review of Richard Dawkin’s God Delusion

Marilynne Robinson, a well respected author says this about Dawkin’s book, the God Delusion:

“Dawkins deals with all this in one sentence. Hitler did his evil ‘in the name of. . . an insane and unscientific eugenics theory.’ But eugenics is science as surely as totemism is religion. That either is in error is beside the point. Science quite appropriately acknowledges that error should be assumed, and at best it proceeds by a continuous process of criticism meant to isolate and identify error. So bad science is still science in more or less the same sense that bad religion is still religion. That both of them can do damage on a huge scale is clear. The prestige of both is a great part of the problem, and in the modern period the credibility of anything called science is enormous. As the history of eugenics proves, science at the highest levels is no reliable corrective to the influence of cultural prejudice but is in fact profoundly vulnerable to it”.

Related articles

• The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins (turningpagesandtea.wordpress.com)