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    The God Delusion
    The God Delusion
    The God Delusion
    Ebook561 pages11 hours

    The God Delusion

    By Richard Dawkins

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    A preeminent scientist—and the world's most prominent atheist—asserts the irrationality of belief in God and the grievous harm religion has inflicted on society, from the Crusades to 9/11.

    With rigor and wit, Dawkins examines God in all his forms, from the sex-obsessed tyrant of the Old Testament to the more benign (but still illogical) Celestial Watchmaker favored by some Enlightenment thinkers. He eviscerates the major arguments for religion and demonstrates the supreme improbability of a supreme being. He shows how religion fuels war, foments bigotry, and abuses children, buttressing his points with historical and contemporary evidence. The God Delusion makes a compelling case that belief in God is not just wrong but potentially deadly. It also offers exhilarating insight into the advantages of atheism to the individual and society, not the least of which is a clearer, truer appreciation of the universe's wonders than any faith could ever muster.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateJan 25, 2011
    ISBN9780547348667
    Author

    Richard Dawkins

    RICHARD DAWKINS is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford and was the University of Oxford's Professor for Public Understanding of Science from 1995 until 2008. He is the author of 15 books includingUnweaving the Rainbow, A Devil’s Chaplain, and The God Delusion.Dawkins lives in Oxford.,

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    Reviews for The God Delusion

    4/5

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    • 5/5
      I truly feel that I understand atheism and as someone who left religion, this book is not only comforting but confirming.
    • 5/5
      I enjoyed it for being direct and challenging believes, but he can come across as a bit condescending, especially if you do follow any of the mainstream religions. On the other hand Atheists don't have nearly as many spokesmen as the religious community.
    • 4/5
      This book is Richard Dawkins' argument against the existence of any sort of divine being that runs the world. While getting deeper at times than I was comfortable following (quantum physics and philosophical arguments sometimes do that to me), I found it very interesting, and it addressed many of the questions raised by the religious when they're confronted with Atheists.

      One of my biggest pet peeves is when religious people say that one can't have morals if one isn't religious. Dawkins does a splendid job of debunking that idea, and I recommend the book for that section alone.

      I also loved his use of "American Taliban" to describe American fundamentalist religions. I know he didn't coin the term, but this was the first time I'd heard it, and I will be using it from now on.

      I'm sure this book would horrify and anger many of the faithful. However, if you are open-minded and willing to listen, this book opens a whole world.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 2/5
      Richard Dawkins is an insufferable ass. I mean that wholly as an ad hominem attack; it has no bearing on the quality of his arguments. He secretes a superlatively patronizing tone that only the snootiest of Brits can attain, and he fully admits his abhorrence of the people that he claims to want to convert to his beliefs. As such, it's hard enough to read a book like The God Delusion without being distracted by all the snide parentheticals. Listening to it, as I did, is even more difficult because you get to hear every condescending inflection the way he intended it.

      Moving past the tone and style of the book, however, I have to admit that I agree with many points Dawkins makes. In large part, he lays out his arguments rationally, coming to many of the same conclusions I have come to myself. He debunks a lot of illogical, contradictory and downright asinine ideas held by many religious people, and generally shows the unreasonability of belief in a supernatural being (or set of beings) that actively participates in the events of the world. Taken as a whole, I have to say that I agree with about 75% of what Dawkins says.

      But there is at least one very big thing that he does not address, and a few conclusions that I think he simply gets wrong, particularly with regard to ethics. I will outline these counterpoints below.

      NOTE: As Dawkins includes many definitions and manifestations of supernatural beings in the word "God" I will use the same convention when I refer to "Dawkins," by which I mean all atheists who essentially agree with him. I think he would be amused by this juxtaposition.

      Preferring reason because it is reasonable is a tautology.

      Dawkins' use of reason is aptly summed by a line Benjamin Franklin penned in his autobiography: "So convenient a thing is it to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do."

      Perhaps the simplest argument against Dawkins' viewpoint is the axiomatic nature of reason. One cannot prove, without using reason, that reason is better or more useful or more valid than unreason. (Although, one can find evidence that sometimes irrationality is reasonable--that's a paradox for another essay, though.) A preference for reason is, therefore, no different than a preference for unreason. The very act of arguing for reason requires one to accept reason as an a priori virtue.

      Furthermore, Dawkins' reverence for Reason (with a big R), almost as though it were a divine entity in its own right, seems a bit strange in light of his constant jibes at those who believe in God. He tends to overlook the limitations of reason as a human construct, which include imperfect and incomplete knowledge, differences in reasoning capacity between people, and the equal (or near-equal) validity of differing conclusions based on the same evidence. These limitations may not be enough to parry his attacks against religion, but his failure to address them sufficiently puts him in the same category of disingenuous debaters that he riles against.

      Please, please, PLEASE do not take the above paragraphs to mean that I do not value reason, or that I believe unreason is better or more valid or more useful than reason. I agree with Dawkins that reason is a virtue. But I also admit that my preference for reason rather than unreason is exactly that--a preference--not a universal truth that must, or even should, be followed by all.

      His biblical examples are lacking.

      Dawkins uses several examples to show that people pick and choose the parts of the Bible that they want to believe. I agree with him here, but I take issue with a couple of stories he chooses as examples. In several instances, he uses a formulaic argument against each story, saying something to the effect: "Look at how utterly immoral these people acted, and yet we are supposed to believe that they are God's chosen people." Then, he says that Jews and Christians are either ignorant because they don't know about these stories, or worse, they are inconsistent and hypocritical because they choose to overlook them.

      In the specific stories of Lot in Sodom and his subsequent incest (Genesis 19) and the Levite at Gibeah (Judges 19), the only thing Dawkins proves is that biblical exegesis skills are weak. I find it interesting that he rails against the ignorance and prejudice of religious people, but then exhibits the same ignorance and prejudice when it comes to exposition of some passages in the Bible. Essentially, in each of these particular stories, I disagree that the actions taken by the main characters are meant to be examples of how people should act. Dawkins conveniently ignores certain portions of the text, instead putting forth the actions of Lot and the Levite as being sanctioned by God. (In Lot's particular case, the incest is the genesis of later Israel's two most hated enemies, the Moabites and Ammonites, which is perhaps the strongest symbolic, if not literal, damnation of the act of incest in any religious or literary work that I have ever seen.)

      As I stated above, I agree with Dawkins' premise that people choose which parts of the Bible (and religious texts in general) that they follow. But his own choice of some stories to illustrate his point seems strange at best and deceptive at worst. Removing these examples from his book would not negate the larger argument he is making--which makes me wonder why he put them in to begin with.

      Arguments against the first mover.

