Re: [asa] Interesting review of "The Selfish Gene"

On 8/16/06, mrb22667@kansas.net <mrb22667@kansas.net> wrote:
>
> What this reviewer writes is actually full of hope, I think! He states
> that
> Dawkins' arguments have rendered a God superfluous ... and accounts for
> the
> nature of life all too well... And the the reviewer goes on to lament
> the
> obvious shortcomings of such a point of view: that it apparently does
> NOT
> account for the nature of life in any sense that he wants to call "well".

I guess I empathised more with the despair than the hope; for example the
fact that reading the book seems to have completely arrested any spiritual
development of the reviewer, leading to years of depression, and the
desperate wish that he could "unread" the book. The hope expressed at the
end sounds pretty desperate to me; namely that there IS a "God-shaped hole"
in all of us, but he doesn't know if a God exists to fill such a hole, only
that science can't fill it. [Looking at it pessimistically, or as devil's
advocate, it could be said that the "God shaped hole" is just an unfortunate
consequence of the evolutionary process that gave us superior brains - after
all evolution has no foresight and couldn't have foreseen this defect that
would naturally occur ...]

All the best,
Iain

To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with
"unsubscribe asa" (no quotes) as the body of the message.
Received on Wed Aug 16 03:57:28 2006