Dawkins | The God Delusion

Here are my comments on The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. I read this book early on before I was taking notes. This book is part of the reading I am undertaking in my quest for the truth about god, heavily inspired by the Ultimate Truth-Seeker Challenge (Easy Version) from Common Sense Atheism.

This was the first book I read when I began to doubt. I ran across the title many times in my initial look into atheism, so I rented it form the library. I read it before I decided to take notes and thus my comments will be very brief. I don't actually recall much of the book, nor do I remember it being incredibly forceful in its arguments or approach. I actually only want to call to mind one passage:

Scientists invoke the magic of large numbers. It has been estimated that there are between 1 billion and 30 billion planets in our galaxy, and about 100 billion galaxies in the universe. Knocking a few noughts off for reasons of ordinary prudence, a billion billion is a conservative estimate of the number of available planets in the universe.

I was actually reading through this, which occurs in the discussion of the "Goldilocks Argument" for god's existenc while… going to the bathroom. The sitting down kind. It was quite late. I had never before read about how large our universe actually was. For a brief moment it was as if I got a glimpse of our smallness. It was quite profound picturing the earth rotating about the sun amidst an entire galaxy which itself is only one of 100 billion galaxies! It was exhilarating. Amazing. Somehow it all holds together. Incredible. I would actually call the sensation quite like that of a religious experience, but it had nothing to do with god. I don't recall much else of this book, but I loved the fact that amidst complete doubt of god I had an experience that was much like what I felt when I didn't doubt god.

I believe this is important as many think these kinds of experience and feelings are limited to being signs fo god's interaction with humans. I don't think this is the case, especially now that I've had such an experience reading the typeset words of an atheist! Awe and wonder are not monopolized by the religious.