Even the luckier inhabitants of our planet suffer much discomfort, pain, anxiety, disappointment, fear, grief, death and much else, All of these harms could have been avoided if the people suffering them had never been brought into existence. There are millions of victims of human evil. Our own bodies fail us, causing vast amounts of suffering. The planet is not to blame for all our ills, however. Natural disasters and infectious diseases kill millions. Most people, most of the time, are too hot or too cold - not too hot or too cold in order to live, but rather too hot or too cold for comfort. However, it is far from 'all but perfect'. He is correct, of course, that our planet has the minimum conditions necessary to sustain life (at least for the moment). Professor Dawkins, for example, says that we 'live on a planet that is all but perfect for our kind of life', noting that it is neither too warm nor too cold, and that it contains both water and food. Optimists tend to forget just how much pain and suffering there is in the world. In contrast, by coming into existence we suffer the many harms for which existence is the precondition. In other words, there would have been nobody who would have been deprived. Although one would not have experienced the joys of life had one never come into existence, one would not then have been deprived of those goods - quite simply because one would not have existed. Yet the alternative is not bad at all - indeed it is much better than existing. Coming into existence can only be a good fortune if the alternative would have been worse. These 'unborn ghosts' 'outnumber the sand grains of Arabia'.Īlthough most people share his view that they have been bestowed a great good by being brought into existence, it is a thoroughly confused idea.

Elsewhere he says that we are lucky that we are going to die because most 'people are never going to die because they are never going to be born'. He suggests that wasting even a second of our lives is a 'callous insult to those unborn trillions who will never be offered life in the first place'. Professor Dawkins is no exception.įor example, noting how amazingly small the chance was that any one of us would come into existence, he marvels at how lucky each one of us is to have been born. It blinds most people - both theists and atheists. It is a delusion much more prevalent than theism. Optimism can take various forms, but the relevant one here is optimism about humanity and the human condition. Optimism is the delusional belief that things are (or were, or will be) better than they really are (or were, or will be). In debunking theism in more than one of his books, Professor Dawkins reveals his own delusion - namely, a bad case of optimism. What Professor Dawkins brings to these matters is his own accessible and flamboyant style, and the Dawkins branding. That basic idea and even many of the details are not new. Richard Dawkins seems to take a special pleasure in puncturing what he calls 'the God delusion', the delusion that there is a God. In the first of our three pieces responding to Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion, David Benatar suggests that Dawkins is preaching 'the gospel of secular optimism'.

Delusional optimism book