I’m just back home from seeing, and enjoying, “God Is Bullshit: And That’s The Good News” by Catherine Deveny at the Trades Hall and on the way home I dropped in to Readings for a browse (as one does).
My eyes fell upon a book called “Conceiving God: the Cognitive Origin and Evolution of Religion” by David Lewis-Williams. Like a good skeptic I read the blurb and the start and the last page, to see how it ended.
On the last page was a lovely line something, from memory, like this…
Repeatedly, science is modifying religion, never vice versa.
How true.
This link is a review of the book by A.C. Grayling (recently in Melbourne as a speaker at the atheists convention…and he also has a new book out which was sitting just near this one) which makes some interesting observations about how atheists can most effectively deal with the issue of religion.
[The above was written on the 2nd of April]
Update
I’ve subsequently bought “Conceiving God” (costs about 50 bucks in hardcover). Haven’t read it yet but it looks interesting although the message, though expressed with more complexity, is probably not much different to that of Jethro Tull in “Aqualung” (1971, liner notes on the album cover) which is that man created god, not the other way around.
Terry
