P.Z. Myers and Daniel C. Dennett, in The Reality Club over at edge.org (H. Allen Orr for the defense), have penned rebuttals to Orr’s review of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion.You really should click over and read the whole interchange. Myers and Dennett are not at a loss for words, so it’s quite a lengthy though wonderfully erudite exchange of opinion.
By far I enjoyed the following, written by Myers, the most of any single paragraph or two.
Dawkins goes so far as to accuse those who conflate Einstein’s abstraction with the the kind of personal god worshipped by hundreds of millions of people of “intellectual high treason.” I don’t quite agree with that, but it certainly is intellectual foolishness. I like Orr’s work, I usually greatly enjoy his reviews, but in this case he is, perhaps unconsciously rather than deliberately, confusing the pantheistic cosmic force he is unnecessarily defending from Dawkins’ argument with the righteous anthropomorphic Supreme Being that is actually refuted.
p.z. myers
And yes, I know it is the nature of religion that everyone who believes will automatically state that their god isn’t the complicated caricature of the Bible or the Torah or the Koran and will retreat to the safety of the Ineffable (but Simple) Pantheistic/Deistic God until the challenge from the atheist subsides. Once the critic is safely out of earshot, though, then they will pray to the fickle deity for the new raise or that their favorite football team will win, and they will wonder if the cruel Old Testament God will torture them for eternity for transgressions against antique laws of propriety. Until that atheist glances their way again … then once more, they will describe God as an abstraction, as Love, as something so nebulous that it is safely removed from any specific attack. It’s familiar territory. Get into an argument with someone over Christianity or Islam or any of the dominant monotheistic faiths, and you’ll see them flicker back and forth between the abstract and the real god of their religion — their only defense is to present a moving target.
I belong to a forum where debating religion is encouraged. What Myers describes is precisely how 95% of debates with theists go.
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