      The first mover "proof" of God, first posited by Thomas Aquinas, goes something like: Every effect has a prior cause, but at some point there must have been a first cause, which we call God. (Aquinas actually makes three arguments which are basically variations on the same theme.) Dawkins, however, says that even if there is such an initiator, there is no reason to call it "God" or to imbibe it with supernatural powers, such as omniscience, omnipresence and/or omnipotence. After going on a diatribe about the incompatibility of omniscience and omnipotence, he remembers that he is making an argument against the first mover, and says that we might as well call it the big bang instead of God.

      His longer argument seems to boil down to the declaration that such a first mover, if indeed there is one, is necessarily simple. Oddly, his reasoning is rather Aquinian: Since things tend to become more complex as they evolve, any first mover must have been very, very simple--much more simple than the monotheistic God of the Jews, Christians and Muslims possibly could be. Dawkins rules out any complex being's existence simply by reason that such a being would not be a first mover--there would have been something even simpler before it, which would mean that "God" was not actually God, but a product of his own evolutionary sequence (begging the question as to whether God's evolutionary sequence could have had an initiator). Dawkins' argument is largely a straw man: Aquinas never attempts to prove God's attributes with the first mover argument, simply that a first mover exists. Aquinas uses other arguments to "prove" the various attributes of God, but Dawkins never acknowledges those additional arguments, let alone addresses them.

      Secondarily, Dawkins' assertion that God would have developed from a similar evolutionary process as those established on Earth is merely conjecture based on observations of the universe as it is now. But if God created the universe, why would the current rules apply to him? Also, as Dawkins discusses near the very end of the book, our knowledge of the world is based on how we experience things through our various senses. Very small animals experience the effects of surface tension and Brownian motion much differently than we do, and so on. Projecting that same idea to God, why would something that seems complex to us not seem simple to him?

      (Due to length restrictions, the rest of this review is provided in comments.)

      1 person found this helpful

    • 2/5
      The logic is generally agreeable, and the conclusions he comes to I generally agree with.

      The tone he writes with is just insufferable. I found it extremely hard to enjoy.

