He reminds me of me

Richard Dawkins reminds me so much of one of my favorite people: me, ten years ago. The arguments are the same, the arrogance is almost identical. Dawkins employs celestial teapots, fairies, and the flying spaghetti monster as equivalent, logically, to God. In my day, I used flying, insensible, immaterial rabbits. We both found St. Anselm's ontological proof of God to be exceedingly silly.

Dawkins notes, confusedly, that one of his heroes, Betrand Russell, took the argument seriously. Dawkins does not note that one of the most famous logicians and mathematicians ever (and good friend of Einstein) Kurt Gödel, produced a modern ontological proof. I cannot pretend to understand it, and thus, be convinced by it, but I certainly can't belittle it, either.

At the outset I said belief in God was not a topic to be decided by experts - so Gödel's incomprehensible proof could hardly end the issue. What is frustrating about Dawkins, and indicated by Gödel's absence from his book, is Dawkins's radical unfairness. Dawkins, however, cannot believe anyone remotely intelligent could take God seriously. Every smart religious person is transformed in Dawkin's eyes to someone stupid, or, more often, a secret atheist, whose true beliefs were buried by religious persecution. But Gödel believed in God, not in "the old days when everyone believed", but in the 1960s and 1970s. And thus, since neither his intelligence, nor his faith, can be dismissed, Gödel himself is dismissed. The resulting book, so far, appears to the equivalent of what happens when partisans write political books. In fact, Dawkins reminds me of someone else. He's the Ann Coulter of atheism.


(In my next post: I agree with Dawkins about several things!)