Top critical review
1.0 out of 5 starsNothing new here, and nothing interesting
Reviewed in the United States on October 8, 2019
Dawkins has written all this before. He’s said many times, for example, that any God who could create the cosmos would have to be more complex than the cosmos, and would need his existence explained just as much. He’s been answered many times, but he only repeats himself. It’s as if there were no intellectual world outside his own head; as if intellectual integrity never called for a thinker to respond to other thinkers.
The same goes for virtually all his theologizing. (I’m not a scientist so I will not speak to most of his science, though I’ll turn to one piece of it very shortly.) It’s all recycled material, but sterile, in the sense that it’s remained uninfluenced by the living world surrounding it.
And not just his theology but also his philosophy. At the end of the book he says we “must” live in a “Goldilocks” universe, one of the rare members of the multiverse that supports life. He backs off in the next paragraph as far as admitting it’s not proved yet, but that’s after he concludes it must be true. And why must it be true, even in the complete absence of any physical, empirical evidence? Because there’s no God. And why is he so sure there’s no God? Because the multiverse theory could be true. That’s just rationally empty; it begs the question of God; it’s arguing in a circle
There’s nothing of interest here that wasn’t already in *The God Delusion,* of which nearly every chapter was given enough response by theists to merit at least some attempt at a counter-argument. Dawkins doesn’t seem to care. And because this is old and worked-over material, my final comment is that (unlike most of what I’ve read if Dawkins) this book was really quite boring. I read it so I could review it for The Stream, which I’ll do soon enough. Otherwise I’d have laid it down after a couple chapters and found a better way to spend my time.
