Goog God, Good Bye

I'm reading a book a friend recommended me long time ago. For him, it seems like it was kind of a revelation, though I had read some of the previous books by the same writer during a period of my life, a decade ago, where I used to be extremely interested in science books.

The guy is Richard Dawkins and the book, The God Delusion, which I bought at Stansted Airport at 4 for 3. I haven't finished all of 420 pages of that log yet, but I'm right in the middle. I had previously read The Blind Watchmaker and The Selfish Gene. These are books about how evolution works, which is the only plausible explanation so far grounded on facts that explains what he calls the climbing of mount improbable, that is, the diversity and adaptability of the existing species.

The God Delusion is a book against religion, hilarious in some chapters, which aim is deconstructing point after point a great deal of arguments for the existence of personal god(s), as he says, or any kind of super-natural being used to explain the existence and functioning of reality. It is very directed towards fighting views such as creationism and intelligent design as an answer, I guess, to their belligerence with respect to science in the educational arena in the US.

The book is well written (as anyone would expect of a Cambridge scholar), full of facts and scientifically well based. For me, it is a bit reiterative and extensive, and I think he could have explained the same in a more succinct way without losing any important argument. Sometimes he drifts too much from the central point of chapters and he tends to sprinkle the text too much with his own interpretation of other's words and personal anecdotes, which are of difficult rebuttal, but I guess this is the price to pay in science best-sellers.

I, personally, am also an atheist, of the hardest dyed-wool type, as he calls himself. I think I was born without the lobule in the brain that make people "gullible" to religions. As far as I remember, I have never believed in anything, not even Santa Claus. Why? When I was a child, I felt it was a waste of time to pray to a cross with a wooden guy hanging on the wall. Never understood the causal relation between praying and reality.

Later, for a while, I was amused by the Biblical stories the priest in my church (where I was baptized) explained using slides. They were really formidable, kind of unbelievable, like the one of Abraham said to kill his own son and told not to do so on the last moment. "What would it happen if the guy had been deaf?", I asked to myself, would he had been guilty of son-cide or would it have been god himself guilty of homicide? What a dilemma. And then, my big question: why those extraordinary things were never on the news nowadays? Why only happened in a desert 3.000 years ago? Was god now taking a rest?

Stories in the Bible were just like those in comics for me, really unreal. Never took them seriously, specially because of the darkness and weird smell surrounding churches, a mixture of wax, smoke, closeness, and smell of old people, which by itself it is enough to prevent anyone to enter. Then, one summer, I discovered Cosmos, by Carl Sagan, and my vision of the whole world changed for ever. I have always wanted to know how things worked, but that was different: there was a way that made possible to know how the world worked, and there was no need of god, just pure thinking, mathematics, and measures. Clear, clean, open, bright. That's science.

That was all I needed. I've never been a genius, on the contrary, a pretty normal type of guy, but if only I have a quality is that of being extremely skeptic. My grandmother used to say "better believing something rather that checking it". For me, even if I see it, I might not believe it is true.