Isaac's Meandering Musings

Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion has, according to wikipedi a, sold over 3 million copies in English and has been translated into 35 languages. It is by far the most widely-sold (and probably the most widely-read) atheist polemic of recent decades - perhaps of all time. All this means of course that Dawkins is quite influential in the global atheist 'community'. But is his book really any good? The reader should, by now, be fully aware that the answer is 'No'. I've focused primarily on Dawkins' discussion of the existence of God, as this issue is the lynch-pin of his book. Without his conclusion that belief in God is akin to insanity, the rest of his discussion is largely moot. Much of his case for the 'dangerous' nature of religion is based on the assumption that belief in God is fundamentally irrational and, therefore, 'faith', as he defines it, is the enemy of reason and progress. The problem is, however, that Dawkins' discussion ...

Part IX: Monkeying with Physics Robin Collins, probably the foremost defender the fine-tuning argument today, lists several examples of fine-tuning: 1. If the initial explosion of the big bang had differed in strength by as little as 1 part in 1060, the universe would have either quickly collapsed back on itself, or expanded too rapidly for stars to form. In either case, life would be impossible…(As John Jefferson Davis points out, an accuracy of one part in 10^60 can be compared to firing a bullet at a one-inch target on the other side of the observable universe, twenty billion light years away, and hitting the target.) 2. Calculations indicate that if the strong nuclear force, the force that binds protons and neutrons together in an atom, had been stronger or weaker by as little as 5%, life would be impossible… 3. Calculations by Brandon Carter show that if gravity had been stronger or weaker by 1 part in 10 to the 40th power, then life-sustaining stars like the sun...