{"id":159820,"date":"2023-03-08T09:25:03","date_gmt":"2023-03-08T15:25:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/03\/book-review-believing-in-dawkins"},"modified":"2023-03-08T09:25:03","modified_gmt":"2023-03-08T15:25:03","slug":"book-review-believing-in-dawkins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/03\/book-review-believing-in-dawkins","title":{"rendered":"Book review: Believing in Dawkins"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

Among \u201cthe jobs once done by God [that] can be done by natural entities\u201d there is life after death. Dawkins \u201cfrequently affirms that there is no life after death\u201d, but Steinhart shows that this is inconsistent with Dawkins\u2019 own convictions. Dawkins \u201cshould have argued that false religious theories of life after death can be replaced with more plausible scientific theories of life after death\u201d [**].<\/p>\n

Steinhart describes two plausible scientific theories of life after death: promotion to the higher level of reality of the simulators, and revisions of entire lives in new universes, each better than the previous life and universe. Worth noting, promotion could preserve memories and implement \u201cthe ancient idea of the resurrection of the body.\u201d These theories of life after death are only sketched in this book, see Steinhart\u2019s previous book \u201cYour Digital Afterlives: Computational Theories of Life after Death<\/em><\/a>\u201d for more. See also my review of \u201cYour Digital Afterlives<\/em>\u201d in \u201cTales of the Turing Church<\/em><\/a>\u201d (Chapter 12).<\/p>\n

In summary, Steinhart builds a thorough and philosophically consistent spiritual naturalism, inspired by Dawkins, which offers the main mental benefits of religion. I like (actually I love) philosophy, but I try to keep mine as simple and working-class as possible, because many people don\u2019t have the patience (or the time) for too much philosophical sophistication. I think the two approaches are complementary. So I use the term \u201creligion\u201d for the spiritual naturalism of Dawkins and Steinhart, and I use the simple term \u201cGod\u201d now and then.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Among \u201cthe jobs once done by God [that] can be done by natural entities\u201d there is life after death. Dawkins \u201cfrequently affirms that there is no life after death\u201d, but Steinhart shows that this is inconsistent with Dawkins\u2019 own convictions. Dawkins \u201cshould have argued that false religious theories of life after death can be replaced [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":661,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1527,1523,1878],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-159820","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alien-life","category-computing","category-employment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159820","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/661"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=159820"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159820\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=159820"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=159820"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=159820"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}