Written 10 Nov 2008.

Chemistry according to Richard Dawkins

The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

... a book I am reading at the moment. It is The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. It has made me think more clearly about what I believe and what I know. I have not finished the book so I only write a little about it today. Yesterday I came to a point in the book which made me think that Richard Dawkins in some respects looks at some things through the lenses of pers religious upbringing. I shall write about that further when I have had time to think about it more.

Now I want to write about something which really exited me when I read it. I thought "WOW! I wish the chemistry was taught this way at school. Perhaps then something would have stuck to my mind about it. Something else than H2O." I am fairly certain that the fact that we humans are mostly water entered my brain and stayed there after I had left school, not before. I have known that water is important for us, as we all know, but I had not really thought that "Liquid water is a necessary condition for life as we know it, but it is far from sufficient." (page 164) What else? "The origin of life was the chemical event, or series of events, whereby the vital conditions for natural selection first came about." (p. 164) After reading "Chemistry as we know it consist of the combination and recombination of the ninety or so naturally occurring elements of the periodic table" I checked the Wiki for it. Richard Dawkins' book was published in 2006 and the "current standard table contains 117 elements as of January 27, 2008 (elements 1-116 and element 118)" states the Wiki.

Richard Dawkins goes on to write about stars like our sun and explosions which may lead into formations of planets like our Earth. "This is why Earth is rich in elements over and above the ubiquitous hydrogen; elements without which chemistry, and life, would be impossible." (p. 171) And then onto our universe and ideas about many universes or "multiverse" and "megaverse" and black holes. Are we entering the realm of science fiction here? Lets finish this with another quote "The key difference between the genuinely extravagant God hypothesis and the apparently extravagant multiverse hypothesis is one of statistical improbability. The multiverse, for all that it is extravagant, is simple. God, or any intelligent, decision-taking, calculating agent, would have to be highly improbable in the very same statistical sense as the entities he is supposed to explain." (pp. 175-176)