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Zusammenfassung von Outgrowing God

Name: Outgrowing God
Rating: 4.2 (332 reviews)
Author: Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins

A Beginner’s Guide

4.2 (332 Bewertungen)

24 Min.

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Atheismus

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Outgrowing God
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What’s in it for me? An atheist’s case against God.

In predominantly Christian countries, people celebrate Christmas to mark the birth of Jesus. For Jews the world over, there’s Hanukkah, a celebration that commemorates the rededication of the Temple of Jerusalem. Amongst Hindus, there’s Diwali, the festival of lights associated with the goddess of prosperity, Lakshmi. In Muslim countries, people observe Ramadan, the sacred month of fasting.

All over the world, people believe in one god or several, and religious rituals such as these are expressions of this belief. Religion, and the belief in God, clearly plays an important role in peoples’ lives.

But according to renowned evolutionary biologist and outspoken atheist Richard Dawkins, religion and the belief in God belong in the dustbin of history. By applying the principles of scientific enquiry to religious beliefs and practices, Dawkins dismantles many of the common arguments religions make in the name of their faith.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

why holy books don’t tell the truth;
why it’s a bad idea to look to God for moral guidance; and
how evolution explains the improbability of living things.

Faith is an accident of birth, not a valid reason to believe in God.

God is a pretty awesome being. He’s all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful. He’s the superhero of superheroes. Nothing and no one rivals his incredible capacities.

This omnipotent, omniscient being is the God of the three main monotheistic religions of today – Judaism, Christianity and Islam. But there’s a problem. If this God is so awesome, so powerful, and so unique, how come he’s just one among many? In fact, only one among thousands.

That’s right. There are many gods other than the God of the main monotheistic religions. Thousands of gods have been worshipped throughout history and into the present day. The Vikings, for instance, were polytheists – they believed in multiple gods. Wotan was their primary god, but they had others, such as Thor, the thunder god who carried a hammer, and Snotra, the goddess of wisdom. The Greek gods and goddesses included Zeus, the king of the gods, Aphrodite, goddess of love, and Poseidon, god of the sea.

Even so, if we put together all the Greek and Viking gods along with the Muslim, Jewish, and Christian God, they’d still add up to just a tiny fraction of the gods that humans and all their religions have worshipped throughout history. Even the number of gods solely dedicated to the sun is huge: Many indigenous African religions have sun gods such as Anywanwu, Mawu, and Ngai. Australian aboriginal sun gods include Bila, Wala, and Karruar.

But despite the variety of gods available, the ones that people worship and the religions that they follow depend more on the time and place they were born than anything else. Why is this significant? Because this means that your own faith is most likely a consequence of the time and place you were born. If you’d been born during Viking times, you would have believed in Wotan and Thor. If you’d been born into an aboriginal family in Australia, you would probably have believed in sun gods such as Bila or Wala.

If there are so many religions and so many gods, how can you be sure that your religion or god is the one true one? Obviously, you can’t. If all the other religions are wrong, what makes you think your own religion and scripture isn’t wrong, too?

The fact of the matter is, the holy books of the most dominant monotheistic religions of today are wrong. Indeed, the origins of these books raise plenty of doubt about the truth of their contents.

The Bible and other holy books aren’t true, so there’s no reason to believe anything in them.

Ever played the game known as “Telephone?” A bunch of people stand in a row. The person at one end whispers a story to the person standing next to her, then that person whispers it to the one next to him. It goes on like this until the story reaches the other end of the line, when the last person shares what she heard with the whole group. More often than not, the story has changed greatly along the way.

Many of the holy books – including the Bible – came about through a “Telephone” effect. The stories they tell were passed down through word-of-mouth storytelling over decades and sometimes even centuries before they were written down, making them highly unreliable.

The God of the Bible is a jealous, violent god, so you shouldn’t look to him for moral guidance.

Imagine yourself as a kid, arriving home from school. You find your dad waiting. He cheerfully suggests that you light a bonfire together. You love bonfires, so you say yes and excitedly follow him outside. But once the firewood is all in place, something terrible happens. Your dad picks you up and throws you on top of the firewood. Turns out he wants to barbecue you – because God commanded him to.

That’s essentially the biblical story of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of his son. If you were that kid about to be sacrificed, would you think God was good? Probably not. A God who can think of no other way to test his subjects’ loyalty than to have them sacrifice their own children is pretty cruel.

Holy books can’t teach us how to be moral, because morality changes over time.

Not so very long ago, people could own other people. They could go to a market, pay cash, and return home with a slave, a person whose life they had absolute power over.

Thank goodness slavery has been abolished, because it’s a morally reprehensible practice. But slaves aren’t the only people who have historically been denied their rights. Women, for example, have also had very limited rights until very recently. In Britain, for instance, it was only in 1928 that women gained voting rights equal to those of men. Swiss women were only given those rights in 1971. Some countries, such as Saudi Arabia, have only granted women this basic democratic right in the last few years.

Living organisms aren’t created from the top down, by God, but from the bottom up, by DNA.

If want to build a house, you draw up blueprints. Then you hire construction workers who build the house to your specifications.

Constructing a house in this way is an example of top-down design. This is also how many people think of God: as a top-down architect up there in the sky who designed the world beneath.

Living organisms adapt to their environments and develop through the process of evolution.

If you’re cold, you put on a warm sweater, right? If you’re hot, you’ll take off some layers to cool down. You adapt depending on the conditions that you face.

Likewise, in nature, living organisms adapt to their environments. The way that these creatures adapt is important. Why? Because it points to evolutionary history.

Natural selection, the basis of evolution, explains the improbability of living things.

We’ve all seen those wildlife documentaries that show a cheetah hunting. It’s hypnotizing to watch the awesome power and beauty of the big cat sprinting after its prey.

When we consider an animal like a cheetah, we tend to jump to the conclusion that an “intelligent designer” – a euphemism for God – must have made it. Why? Because an organism as complex as a cheetah couldn’t have just happened. All organisms – even simple ones like bacteria – are highly improbable.

Our tendency towards superstition and religion is likely a by-product of evolution.

Say you’re an early human out on the African plains. You’re making good progress digging up a root for dinner when suddenly, you hear the grass rustle. It could just be the wind – but it could also be a lurking predator.

What are you likely to do in this situation? Probably err on the side of caution and run off in a hurry! Even if there was no lion lurking in the grass, it was in your best interest to assume that there was; a general belief that mysterious movements or sounds probably indicate danger could save your life.

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Worum geht es in Outgrowing God?

Outgrowing God (2019) shows us why we should all be atheists. Revealing how holy books such as the Bible are full of untruths and historical inaccuracies, Richard Dawkins argues that we can’t take these books seriously, nor should we rely on them for moral guidance. To explain all the awesome complexity and improbability of living things, we should look to science, and specifically to the process of evolution. It is evolution, by way of natural selection, that gave rise to us and other living creatures from the bottom up.

Bestes Zitat aus Outgrowing God

Our modern morality, whether we are religious or not, is very different from biblical morality.

—Richard Dawkins

Wer Outgrowing God lesen sollte

Agnostics who are uncertain whether to believe in God or not
Religious people who want to understand atheism
Atheists seeking a better grasp on arguments against believing in God

Über den Autor

Richard Dawkins is a Fellow of the Royal Society, and was previously the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. An ethologist and evolutionary biologist by training, he is the best-selling author of many books, including The Selfish Gene (1976), The God Delusion (2006), and The Magic of Reality (2011).

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