Just out of curiosity, what books are you referring to when you say "books like these"?
Carl Sagan's Demon-Haunted World, Dennett's Breaking the Spell, tons of stuff by Michael Shermer, various writings by Pat Churchland (e.g., the chapter on religion in Brain-Wise), Russell's Why I Am Not a Christian, and Hume's Dialogues on Natural Religion (these last two being much better than the rest, it seems to me), and many others.
My reaction is definitely much different. I don't see much in the way of novelty, here; I see another entry in a long tradition going back to Xenophanes, much of which amounts to table-pounding and question-begging (of course, things don't fare much better on the other side, either). And I just don't expect Dawkins to do a very fair job of it (and, from everything I've read that you've linked to, Dawkins seems quite proud of his intentions to treat religion unfairly). But I clearly have different evaluations of Dawkins generally than you do. Anyhow, atheism, and defenses thereof, and even ones that rely on evidence from science, are actually quite common, not something new, and not much of it seems like a positive contribution, to me.
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Date: 2006-10-19 04:24 am (UTC)Carl Sagan's Demon-Haunted World, Dennett's Breaking the Spell, tons of stuff by Michael Shermer, various writings by Pat Churchland (e.g., the chapter on religion in Brain-Wise), Russell's Why I Am Not a Christian, and Hume's Dialogues on Natural Religion (these last two being much better than the rest, it seems to me), and many others.
My reaction is definitely much different. I don't see much in the way of novelty, here; I see another entry in a long tradition going back to Xenophanes, much of which amounts to table-pounding and question-begging (of course, things don't fare much better on the other side, either). And I just don't expect Dawkins to do a very fair job of it (and, from everything I've read that you've linked to, Dawkins seems quite proud of his intentions to treat religion unfairly). But I clearly have different evaluations of Dawkins generally than you do. Anyhow, atheism, and defenses thereof, and even ones that rely on evidence from science, are actually quite common, not something new, and not much of it seems like a positive contribution, to me.