      It is also extremely redundant, and it diverges for chapters at a time, to prove points that don't really seem relevant to the matter at hand.
    • 1/5
      Absolute Rubbish! Ravings of a bloody git with
      no clue about theology or the philosophy of
      atheism. His complete and total arrogance prevents
      any serious science/religious dialogue and does
      a huge disservice to the field of science.
    • 4/5
      Professor Dawkins gives us a whole bunch of information on why there is no God and why that's good. I'm not religious so he was preaching to the converted but others may get more out of it.
    • 3/5
      I thoroughly enjoyed listening to the evolutionary biological attack on religion, and why it might have been necessary to humans to create this anathema. I enjoyed Dawkins' equal trouncing of Christianity and Islam. I enjoyed listening to him pick apart the creationist myth. I absolutely loved his interpretation of humans as only able to percieve a tiny window of the universe without the help of science and mathematics. I learned a ton of new information and perspectives. This is an, "I enjoyed this book, but..." review however:I didn't enjoy his gendered and patriarchal dismissal of feminist theologians as "ditzy."Dawkins has either never heard of the book "Mutual Aid, a factor of evolution" (I doubt this is true) by Petr Kropotkin, or is purposefully ignoring it. I say this because he takes great strides to tiptoe around the words Mutual Aid, calling the phenomenon "reciprocal altruism" and attributing its first advocate as Robert Trivers in the 1970s, when "Mutual Aid" was first published in 1902.Dawkins also uses a quote from a writer who "used to subscribe to Bakunian anarchism." He describes the looting of banks, stores, and other commercial districts during a police strike as barbaric and savage, and evidence that people will do evil things when the law isn't paying attention. Well, these things are only evil if you forget that the wealth in the banks is money that these same looters created, and that "Looting is a natural response to the unnatural and inhuman society of commodity abundance." (Guy Debord). Dawkins also states that there are probably less atheists in jail than theists. What he ignores, in favor of classist, racist smugness, is the systematic use of the prison system to stamp out communities in rebellion, and to systematically oppress communities of color.Finally, though I loved the interpretation of human perception, Dawkins' use of the burka in the final chapter of the book as (only) an oppressive force and a metaphor for ignorance is abhorrant, racist, and reflective of Western cultural hegemony.Anarchists curious about atheism have a lot to learn from Dawkins. However, Dawkins clearly has a lot to learn himself, and an understanding of feminism, anarchism, intercommunalism would make this book far better. I held a star from this review for the above reasons. That said, this book outshined warmonger Christopher Hitchen's atheist tome by a lot.2020 update: LOL FUCK THIS GUY
    • 5/5
      This was an absolutely spellbinding book about the nature of religion. Dawkins presented his evidence with aplomb and amazed me with the weight of his arguments throughout the duration of the text and provided all sides of the argument. There were many noteworthy examples from all areas of history (including today) to help the reader gain perspective and understanding of where Dawkins was coming from and what he was trying to express to his reader. Overall, an amazing book.4.5 stars!
    • 4/5
      Religion and Science The case against religion or religious beliefs is not an easy one. Richard Dawkins exposes it comparing religion with science. He also devotes some pages to elaborate on philosophical arguments about the existence of God, pretending to demonstrate their failures. At the end, the promise he makes in the book’s introduction - to guide the reader to an emancipation of religious beliefs - is not fulfilled. Williams James - The Varieties of Religious Experiences - knows better.
    • 1/5
      “Science can chip away at agnosticism, in a way that Huxley bent over backwards to deny for the special of God. I am arguing that, notwithstanding the polite abstinence of Huxley, Gould and many others, the God question is not in principle and forever outside the remit of science. As with the nature of the stars, contra Comte, and as with the likelihood of life in orbit around them, science can make at least probabilistic inroads into the territory of agnosticism.”In “The God Delusion” by Richard DawkinsUhm...How can you do that Dawkins, when your knowledge of Statistics is so frigging fuzzy (I’m using a polite word here)?NB: This review heavily relies on probabilistic concepts (*I'm looking at you Dawkins*).I haven't thought about this aspect of the philosophy of math in a while since my college days. I guess I could get behind the idea that frequentism is incompatible with a finite world even though it seems to work well on paper and in the head. There's also the Bayesian view which thinks about this topic differently based upon prior and posterior although I'm not sure Dawkins could salvage any of his probability arguments without question begging. One of my fantasies is to see a frequentist and Bayesian go at it in a stats smackdown/debate.On with the argument.I've always found Dawkin's statements strange when it comes to God's existence statistics-wise, and coming from a biologist (I thought these guys would be fairly proficient in the arcane arts of Statistics and Probability). While absence of proof is not necessarily proof of absence, absence of evidence is routinely considered as evidence of absence. Consider this thought experiment: I toss a coin intending to prove that it is a two-headed coin: neither side of it is 'tails'. The coin comes down 'heads'. Have I proved my hypothesis? Obviously not. I toss it again: 'heads' again. Proven? No. I toss it 100 more times, for 100 'heads'. Have I proven my hypothesis? No. In fact there is no number of tosses that can prove the hypothesis - though a single result of 'tails' would instantly disprove it. So the absence of that proof of 'tails' - i.e. a 'tails' result - is indeed not a proof of 'tails' absence ... but the one thing that is certainly true is that the accumulated series of 'heads' results is evidence of 'tails' absence! The more 'heads' results I get, the greater the accumulation of evidence that 'tails' does not exist, given the "a priori" assumption that both sides of the coin are equally likely to appear at each toss. So absence of evidence is evidence of absence ... just not proof. Dawkin's unfamiliarity with the laws of statistics extends to his misunderstanding of statistical issues, which is quite surprising when we consider how important statistic is for any any branch of science, certainly for his area of "expertise", Biology. Dawkins, I want you to state what his your p-value for your hypotheses that God does not exist, ok? Can we have that, please? After you state that, we can have a proper discussion on the "existence" of God.The above-mentioned thought experiment can indeed be related to the existence of God. Every possible scientific inquiry we make about the universe which, if the universe were created by a supernatural entity, could reveal indisputable evidence of that supernatural entity but fails to do so (having a natural or mundane explanation instead) is like a toss of that coin coming down 'heads'. The evidence accumulates that no 'tails' exists. And those 'coin tosses' - scientific experiments across thousands of years - are in the millions now, and no credible evidence for a supernatural being has been revealed. It's not proof of the non-existence of God, but it's an accumulation of evidence.Personally, I think spirituality is an internal experience which is hard to classify and something some people feel drawn to. Those who are not drawn to spirituality can seem to be angered by those who are. In the early Christian Gnostic 'Gospel of Mary Magdalena it says 'God can be found in the silence'. Perhaps, if atheists would really like to understand the pull of spirituality they should try meditation. It would certainly make a refreshing change from those who scour the Old Testament to find things to complain about (perhaps if they realised that many Christians long ago stopped taking the OT literally, they might understand the futility of such exercises). It is very clear from reading both the Old Testament and The New Testament that they are written not only by very different people and a different era, but the whole style and approach to God is very different. In the OT God is rather wrathful, extremely powerful and sometimes unforgiving. Whereas Jesus spent his whole time stressing love, forgiveness and kindness. His kindness was often commented on and often shocked people used to less kindness from their orthodox priests of the time. I think the reason that Christianity flourished is because of this new vision of a gentle and loving God. It was revolutionary and people are still struggling to love one another today. The Old Testament, on the other hand belongs to the tradition in which it was written - pre-history by numerous anonymous writers over hundreds of years. But people are usually Christians because of the new kinder message of Jesus Christ (hence the name) and not because of the OT.Bottom-line: Dawkins has become better known, these days, as an anti-theistic polemicist (or is he a warrior of truthfulness?) than as a scientist or an intellectual. He's not out to enlighten, elucidate, or engage in the serious discourse beliefs as serious and strongly held as his deserve; rather, he seems content merely to mist all who fail to avoid him with bafflingly smug proclamations from atop the impossibly high horse upon which he is evidently stranded. He's become a rabid dogmatist as insufferable as any other dogmatist, extremist, or fundamentalist you're likely to meet, and he can't keep his mouth, or fingers, shut. By no means does my little diatribe imply that the religionists should have the stage while atheists and anti-theists must remain silent. (For ex: Which am I, anyway?) I do maintain, however, that if this man expects to be taken seriously any longer, he is well advised to procure a strong crowbar to pry his intellect open a tad (or at least learn Statistics), as well as at least enough humility to respect not only others’ beliefs, but others for their beliefs. He's an arrogant twat. People who accept his point of view behave as he. People who find it difficult to square his "mathematical opinions" with their beliefs (or knowledge) to the contrary (regardless of your opinion on the last two nouns) feel threatened by his rabble rousing belligerence. People who believe they are threatened generally behave as if they are threatened. What's so interesting or not self-evident about that? Dawkin's bias comes from the old platonist vs formalist split. Dawkins may see physics quantum fluctuations as perfectly real existing entities, though no one has seen any such thing directly but God is, at best a name a notion. Hey Dawkins, Quantum Physics is just a man-made representation of reality. It's not reality! Why does Quantum entanglement works? No one knows! This is all assumption. I am not a fan of organized religion and condemn as Dawkins does the terrible cruelty inflicted upon humanity by organized religion over the centuries. I am also no dogmatist. What I care about his Science. And this is why I think Dawkins is just after you for your Euros. He does not have the intellectual wherewithal nor the initiative to present cogent arguments to counter theists directly; he simply takes the stance that anything that is not conventional science is illegitimate. That is dogma and such laziness.NB: In this review I’m not proving or disproving God’s “existence”. I’m just debunking Dawkin’s “science”.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Very good, no doubt, but after all the hype, a little underwhelming, I felt. And frankly a bit too boring. I really think in this school of authors, Hitchens is more readable and generally better while I get a lot more out of Dan Barker even. Still, a good work.
    • 4/5
      Compelling argument for atheism though find Dawkin's tone off putting at times.
    • 4/5
      Having read his books and heard him speak he reads a lot more passionately than he speaks. I appreciate his approach, learned some along the way in a repackaging of many of the standard arguments with new ideas thrown in, and thoroughly agree with most of what he has to say. I was interested to learn that they have creationist controversy in England. And I got a kick out of the characterization of fundamentalist Christianity in the US as the American Taliban.
    • 2/5
      Unfortunately Dawkins taints an otherwise good book with much (perhaps deserved) hatred of the Catholic church (in particular). One doesn't come away with the feeling that Dawkins is the unbiased scientific thinker that he may otherwise want to portray himself as.
    • 4/5
      A really interesting read, although he does tend to go on a bit. Even as someone who shares his views on god I was starting to get fed up towards the end.
    • 2/5
      FYI, I regularly bounce back and forth between atheist, agnostic, and Quaker. Dawkins is the type of atheist that is aggressively angry and (seemingly) intentionally offensive to anyone who may be on the fence religion-wise. He reminds me of so many trolls I've seen in discussion boards that hovers around merely to insult those that a religious, regardless of what their view is. Were he a Christian, I would liken him to some of the most vociferous of televangelists given his overblown hatred of Jews and Muslims - thankfully for him, he hates all monotheists equally. There's very little commentary on non-Abrahamic religions.And did he REALLY say that raising a child in any religion (regardless of its liberalism of moderation) is worse than pedaphilia? This guy can seriously go fuck himself.
    • 5/5
      The title alone won't make the religious happy, but (agree with him or disagree with him) is the search for truth supposed to make people happy? That's not the aim of the truth or its discovery, no. This is one of the first so-called "New Atheist" books I've read, and it's one of two that I'd recommend at a minimum for anyone wanting to understand the Atheist's point-of-view.
    • 5/5
      A good book for the open minded to challenge your beliefs.
    • 3/5
      Masterful demolition of god & religion. Great stuff.Read Feb 2007
    • 5/5
      I think this book should be required reading for everyone. Although Dawkins can be slightly condescending in his writing, his arguments are extremely well put together and bring up a lot of issues that you've probably never thought about. Religion is certainly a touchy subject, but it's one that needs to be discussed, and this book has a lot of fascinating things to say about it.

