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Location: Newark, Delaware, United States

My name is David P. Bellamy. The only significant thing not mentioned elsewhere here is, I think, that I almost always prefer to read a book instead of watching a movie.

Saturday, April 28, 2007

Dawkins' book

I have just finished reading The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. It is fun to read, and there is little that I find to disagree with. Nevertheless, in the last chapter, he mentions almost as an afterthought, what to me is the essence of religion. I have no quarrel with his assertion that "God" does not exist in the physical world. Neither do many mathematical objects, such as infinite-dimensional vector spaces or Stone Cech compactifications of Euclidean spaces, etc. The proper sphere of existence for gods and goddesses is the human subjective experience. If anyone wants to say that, OK, that means that they are fantasies, fine, although just as with mathematical constructions, they are not experienced as fantasies.

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