The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution Immediately

There is something I noticed about this book that I don't think others have picked up on. Before getting to that, let me say that it has nothing to so with whether I agreed with his argument about evolution, which I do. The problem is this: In his Appendix (which was extremely interesting), Dawkins tells us that studies how that 36% of us believe in evolution "but God guided the process", 14% believe in evolution but God had no part in the process, and 44% believe that God created human beings within the last 10,000 years. He also tells us that the book is basically being written to those 44% "history-deniers". In his words, "this book is necessary" to reach those 44%.

While I consider myself agnostic, I know many people of all faiths who I consider to be very religious. While I don't agree with their views on religion or the historicity of the Bible, I do consider most of them quite smart. And here's the thing--not one of them falls into that 44% category. Rather they all fall into the 36% category. In other words, to their mind, the validity of the theory of evolution (or fact of evolution as he calls it) is not inconsistent with their views on religion and God's role in history. The two can co-exist. In fact, I don't know a single person who falls into the 44% category. While I don't doubt that they exist, I suspect that they must occupy the very lowest intellectual rungs of our society.

I read the whole book pretty carefully and, although I consider myself reasonably intelligent, I honestly couldn't follow the science in at least 80% of the book. It seemed to me that one would need an advanced degree in biology and perhaps anthropology or chemistry to really comprehend the book. So, if he's really addressing the book to that particular 44%, I have a very hard time believing that a single one of them would even buy it, much less understand it if they did. In fact, I would venture to say that there is not a single person in the world whose mind would be changed by this book, and that's not because his argument is not highly persuasive. It's because the people he is allegedly trying to persuade would never buy or understand the book.

In addition, by purporting to address his arguments to the 44% group rather than the 36% group (which he pretty much ignores entirely), I fee that he picked the wrong target. It's like saying: I don't want to go after the smart religious people, so I'll go after the moronic religious people. Or, let's take his Holocaust-denial analogy a step further: Say there are two groups out there. One of them denies that the Holocaust ever occurred at all. The other believes that it occurred exactly as reported but believes that the number of dead killed in the concetration camps has been highly inflated. While both of these groups may be wrong, which one would be easier to challenge? Obviously, it's the Holocaust-deniers. And by analogy, that's the target that Dawkins has chosen. This is not to say that the 36% group may not be wrong as well. But the fact is that it would have been much more interesting for him to attempt to debunk the beliefs of that group rather than the group that believes obvious nonsense.Get more detail about The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution.