I’ve just reviewed Thank God for Evolution at the Popular Science website.
Bizarrely, this is a book that manages to quote Dawkins in support of religion. The reason it gets away with it is that it rebuilds the concept of religion from scratch, starting from scientific data and theories (particularly evolution). It’s a fascinating attempt, coming up with with something that I think most atheists wouldn’t be unhappy with, yet still religion. The only problem with it is that it’s written like a religious book, rather than a popular science book, which makes it pretty tedious going – but a really interesting idea.
I’m not as staunchly atheist as some scientists (maybe because I grew up in a multi-faith household), so I like the idea of a book on evolution that doesn’t wholesale reject the idea of religion. They may not be ideal bedfellows, but it must help the discourse to prove that religion and science can peacefully co-exist!
Absolutely, Angela. What’s impressive about this book is that he’s managed to get support from the whole spectrum, all the way from staunchly atheist to pretty heavy duty religious believers.
This sounds very much like Stuart Kaufmann’s Reinventing The Sacred which I reviewed for the Philadelphia Inquirer. (Not only was it an awful book, but the PI keep not paying me.) As I understand it from your review, Brian, Dowd’s book extracts religious meaning from the world around us in a sort of (but not quite) pantheistic way. Kaufmann’s book was rather like that, too, and its immediate effect was as the penultimate nail in my own religious coffin (the last nail was Barrow’s Impossibility) before I finally stumbled backwards into atheism.
“stumbled backwards”
Sideways.
Backwards. It was definitely backwards.
When you say that it’s written like a religious book, is it because it’s full of characters that at some point in their lives get to “know” each other, then proceed to beget the next generation, and then the whole thing starts all over again?
That’ll be the Reverend Michael Dowd. This kind of thing is not unusual, I think. I’ve been reading Denis Alexander’s Creation or Evolution: Do We Have to Choose? As an updated overview of evolution, it’s excellent. But it slips into language that just grates when it attempts to marry it with selected Bible excerpts. There’s artistry in this kind of allegorisation. But there’s no evidence that evolution is any god’s ‘plan’; so it’s faith. Attempting to ‘prove’ it in this way is apologetics. But isn’t attempting proof kind of against the point?
(Err, I’ll get me coat…)
I think some of you are misreading what the book’s about – my review is probably not clear enough. It’s not an attempt to shoehorn evolution into existing religious frameworks, but rather to see if there is a religious framework that fits the universe as revealed through science, including evolution. The whole idea of evolution as ’god’s plan’ is totally alien to this approach – there is no plan.
You can, of course question the point of fitting a religious framework to what we observe, but the author argues this is something many of us need. He then, and this is the weakest part, argues that existing religions (all existing religions, not just his own Christianity) can continue as metaphorical extensions of the ‘real’ religion, but that they need to throw away ideas of anything being literal in the bible etc.
I do think some of the responses above are surprisingly similar to those from Christians who condemned Monty Python’s Life of Brian without actually seeing it. We all, it seems, have our irrational prejudices.
Nah. Re-reading all the comments, I don’t see any ‘prejudice.’
Monty Python’s Life of Brian? Isn’t that the one that features the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch? Haven’t seen it, I try to stay away from that sort of filth… ;)