy of academic attention. While we might imagine a theological journal taking a passing interest (along with passing pot-shots), surely a social scientific journal need not pay attention to The God Delusion. But Dawkins quite s...

The God delusion Richard

Twelve Misunderstandings of Kin Selection By RICHARD DAWKINS

HAMILTON’S theory of kin selection is much misunderstood. This paper lists and refutes 12 of the commonest misunderstandings, for example: “Kin selection is a special, complex kind of natural selection, as opposed to ‘individual selection’”; “Kin selection is a form of group selection”; “All species members share the majority of their genes, so selection should favour universal altruism”, “Kin ...

Playing Fast and Loose with Complexity: A Critique of Dawkins' Atheistic Argument from Improbability

This paper is a critique of Richard Dawkins’ “argument from improbability” against the existence of God. This argument, which forms the core of Dawkins’ book The God Delusion, provides an interesting example of the use of scientific ideas in arguments about religion. Here I raise three objections: (1) The argument is inapplicable to philosophical conceptions of God that reduce most of God’s com...

Dawkins’s Gambit, Hume’s Aroma, and God’s Simplicity

I examine the central atheistic argument of Richard Dawkins’s book The God Delusion (“Dawkins’s Gambit”) and illustrate its failure. I further show that Dawkins’s Gambit is a fragment of a more comprehensive critique of theism found in David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Among the failings of Dawkins’s Gambit is that it is directed against a version of the God Hypothesis that fe...