      It's actually remarkable just how much is covered in this relatively quick read: evolution, natural selection, upbringing of children, the atheist lifestyle, morality without religion, the God Hypothesis, religious moderates and fundamentalists, religious history, influence of religion on our language and more. No, you don't have to agree with everything (or anything) Dawkins says to appreciate the book. Just reading his opinions, even if you completely disagree with them, will at least get you to think about the issue of religion in ways you probably haven't before.
    • 5/5
      Unless you teach in a religiously-sponsored school, religion probably plays little role in your teaching of science. However, the "prior knowledge" of your students includes some decidedly non-scientific, religion-inspired viewpoints that ought to be taken into account. Renowned evolutionist Richard Dawkins' best-selling atheist thesis, "The God Delusion", attacks faith of all kinds head-on, and challenges the beliefs of every reasoning person. While he points out that few distinguished scientists hold traditional religious values, that is not true of most teachers of science and is definitely not true of our students. I recommend that teachers read this book, but be cautious about how the material in it is used in the classroom. Even if you fully agree with his very skeptical view of religion, it does not serve our educational mission to confront students with ideas that they will reject out of hand because those concepts do not comport with previous religious training. On the other hand, I agree with Dawkins that religious ideas are given more deference than they deserve, just because they are "religious".
    • 5/5
      Everyone must read it!
    • 5/5
      Wouldn't want to argue the other side with him. Could also be called the Human Delusion or the delusion of humans.
    • 4/5
      This took me a while to get through, not because it was bad, but because there is a lot of information and material to get through and understand (and I had to take multiple breaks to get away from the realistic, logical arguments and read something fun).Overall, I think this was very well written. As an atheist there are a lot of arguments I can get behind. At times I felt that Dawkins' language was a little too strong and often he came off as demeaning and mean. And while it was in no way his intention to be nice regarding religion, I think his rude attitude didn't help persuade people (an unfortunate example of the privilege of religion that Dawkins points out in the book, but is no less true).This is quite a heavy, dense book, however, so as the only other book I have read by Dawkins is The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution, I wasn't prepared for this book. It is a good book to read if you actually have time to sit down and think about the material.I really enjoyed some of the later chapters, especially the chapters on morality and possible origins of religion.This is a good book for people looking for a powerful perspective on the unnecessary existence of religion.
    • 3/5
      This is like a book from an alternate reality for me. He (and his buddy the late Christopher Hitchens) has a lot of my respect, academically and professionally- however, while his brand of atheism is designed to "free" people and help them "escape" religion, when I read his reasons why and his rhetoric about it, it just made me sad. He likened people I dearly love to children playing make believe and the God whom I follow as diabolical fiction.

      The voice is good to hear, and I am open to listening to him. His sources are great, though he does leave out material (as we all do) that does not support his argument.

      I find myself a bit thinking about and even praying about Dawkins. I believe I understand where he is coming from, but at the same time I feel as though he is as convinced in his "non-faith" as I am in my faith. I wish people would stop arguing about God- we have politics and baseball for that.

      All this to be said, I will keep this book on my shelf and I shall even read it again. Perhaps even a couple of times.

    • 4/5
      Richard Dawkins pulls no punches. This book advocates strongly, and persuasively, for an atheistic world view. Some may think this type of in your face atheism is unseemly, but as Dawkins points out, he is no more strident than religious groups are at advocating for their point of view.

      His arguments take two basic tracks:

      1. Evidence is overwhelming that God does not exist, and that the work many ascribe to God is more simply explained by natural processes (Darwinism etc). He looks at many of the ways people try to reconcile religion and science and comes away arguing they are not reconcilable. Religion is simply not a reliable source for evidence of the creation or of evolution. If God created the universe, he argues, then who created God? A question there is no answer to.

      2. He argues religion, rather than being a benign institution is actually dangerous, is responsible for holding back progress and as a whole, has caused far more harm than good.

      Both are very persuasive. His arguments against the existence of God are sometimes hard to understand as it gets into a fairly technical (at least for me) discussion of biology.

      The section of the book in which he argues religion is a harmful institution are very compelling. Not that I agree with every one of them. In my personal life I know many religious people who do not fit into the parameters of that argument. However, taken at a macro level his argument is hard to refute.

      He ends the book with a very beautiful, affirmative argument for the transformational power of science. He agrees with Carl Sagan that religion actually limits the wonder one can experience when contemplating the natural world.

      I personally enjoyed this book very much.

      If you are an atheist it will give you more than enough ammo to engage in discussions of atheism vs. theism you may have with others.

      If you are wavering this may give you the information you have been looking for to help you decide.

