Reception
In Science Magazine the skeptic Michael Shermer, reviewing this book, says " defense of religious faith is a passionate and honorable one and he demonstrates that some of Dawkins's characterizations of religion are indeed overly simplistic or selective, but he never delivers an answer to the God question. The closest thing to an argument for God's existence I could find in the book is this: 'Why should God require an explanation at all? He might just be an "ultimate,"...one of those things we have to accept as given and is thus amenable to description, rather than explanation.' That may be, but like all other arguments made in favor of God's existence, this only works as a reason to believe if you already believe. If you do not already believe, science cannot help you."
Read more about this topic: Dawkins' God: Genes, Memes, And The Meaning Of Life
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)
“Aesthetic emotion puts man in a state favorable to the reception of erotic emotion.... Art is the accomplice of love. Take love away and there is no longer art.”
—Rémy De Gourmont (1858–1915)