I got ‘Outgrowing God : A Beginner’s Guide‘ by Richard Dawkins when it came out but never got around to reading it. I was in the mood for some nonfiction and so picked this one up and read it.
This book has two parts. In the first part, Richard Dawkins tries to show how modern religions are not much different from Ancient Greek or Ancient Egyptian mythology, that is how they are also a product of the human imagination. In the second part, Dawkins tries to explain how the theory of evolution and the principle of natural selection and other associated scientific theories explain how life and living things and humans came into being.
The book looked like a combination of Dawkins’ other books, like ‘The God Delusion’ and his books on the theory of evolution, but written for a younger audience. The language is simple and straightforward, Dawkins is very clear with the facts he presents, and with his arguments, and his explanations.
I was surprised with some of the facts that Dawkins mentioned. For example, that the Greek mathematician Aristarchus (310-230 BCE) first discovered that the Earth orbited around the sun, but this was forgotten for centuries before Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543 CE) discovered that again. Very fascinating!
Another interesting fact that I discovered through the book was that Prince Philip was regarded as a revered deity by the people in one of the South Sea Islands and they were waiting for him to come back again. Prince Philip was my favourite Royal. He looked so dashing and handsome when he was young when he served in the navy, and later when he became older he had an irreverent sense of humour. He was like an old grandpa who cracked a lot of jokes and many times he didn’t realize that his jokes were offensive and people were upset by them. I loved all his jokes, even the ones that people thought were offensive. As an elderly, kind gentleman who has seen a lot in life, and as the Queen’s husband, I thought he had the license to crack any kind of joke. It was a sad day when he passed. He was the last of the kind, and we’ll never see another like him. It is nice to know that somewhere deep in the South Pacific, there are people who revere him as a deity and are waiting for him to come back.
Dawkins also doesn’t shy away from the difficult questions and doesn’t try to sweep things below the carpet. He puts it all out there in black-and-white and tries to answer them. For example, this passage here –
“The previous chapter was filled with amazing examples of animals beautifully built, displaying uncannily perfect colour patterns, or doing apparently clever things to assist their survival. After each story, I asked : must there not have been a designer, a creator, a wise god who thought it all out and made it happen? What exactly is it about those examples and you could tell similar stories for every animal and plant that ever lived – that makes people think there had to have been a designer? The answer is improbability, and I now need to explain what I mean by that.
When we say something is improbable we mean it’s very unlikely to just happen by random chance. If you shake ten pennies and toss them on the table, you’d be surprised if all ten came up heads. It could happen but it’s very unlikely. (If you enjoy arithmetic you might like to work out just how unlikely, but I’m content to say ‘very’.) If somebody did the same thing with a hundred pennies it’s still just possible they’d all come up heads. But it’s so very very very improbable that you’d suspect a trick, and you’d be right. I’d bet everything I have that it was a trick.
With tossing pennies it’s easy – well, straightforward, at least – to calculate the odds against a particular outcome. For something like the improbability of the human eye, or the cheetah’s heart, we can’t calculate it exactly just by using arithmetic, like we can with the pennies. But we can say that it’s very very improbable. Things like eyes and hearts don’t just happen by luck. It’s this improbability that tempts people to think they must have been designed. And my task in this chapter and the next ones is to show that this thinking is mistaken. There was no designer. The improbability remains, whether we are talking about the improbability of an eye or the improbability of a creator capable of designing an eye. There has to be some other solution to the problem of improbable things. And that solution was provided by Charles Darwin.”
There is also humour throughout and that makes the book a pleasure to read. I don’t know whether some of the humour was intended or whether I read between the lines.
The book is fascinating and the pages just fly, and whether we agree with Dawkins or not, this book makes us think a lot. And that is the best thing that we can expect from a book.
Sharing some of my favourite parts from the book.
Quote 1
“Humans have a tendency to believe in agency. What is agency? Well, an agent is a thing that deliberately does something for a purpose. When the wind rustles the long grass, there is no agency. Wind is not an agent. A lion is an agent. A lion is an agent whose purpose is to eat you. It will modify its behaviour in sophisticated ways in order to catch you, and work energetically and flexibly to thwart your efforts to escape. It’s worth being scared of agency. But it can be a waste of time and effort, because the suspected agent may be something like the wind. The more dangerous your life tends to be on average, the more the balance should shift towards seeing agents everywhere and therefore sometimes believing falsehoods.
Nowadays we mostly no longer have to be scared of lions or sabretooths. But even modern humans can be scared of the dark. Children are scared of bogeymen. Adults are scared of muggers and burglars. Alone in bed at night, you hear a noise. It could be the wind. It could be the timbers of the old house, creaking as they settle. But it could be an armed burglar. Maybe nothing so specific as a burglar. As far as you are concerned, you fear an unnamed agent, as opposed to a non-agent like the wind or a creaking beam. The fear of agents, even if irrational, even if inappropriate on this particular occasion, may lurk within us from our ancestral past.”
Quote 2
“The idea of reciprocation, of exchange of favours, is at the root of all trade. Nowadays, few of us grow our own food, weave our own clothes, propel ourselves from place to place with our own muscle power. Our food comes from farms which may be on the other side of the world. We buy the clothes we wear, get around in a car or on a bicycle which we haven’t the faintest clue how to make. We board a train or plane which was made in a factory by hundreds of other humans, not one of whom probably knew how the whole thing was put together. What we offer in exchange for all these things is money. And we’ve earned that money by doing whatever it is we can do, writing books and giving lectures in my case, curing people in the case of a doctor, arguing in the case of a lawyer, fixing cars in the case of a garage mechanic.
Most of us would have a hard time surviving if we were transported back ten thousand years to the world of our ancestors. Back then, most people grew or found, dug up or hunted their food. In the Stone Age it’s possible that every man made his own spear. But there would have been expert flint-knappers who made especially sharp spear points. At the same time there may have been expert hunters who could throw a spear hard and accurately, but were not skilled at making spears in the first place. What could be more natural than an exchange of favours? You make me a good sharp spear and I’ll give you some of the meat that I catch with it.”
Have you read this book? Do you like Richard Dawkins’ books? Which of his books is your favourite?
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