The God Delusion

Features

• Cover Type: Hard Cover with 416 pages
• Published by: Houghton Mifflin September 18, 2006
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0618680004
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0618680009
• Book Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 1.6 inches
• Weighs: 1.4 pounds

From Publishers Weekly
The antireligion wars started by Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris will heat up even more with this salvo from celebrated Oxford biologist Dawkins. For a scientist who criticizes religion for its intolerance, Dawkins has written a surprisingly intolerant book, full of scorn for religion and those who believe. But Dawkins, who gave us the selfish gene, anticipates this criticism. He says it's the scientist and humanist in him that makes him hostile to religions—fundamentalist Christianity and Islam come in for the most opprobrium—that close people's minds to scientific truth, oppress women and abuse children psychologically with the notion of eternal damnation. While Dawkins can be witty, even confirmed atheists who agree with his advocacy of science and vigorous rationalism may have trouble stomaching some of the rhetoric: the biblical Yahweh is "psychotic," Aquinas's proofs of God's existence are "fatuous" and religion generally is "nonsense." The most effective chapters are those in which Dawkins calms down, for instance, drawing on evolution to disprove the ideas behind intelligent design. In other chapters, he attempts to construct a scientific scaffolding for atheism, such as using evolution again to rebut the notion that without God there can be no morality. He insists that religion is a divisive and oppressive force, but he is less convincing in arguing that the world would be better and more peaceful without it. (Oct. 18)
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From Scientific American
Richard Dawkins, in The God Delusion, tells of his exasperation with colleagues who try to play both sides of the street: looking to science for justification of their religious convictions while evading the most difficult implications-the existence of a prime mover sophisticated enough to create and run the universe, "to say nothing of mind reading millions of humans simultaneously." Such an entity, he argues, would have to be extremely complex, raising the question of how it came into existence, how it communicates -through spiritons!-and where it resides. Dawkins is frequently dismissed as a bully, but he is only putting theological doctrines to the same kind of scrutiny that any scientific theory must withstand. No one who has witnessed the merciless dissection of a new paper in physics would describe the atmosphere as overly polite.

George Johnson is author of Fire in the Mind: Science, Faith, and the Search for Order and six other books. He resides on the Web at talaya.net

Reader Reviews
"As a scientist," Richard Dawkins writes, "I am hostile to fundamentalist religion because it actively debauches the scientific enterprise. It teaches us not to change our minds, and not to want to know exciting things that are available to be known. It subverts science and saps the intellect" (p. 284). In other words, the greatest crime of fundamental Christianity is to think without asking scientific questions. For those readers already familiar with Dawkins' work, it will come as no surprise that this book is nothing less than brilliant. Pity those readers, however, who either won't read this book (they should) or who will find nothing positive to say about it, because this is the work of one the greatest thinkers of our time. In THE GOD DELUSION, Dawkins, the celebrated evolutionary biologist, Oxford Professor, and author (The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition--with a new Introduction by the Author, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design, A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love, The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution), gives us a carefully-reasoned yet entertaining treatise on atheism that is equally eloquent and provocative. His basic argument is that the collective irrational belief in "The God Hypothesis" is not only wrong ("intellectual high treason"), but pernicious in its resulting intolerance, oppression, bigotry, arrogance, child abuse, homophobia, abortion-clinic bombings, cruelties to women, war, suicide bombers, and educational systems that teach ignorance when it comes to math and science. Sure to provoke his adversaries, Dawkins not only portrays the "psychotic" God of the Old Testament as "arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully" (p. 31), but also challenges, quite convincingly, every major argument for God's existence, and shows that the Founding Fathers considered religion to be a threat to democracy. Thomas Jefferson, for instance, claimed "Christianity is the most perverted system that ever shone on man" (p. 43). Benjamin Franklin said "Lighthouses are more useful than churches" (p. 43). A 1796 treaty signed by John Adams declares, "the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion" (p. 40). Adams also said, "this would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it" (p. 43). Even conservative icon, Barry Goldwater, threatened to fight fundamentalists "every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans" (p. 39). While Dawkins is clearly out to change minds here, unfortunately, for most of his readers, he is only preaching to the choir. Nevertheless, for its erudite advocacy of science and rationalism at odds with the divisive, oppressive, injurious, and deadly forces of religion, THE GOD DELUSION is highly recommended. Further reading in this area includes Daniel Dennett's, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (2006) and Sam Harris's, Letter to a Christian Nation (2006) and Christopher Hitchins' recent God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. G. Merritt Comments (275) | | (Report this)