      If you are secure in your faith this book is nothing to be afraid of.
    • 2/5
      Took me a couple of false starts (with quite long intervals) before I finished this book. Odd this, because I've read and enjoyed Richard Dawkins' earlier work, finding only the occasional niggle when he has sometimes moved from exposition of generally supported and agreed theories into inventing a theory and then writing at length as though it were a well researched one, fooling those who missed the occasional brief and well masked disclaimer, as when he first came up with the meme. My problem with this book wasn't the writing, which as usual with Richard Dawkins is good; nor his theme - anyone with an interest in religion and theology should read it; and not because I'm a Christian - only the simple-minded believer need be concerned about possibly being convinced. No, my problem with the book is the way he goes to such lengths to pretend to take a scientific approach, while in fact being very selective in the evidence he presents and the conclusions he draws. Of course, he does say up front that his aim is to wean the reader away from faith (any kind of spiritually based faith) and to convert them to atheism. But someone who constantly accuses religious leaders and writers of avoiding uncomfortable material weakens his own arguments by doing exactly the same. Two examples. First, far too much of his 'evidence' against Christianity is typified by selective examples of the ludicrously stupid and wrong headed nonsense espoused by (and the policies promoted by) various extremists, such as, for example, American creationists. In decades of reading and of dialogue with churchgoers, priests and theologians I've never met anyone who challenged Darwinian evolution theory as 'sound science', or who doubted the evidence from geology about the age of the earth, or from cosmology about the nature of the universe. Such acceptance that Genesis isn't literal truth isn't of course evidence that God exists, but the fact that some batty people take Genesis literally isn't evidence that God doesn't exist. Sadly, Richard doesn't tell us - or at least avoids telling us directly - that while hotbeds of creationism may persist in parts of the USA (and be espoused by a few isolated individuals or groups elsewhere), mainstream Christianity rejects their nonsense. The same is of course true about 'intelligent design' theory, equally rejected by anyone who thinks about it for long, but equally cited by RD as 'evidence' against religion.A second - and more significant - omission comes in Richard's comments about Jesus. As an example, he devotes a whole section to working through the allegation that "'love thy neighbour' doesn't mean what we now think it means. It means only 'love another Jew'". Oddly, he neglects to mention how Jesus responded to the direct question 'Who is my neighbour?', with the parable of the Good Samaritan. I've no doubt that Hartung and others have a plausible answer to this and to the other ways Jesus makes it clear that his message is for the world at large, including the Romans. But others have argued even more plausibly that Hartung is wrong. If one is taking a scientific approach to whether God exists, why not present both sides of the coin and let the reader judge - as Richard urges us to do in the case of children's education.My other (and more general) beef with Richard Dawkins' writing (in this and other work, nothing to do with Christian apologetics) is that too much of it appears to reflect a somewhat excessive (and occasionally perverse) desire to see almost every issue and topic through the prism of Darwinian evolution theory. For example the meme, mentioned earlier, is a classic example and duly reappears here. We read how meme theory explains the spread and persistence of religion (and other cultural or social things). We aren't told that while Darwinian evolution has been deeply researched over more than a century, and is accepted by all relevant scientists as valid (RD himself would insist on me saying 'until something better comes along'!), meme theory came from one of his own books as simply a possible explanation of how Darwinian evolution might apply in social and cultural spheres. His failure to mention equally plausible views from specialists who call the theory a "pseudoscientific dogma" and "a dangerous idea that poses a threat to the serious study of consciousness and cultural evolution". Memes may exist and may have the kinds of effects RD would like them to have, but the jury isn't yet even in the jury room - indeed most would say that there is as yet far from enough evidence on which to think seriously about the question, let alone judge. For the avoidance of doubt, I quite like the idea. But RD harms his case (and some of his other work) when he seeks to use meme theory to prove something else.Many years ago, in my earliest reading of RD's superb and fascinating expositions of scientic theories and findings, I was struck by the frequency and manner with which he used religious or biblical metaphors and similes. Knowing his proclaimed faith in atheism, I concluded that here was a man somewhat obsessed with God and perhaps 'avoiding God'. Now he has invested lots of time and trouble on an in-depth assault on religion, churches and the idea that there is - or even may be - a God. Not in any sense a clear win, no better than, at best, a no-score-draw! He may well now welcome it, but I do pray for him quite often.
    • 5/5
      For me, it was a life-changing book. While I've almost always considered myself agnostic, it's primarily been out of a lack of caring about religion in general. But Dawkins proved to me that there is no god, and how beautiful life is because of that.
    • 3/5
      I read this book to both be polite and to prove a point. I know a couple of atheists, and they've been interesting to talk to, and they've known a lot about Christianity and the Bible. It just seems fair to understand their point of view by reading the book most associated with atheism today. And, in an internet conversation, I backed myself into the corner of having to read it now, rather than at some vague, future date. So it's an interesting book. Dawkins gets in his own way more often than he should have, especially with his point that atheism is the only rational choice. But he presents the basic reasons for atheism and the criticisms he has of religion in a clear way. It was one of those books I'm happier to say that I've read, than I was to actually read it, but it was informative. If you've ever followed the topics of religion and science, even casually, probably none of the issues he raises will be unfamiliar. And much of the arguments he raises are against a fundamentalist, anti-science version of Christianity which very few Christians espouse. But in addressing some of the science of our beginnings, he does go into some very interesting areas, with clear, engaging explanations of issues involving natural selection, fascinating creatures and chemistry. He's less sure-footed on topics like linguistics, but the issues he's raised are worth thinking about. He's a polarizing guy, who expresses himself forcefully and not tactfully. It's useful to know what he actually has to say, as opposed to what people say that he's said.

    Book preview

    The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins

    First Mariner Books edition 2008

    Copyright © 2006 by Richard Dawkins

    Preface © 2008 by Richard Dawkins

    First published in Great Britain by Bantam Press, a division of Transworld Publishers, 2006

    All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address HarperCollins Publishers, 195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007.

    marinerbooks.com

    The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

    Dawkins, Richard, date.

    The God delusion / Richard Dawkins.

    p. cm.

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

    ISBN-13: 978-0-618-68000-9

    ISBN-10: 0-618-68000-4

    1. Irreligion. 2. Atheism. 3. God. 4. Religion. I. Title.

    BL2775.3.D39 2006

    211’.8—dc22 2006015506

    ISBN-13: 978-0-618-91824-9 (pbk.)

    ISBN-10: 0-618-91824-8 (pbk.)

    eISBN 978-0-547-34866-7

    v19.0921

    IN MEMORIAM

    Douglas Adams

    (1952–2001)

    ‘Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful

    without having to believe that there are

    fairies at the bottom of it too?’

    Preface to the paperback edition

    The God Delusion in the hardback edition was widely described as the surprise bestseller of 2006. It was warmly received by the great majority of those who sent in their personal reviews to Amazon (more than 1,000 at the time of writing). Approval was less overwhelming in the printed reviews, however. A cynic might put this down to an unimaginative reflex of reviews editors: It has ‘God’ in the title, so send it to a known faith-head. That would be too cynical, however. Several unfavourable reviews began with the phrase, which I long ago learned to treat as ominous, ‘I’m an atheist BUT . . . ’ As Daniel Dennett noted in Breaking the Spell, a bafflingly large number of intellectuals ‘believe in belief’ even though they lack religious belief themselves. These vicarious second-order believers are often more zealous than the real thing, their zeal pumped up by ingratiating broad-mindedness: ‘Alas, I can’t share your faith but I respect and sympathize with it.’

    ‘I’m an atheist, BUT . . . ’ The sequel is nearly always unhelpful, nihilistic or—worse—suffused with a sort of exultant negativity. Notice, by the way, the distinction from another favourite genre: ‘I used to be an atheist, but . . . ’ That is one of the oldest tricks in the book, much favoured by religious apologists from C. S. Lewis to the present day. It serves to establish some sort of street cred up front, and it is amazing how often it works. Look out for it.

    I wrote an article for the website RichardDawkins.net called ‘I’m an atheist BUT . . . ’ and I have borrowed from it in the following list of critical or otherwise negative points from reviews of the hardback. That website, conducted by the inspired Josh Timonen, has attracted an enormous number of contributors who have effectively eviscerated all these criticisms, but in less guarded, more outspoken tones than my own, or than those of my academic colleagues A. C. Grayling, Daniel Dennett, Paul Kurtz, Steven Weinberg and others who have done so in print (and whose comments are reproduced on the same website).

    You can’t criticize religion without a detailed analysis of learned books of theology.

