User:Jeeves/Objections to Dawkins God Delusion

Some notes on The God Delusion. I usually try not to read stuff that reconfirms my own views, since that's just mental masturbation. So, to keep in shape, here's things I found to disagree with in Dawkin's book. May become an essay, or if I accidentally lose my head up my own arse, possibly an email to Dawkins.


 * Applying the anthropic principle to the universe at large
 * There just isn't any *evidence*. I'm not even sure how sensible it is to suggest the universal constants could be anything other than the values they are. I'm not satisfied with the difference Dawkins attempts to establish between the God hypothesis and the multiverse hypothesis. There is no evidence for either, and I don't believe either solves any problems (what created the multiverse? why is the multiverse configured such that it generates the number and permutations of universes that it does?) The section could have been happily left out without affecting the book in the slightest.


 * Basically the whole chapter on the origins of religion
 * Found the whole attempt to try and apply Darwinian ideas to the evolution of religion incredibly unsatisfactory. There isn't truly a free marketplace in ideas, so free competition rarely happens. Evolved susceptibility to ideas in Children also seems unsatisfactory, kids also believe in Santa/Easter Bunny but all grow out of that. Christianity somehow managed to enslave the Roman empire against the tide of power, mainly by winning adult converts. There's something in the fitness of certain religions that is not "evolved" as such, though certain hybridisation has taken place.

&c. &c.