I have finished The God Delusion myself. It has many good passages, but I thought I would share a light-hearted comment Dawkins makes against one of the rather fascile "proofs" for God offered by Thomas Aquinas: "4 The Argument from Degree. We notice that things in the world differ. There are degrees of, say, goodness or perfection. But we judge these degrees only by comparison with a maximum. Humans can be both good and bad, so the maximum goodness cannot rest in us. Therefore there must be some other maximum to set the standard for perfection, and we call that maximum God. That's an argument? You might as well say, people vary in smelliness but we can make comparison only by reference to a perfect maximum of conceivable smelliness. Therefore there must exist a pre-eminently peerless stinker, and we call him God. Or substitute any dimension of comparison you like, and derive an equivalently fatuous conclusion." |
Slim