    Surprise bestseller? If I’d gone to town, as one self-consciously intellectual critic wished, on the epistemological differences between Aquinas and Duns Scotus; if I’d done justice to Eriugena on subjectivity, Rahner on grace or Moltmann on hope (as he vainly hoped I would), my book would have been more than a surprise bestseller: it would have been a miraculous one. But that is not the point. Unlike Stephen Hawking (who accepted advice that every formula he published would halve his sales), I would happily have forgone bestsellerdom if there had been the slightest hope of Duns Scotus illuminating my central question of whether God exists. The vast majority of theological writings simply assume that he does, and go on from there. For my purposes, I need consider only those theologians who take seriously the possibility that God does not exist and argue that he does. This I think Chapter 3 achieves, with what I hope is good humour and sufficient comprehensiveness.

    When it comes to good humour, I cannot improve on the splendid ‘Courtier’s Reply’, published by P. Z. Myers on his ‘Pharyngula’ website.

    I have considered the impudent accusations of Mr Dawkins with exasperation at his lack of serious scholarship. He has apparently not read the detailed discourses of Count Roderigo of Seville on the exquisite and exotic leathers of the Emperor’s boots, nor does he give a moment’s consideration to Bellini’s masterwork, On the Luminescence of the Emperor’s Feathered Hat. We have entire schools dedicated to writing learned treatises on the beauty of the Emperor’s raiment, and every major newspaper runs a section dedicated to imperial fashion . . . Dawkins arrogantly ignores all these deep philosophical ponderings to crudely accuse the Emperor of nudity . . . Until Dawkins has trained in the shops of Paris and Milan, until he has learned to tell the difference between a ruffled flounce and a puffy pantaloon, we should all pretend he has not spoken out against the Emperor’s taste. His training in biology may give him the ability to recognize dangling genitalia when he sees it, but it has not taught him the proper appreciation of Imaginary Fabrics.

    To expand the point, most of us happily disavow fairies, astrology and the Flying Spaghetti Monster, without first immersing ourselves in books of Pastafarian theology etc.

    The next criticism is a related one: the great ‘straw man’ offensive.

    You always attack the worst of religion and ignore the best.

    ‘You go after crude, rabble-rousing chancers like Ted Haggard, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, rather than sophisticated theologians like Tillich or Bonhoeffer who teach the sort of religion I believe in.’

    If only such subtle, nuanced religion predominated, the world would surely be a better place, and I would have written a different book. The melancholy truth is that this kind of understated, decent, revisionist religion is numerically negligible. To the vast majority of believers around the world, religion all too closely resembles what you hear from the likes of Robertson, Falwell or Haggard, Osama bin Laden or the Ayatollah Khomeini. These are not straw men, they are all too influential, and everybody in the modern world has to deal with them.

    I’m an atheist, but I wish to dissociate myself from your shrill, strident, intemperate, intolerant, ranting language.

    Actually, if you look at the language of The God Delusion, it is rather less shrill or intemperate than we regularly take in our stride—when listening to political commentators for example, or theatre, art or book critics. Here are some samples of recent restaurant criticism from leading London newspapers:

    ‘It is difficult, if not impossible, to imagine anyone conjuring up a restaurant, even in their sleep, where the food in its mediocrity comes so close to inedible.’

    ‘All things considered, quite the worst restaurant in London, maybe the world . . . serves horrendous food, grudgingly, in a room that is a museum to Italian waiters’ taste circa 1976.’

    ‘The worst meal I’ve ever eaten. Not by a small margin. I mean the worst! The most unrelievedly awful!’

    ‘[What] looked like a sea mine in miniature was the most disgusting thing I’ve put in my mouth since I ate earthworms at school.’

    The strongest language to be found in The God Delusion is tame and measured by comparison. If it sounds intemperate, it is only because of the weird convention, almost universally accepted (see the quotation from Douglas Adams on pages 42–3), that religious faith is uniquely privileged: above and beyond criticism. Insulting a restaurant might seem trivial compared to insulting God. But restaurateurs and chefs really exist and they have feelings to be hurt, whereas blasphemy, as the witty bumper sticker puts it, is a victimless crime.

    In 1915, the British Member of Parliament Horatio Bottomley recommended that, after the war, ‘If by chance you should discover one day in a restaurant you are being served by a German waiter, you will throw the soup in his foul face; if you find yourself sitting at the side of a German clerk, you will spill the inkpot over his foul head.’ Now that’s strident and intolerant (and, I should have thought, ridiculous and ineffective as rhetoric even in its own time). Contrast it with the opening sentence of Chapter 2, which is the passage most often quoted as ‘strident’ or ‘shrill’. It is not for me to say whether I succeeded, but my intention was closer to robust but humorous broadside than shrill polemic. In public readings of The God Delusion this is the one passage that is guaranteed to get a good-natured laugh, which is why my wife and I invariably use it as the warm-up act to break the ice with a new audience. If I could venture to suggest why the humour works, I think it is the incongruous mismatch between a subject that could have been stridently or vulgarly expressed, and the actual expression in a drawn-out list of Latinate or pseudo-scholarly words (‘filicidal’, ‘megalomaniacal’, ‘pestilential’). My model here was one of the funniest writers of the twentieth century, and nobody could call Evelyn Waugh shrill or strident (I even gave the game away by mentioning his name in the anecdote that immediately follows, on page 51).

    Book critics or theatre critics can be derisively negative and gain delighted praise for the trenchant wit of their review. But in criticisms of religion even clarity ceases to be a virtue and sounds like aggressive hostility. A politician may attack an opponent scathingly across the floor of the House and earn plaudits for his robust pugnacity. But let a soberly reasoning critic of religion employ what would in other contexts sound merely direct or forthright, and it will be described as a ‘rant’. Polite society will purse its lips and shake its head: even secular polite society, and especially that part of secular society that loves to announce, ‘I’m an atheist, BUT . . . ’

    You are only preaching to the choir. What’s the point?

    ‘Converts’ Corner’ on RichardDawkins.net gives the lie to this premise, but even taking it at face value there are good answers. One is that the non-believing choir is a lot bigger than many people think, especially in America. But, again especially in America, it is largely a closet choir, and it desperately needs encouragement to come out. Judging by the thanks I received all over North America on my book tour, the encouragement that people like Sam Harris, Dan Dennett, Christopher Hitchens and me are able to give is greatly appreciated.

    A more subtle reason for preaching to the choir is the need to raise consciousness. When the feminists raised our consciousness about sexist pronouns, they would have been preaching to the choir where the more substantive issues of the rights of women and the evils of discrimination against them were concerned. But that decent, liberal choir still needed its consciousness raised with respect to everyday language. However right-on we may have been on the political issues of rights and discrimination, we nevertheless still unconsciously bought into linguistic conventions that made half the human race feel excluded.

    There are other linguistic conventions that need to go the same way as sexist pronouns, and the atheist choir is not exempt. We all need our consciousness raised. Atheists as well as theists unconsciously observe society’s convention that we must be especially polite and respectful to faith. And I never tire of drawing attention to society’s tacit acceptance of the labelling of small children with the religious opinions of their parents. Atheists need to raise their own consciousness of the anomaly: religious opinion is the one kind of parental opinion that—by almost universal consent—can be fastened upon children who are, in truth, too young to know what their opinion really is. There is no such thing as a Christian child: only a child of Christian parents. Seize every opportunity to ram it home.

