Saturday, July 07, 2007

Pre-eminently peerless stinker

A sunny day - I may buy a lawnmower! That'd cure it.

I am reading Dawkins' The God Delusion at the moment, and I'm enjoying it so far. I had thought I might find it to be rather too strident, given the Rottweiler's reputation, (but I suppose give it time!)

It has made me laugh, which was unexpected - I'd been expecting to nod along at best, or to find it dry, but reading it is just speeding along. I particularly enjoyed a passage where he talks about Aquinas's argument from degree where god is an external standard of perfection to which we compare ourselves, and he responds that "You might as well say, people vary in smelliness but we can make the comparison only by reference to a perfect maximum of conceivable smelliness. Therefore there must exist a pre-eminently peerless stinker, and we call him god." Oh, it tickled me, that.

In fact it's the paragraph that keeps on giving, making me snort to myself when I think about it. It's that darned "pre-eminently peerless stinker" phrase.

1 comment:

Greg said...

Yes, it's a good read, isn't it.