Quote:
Originally Posted by Graham
I enjoyed the "The God Delusion"; I'm in general, possibly total, agreement with Dawkins; but even as someone solidly on his side of the argument, the book came across as unnecessarily contentious. I'm not convinced that the tone used would help convince those on the fence.
What it does do is stir up the entrenched crowd and raise awareness of the book, so, yes, perhaps a greater proportion of fence-sitters would read it, and yes, perhaps that would lead to a greater conversion of views towards atheism overall. But surely the same publicity could be achieved in a different way?
If an argument is put in a contentious way it provides a target that can be used by those who disagree in lieu of engaging with the underlying reasoning.
Graham
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Yeah I liked that one too... but the Ancestors Tale.. just read like a catalog of frankly not so interesting stories... there some good facts there, but a lot of scientific literature has this problem of producing giant overblown books that read like catalogs. I like the Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond for instance. Thats quite concise and to the point with every chapter illustrating a fascinating idea. Dawkins and scientists like him, fight too hard against Creationists. As we can see from that other thread, creationists can be master fighters and only go harder with opposition. This isn't the way to show people what atheism is or even Evolutionary theory.