    You are just as much of a fundamentalist as those you criticize.

    No, please, it is all too easy to mistake passion that can change its mind for fundamentalism, which never will. Fundamentalist Christians are passionately opposed to evolution and I am passionately in favour of it. Passion for passion, we are evenly matched. And that, according to some, means we are equally fundamentalist. But, to borrow an aphorism whose source I am unable to pin down, when two opposite points of view are expressed with equal force, the truth does not necessarily lie midway between them. It is possible for one side to be simply wrong. And that justifies passion on the other side.

    Fundamentalists know what they believe and they know that nothing will change their minds. The quotation from Kurt Wise on page 323 says it all: ‘ . . . if all the evidence in the universe turns against creationism, I would be the first to admit it, but I would still be a creationist because that is what the Word of God seems to indicate. Here I must stand.’ It is impossible to overstress the difference between such a passionate commitment to biblical fundamentals and the true scientist’s equally passionate commitment to evidence. The fundamentalist Kurt Wise proclaims that all the evidence in the universe would not change his mind. The true scientist, however passionately he may ‘believe’ in evolution, knows exactly what it would take to change his mind: Evidence. As J. B. S. Haldane said when asked what evidence might contradict evolution, ‘Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian.’ Let me coin my own opposite version of Kurt Wise’s manifesto: ‘If all the evidence in the universe turned in favour of creationism, I would be the first to admit it, and I would immediately change my mind. As things stand, however, all available evidence (and there is a vast amount of it) favours evolution. It is for this reason and this reason alone that I argue for evolution with a passion that matches the passion of those who argue against it. My passion is based on evidence. Theirs, flying in the face of evidence as it does, is truly fundamentalist.’

    I’m an atheist myself, but religion is here to stay. Live with it.

    ‘You want to get rid of religion? Good luck to you! You think you can get rid of religion? What planet are you living on? Religion is a fixture. Get over it!’

    I could bear any of these downers, if they were uttered in something approaching a tone of regret or concern. On the contrary. The tone of voice is sometimes downright gleeful. I don’t think it’s masochism. More probably, we can put it down to ‘belief in belief’ again. These people may not be religious themselves, but they love the idea that other people are religious. This brings me to my final category of naysayers.

    I’m an atheist myself, but people need religion.

    ‘What are you going to put in its place? How are you going to comfort the bereaved? How are you going to fill the need?’

    What patronizing condescension! ‘You and I, of course, are much too intelligent and well educated to need religion. But ordinary people, hoi polloi, the Orwellian proles, the Huxleian Deltas and Epsilon semi-morons, need religion.’ I am reminded of an occasion when I was lecturing at a conference on the public understanding of science, and I briefly inveighed against ‘dumbing down’. In the question and answer session at the end, one member of the audience stood up and suggested that dumbing down might be necessary ‘to bring minorities and women to science’. His tone of voice told that he genuinely thought he was being liberal and progressive. I can just imagine what the women and ‘minorities’ in the audience thought about it.

    Returning to humanity’s need for comfort, it is, of course, real, but isn’t there something childish in the belief that the universe owes us comfort, as of right? Isaac Asimov’s remark about the infantilism of pseudoscience is just as applicable to religion: ‘Inspect every piece of pseudoscience and you will find a security blanket, a thumb to suck, a skirt to hold.’ It is astonishing, moreover, how many people are unable to understand that ‘X is comforting’ does not imply ‘X is true’.

    A related plaint concerns the need for a ‘purpose’ in life. To quote one Canadian critic:

    The atheists may be right about God. Who knows? But God or no God, it’s clear that something in the human soul requires a belief that life has a purpose that transcends the material plane. One would think that a more-rational-than-thou empiricist such as Dawkins would recognize this unchanging aspect of human nature . . . does Dawkins really think this world would be a more humane place if we all looked to The God Delusion instead of The Bible for truth and comfort?

    Actually yes, since you mention ‘humane’, yes I do, but I must repeat, yet again, that the consolation-content of a belief does not raise its truth-value. Of course I cannot deny the need for emotional comfort, and I cannot claim that the world-view adopted in this book offers any more than moderate comfort to, for example, the bereaved. But if the comfort that religion seems to offer is founded on the neurologically highly implausible premise that we survive the death of our brains, do you really want to defend it? In any case, I don’t think I have ever met anyone at a funeral who dissents from the view that the non-religious parts (eulogies, the deceased’s favourite poems or music) are more moving than the prayers.

    Having read The God Delusion, Dr David Ashton, a British consultant physician, wrote to me on the unexpected death, on Christmas Day 2006, of his beloved seventeen-year-old son, Luke. Shortly before Luke’s death, the two of them had talked appreciatively of the charitable foundation that I am setting up to encourage reason and science. At Luke’s funeral on the Isle of Man, his father suggested to the congregation that, if they wished to make any kind of contribution in Luke’s memory, they should send it to my foundation, as Luke would have wished. The thirty cheques received amounted to more than £2,000, including more than £600 from a whip-round in the local village pub. This boy was obviously much loved. When I read the Order of Service for the funeral ceremony, I literally wept (although I had never met Luke), and I asked for permission to reproduce it at RichardDawkins.net. A lone piper played the Manx lament ‘Ellen Vallin’. Two friends spoke eulogies. Dr Ashton himself recited Dylan Thomas’s beautiful poem ‘Fern Hill’ (‘Now as I was young and easy, under the apple boughs’—so achingly evocative of lost youth). And then, I catch my breath to report, he read the opening lines of my own Unweaving the Rainbow, lines that I have long earmarked for my own funeral.

    Obviously there are exceptions, but I suspect that for many people the main reason they cling to religion is not that it is consoling, but that they have been let down by our educational system and don’t realize that non-belief is even an option. This is certainly true of most people who think they are creationists. They have simply not been properly taught Darwin’s astounding alternative. Probably the same is true of the belittling myth that people ‘need’ religion. At a recent conference in 2006, an anthropologist (and prize specimen of I’m-an-atheist-buttery) quoted Golda Meir when asked whether she believed in God: ‘I believe in the Jewish people, and the Jewish people believe in God.’ Our anthropologist substituted his own version: ‘I believe in people, and people believe in God.’ I prefer to say that I believe in people, and people, when given the right encouragement to think for themselves about all the information now available, very often turn out not to believe in God and to lead fulfilled and satisfied—indeed, liberated—lives.

    In this new paperback edition I have taken the opportunity to make a few minor improvements, and correct some small errors that readers of the hardback have kindly drawn to my attention.

    Preface

    As a child, my wife hated her school and wished she could leave. Years later, when she was in her twenties, she disclosed this unhappy fact to her parents, and her mother was aghast: ‘But darling, why didn’t you come to us and tell us?’ Lalla’s reply is my text for today: ‘But I didn’t know I could.’

