RE: favorite atheist book
June 13, 2013 at 4:48 pm
(This post was last modified: June 13, 2013 at 4:51 pm by Brian37.)
(June 12, 2013 at 4:07 pm)Clueless Morgan Wrote:(June 12, 2013 at 3:51 pm)Brian37 Wrote: Read them all don't stop at one or two. I will say that "The Greatest Show on Earth was over my head, I am sure I could find evolution for dummies though.
While it's not technically what I would consider an atheist book The Greatest Show on Earth was one of my favorite reads in recent years, I loved every page of it and found every excuse to carry it around with me and read bits of it at every opportunity I could manage. When I finished it I wanted to immediately start it over again. Then again, though, I enjoy Dawkin's writing style and the subject matter; I liked The God Delusion, too.
Harris, for me, is better when I listen to him on youtube videos rather than read his books, I find them very dense and somewhat dry and have a hard time maintaining interest/focus while reading them sometimes. Is Hitchens more or less dense than Harris?
I'm reading Dennett's Breaking the Spell right now and am enjoying it and am planning on reading Proving History by Richard Carrier next.
I cant do a fraction to save my life. But I do know science works. And I did get through college. The one consistent thing I found and it always made sense and is a very simple concept. "Method" simply means "you do these steps in this order". That is a concept that a monkey like me can understand. So if I did something wrong in any math or science class, my answer was wrong.
Just like I can drive a car and know it is not run on pixy dust. Just like our American driving if I drove in the left lane going right, my "method" would be wrong. Just like I can know it is based on scientific combustion concepts of mechanics, without knowing how to build a car.
With evolution, I found that book too high tech in language for me. But in other science classes atoms were very easy for me to understand. To this day I know all the atoms in DNA, adenine guanine thymine and cytosine.
And once you know how simple it is for an atom to exchange electrons or bond with other atoms, you can see evolution as the simple shuffling of a deck of cards that it is, over long period of time. What we see now is atom arrangement changing over long periods of time.
I never want anyone here to confuse me with a brain surgeon, not that anyone would. But the basic concepts of science DO WORK and no matter what the field or how complex that field can get, the basic starting point of all science is simple, "Prior data, established formula, control groups, and peer review, and the ability to go where the evidence leads, not where you wish it would go, and the ability to scrap bad method and bad data".