    I didn’t know I could.

    I suspect—well, I am sure—that there are lots of people out there who have been brought up in some religion or other, are unhappy in it, don’t believe it, or are worried about the evils that are done in its name; people who feel vague yearnings to leave their parents’ religion and wish they could, but just don’t realize that leaving is an option. If you are one of them, this book is for you. It is intended to raise consciousness—raise consciousness to the fact that to be an atheist is a realistic aspiration, and a brave and splendid one. You can be an atheist who is happy, balanced, moral, and intellectually fulfilled. That is the first of my consciousness-raising messages. I also want to raise consciousness in three other ways, which I’ll come on to.

    In January 2006 I presented a two-part television documentary on British television (Channel Four) called Root of All Evil? From the start, I didn’t like the title and fought it hard. Religion is not the root of all evil, for no one thing is the root of all anything. But I was delighted with the advertisement that Channel Four put in the national newspapers. It was a picture of the Manhattan skyline with the caption ‘Imagine a world without religion.’ What was the connection? The twin towers of the World Trade Center were conspicuously present.

    Imagine, with John Lennon, a world with no religion. Imagine no suicide bombers, no 9/11, no 7/7, no Crusades, no witch-hunts, no Gunpowder Plot, no Indian partition, no Israeli/Palestinian wars, no Serb/Croat/Muslim massacres, no persecution of Jews as ‘Christ-killers’, no Northern Ireland ‘troubles’, no ‘honour killings’, no shiny-suited bouffant-haired televangelists fleecing gullible people of their money (‘God wants you to give till it hurts’). Imagine no Taliban to blow up ancient statues, no public beheadings of blasphemers, no flogging of female skin for the crime of showing an inch of it. Incidentally, my colleague Desmond Morris informs me that John Lennon’s magnificent song is sometimes performed in America with the phrase ‘and no religion too’ expurgated. One version even has the effrontery to change it to ‘and one religion too’.

    Perhaps you feel that agnosticism is a reasonable position, but that atheism is just as dogmatic as religious belief? If so, I hope Chapter 2 will change your mind, by persuading you that ‘the God Hypothesis’ is a scientific hypothesis about the universe, which should be analysed as sceptically as any other. Perhaps you have been taught that philosophers and theologians have put forward good reasons to believe in God. If you think that, you might enjoy Chapter 3 on ‘Arguments for God’s existence’—the arguments turn out to be spectacularly weak. Maybe you think it is obvious that God must exist, for how else could the world have come into being? How else could there be life, in all its rich diversity, with every species looking uncannily as though it had been ‘designed’? If your thoughts run along those lines, I hope you will gain enlightenment from Chapter 4 on ‘Why there almost certainly is no God’. Far from pointing to a designer, the illusion of design in the living world is explained with far greater economy and with devastating elegance by Darwinian natural selection. And, while natural selection itself is limited to explaining the living world, it raises our consciousness to the likelihood of comparable explanatory ‘cranes’ that may aid our understanding of the cosmos itself. The power of cranes such as natural selection is the second of my four consciousness-raisers.

    Perhaps you think there must be a god or gods because anthropologists and historians report that believers dominate every human culture. If you find that convincing, please refer to Chapter 5, on ‘The roots of religion’, which explains why belief is so ubiquitous. Or do you think that religious belief is necessary in order for us to have justifiable morals? Don’t we need God, in order to be good? Please read Chapters 6 and 7 to see why this is not so. Do you still have a soft spot for religion as a good thing for the world, even if you yourself have lost your faith? Chapter 8 will invite you to think about ways in which religion is not such a good thing for the world.

    If you feel trapped in the religion of your upbringing, it would be worth asking yourself how this came about. The answer is usually some form of childhood indoctrination. If you are religious at all it is overwhelmingly probable that your religion is that of your parents. If you were born in Arkansas and you think Christianity is true and Islam false, knowing full well that you would think the opposite if you had been born in Afghanistan, you are the victim of childhood indoctrination. Mutatis mutandis if you were born in Afghanistan.

    The whole matter of religion and childhood is the subject of Chapter 9, which also includes my third consciousness-raiser. Just as feminists wince when they hear ‘he’ rather than ‘he or she’, or ‘man’ rather than ‘human’, I want everybody to flinch whenever we hear a phrase such as ‘Catholic child’ or ‘Muslim child’. Speak of a ‘child of Catholic parents’ if you like; but if you hear anybody speak of a ‘Catholic child’, stop them and politely point out that children are too young to know where they stand on such issues, just as they are too young to know where they stand on economics or politics. Precisely because my purpose is consciousness-raising, I shall not apologize for mentioning it here in the Preface as well as in Chapter 9. You can’t say it too often. I’ll say it again. That is not a Muslim child, but a child of Muslim parents. That child is too young to know whether it is a Muslim or not. There is no such thing as a Muslim child. There is no such thing as a Christian child.

    Chapters 1 and 10 top and tail the book by explaining, in their different ways, how a proper understanding of the magnificence of the real world, while never becoming a religion, can fill the inspirational role that religion has historically—and inadequately—usurped.

    My fourth consciousness-raiser is atheist pride. Being an atheist is nothing to be apologetic about. On the contrary, it is something to be proud of, standing tall to face the far horizon, for atheism nearly always indicates a healthy independence of mind and, indeed, a healthy mind. There are many people who know, in their heart of hearts, that they are atheists, but dare not admit it to their families or even, in some cases, to themselves. Partly, this is because the very word ‘atheist’ has been assiduously built up as a terrible and frightening label. Chapter 9 quotes the comedian Julia Sweeney’s tragi-comic story of her parents’ discovery, through reading a newspaper, that she had become an atheist. Not believing in God they could just about take, but an atheist! An ATHEIST? (The mother’s voice rose to a scream.)

    I need to say something to American readers in particular at this point, for the religiosity of today’s America is something truly remarkable. The lawyer Wendy Kaminer was exaggerating only slightly when she remarked that making fun of religion is as risky as burning a flag in an American Legion Hall.¹ The status of atheists in America today is on a par with that of homosexuals fifty years ago. Now, after the Gay Pride movement, it is possible, though still not very easy, for a homosexual to be elected to public office. A Gallup poll taken in 1999 asked Americans whether they would vote for an otherwise well-qualified person who was a woman (95 per cent would), Roman Catholic (94 per cent would), Jew (92 per cent), black (92 per cent), Mormon (79 per cent), homosexual (79 per cent) or atheist (49 per cent). Clearly we have a long way to go. But atheists are a lot more numerous, especially among the educated elite, than many realize. This was so even in the nineteenth century, when John Stuart Mill was already able to say: ‘The world would be astonished if it knew how great a proportion of its brightest ornaments, of those most distinguished even in popular estimation for wisdom and virtue, are complete sceptics in religion.’

    This must be even truer today and, indeed, I present evidence for it in Chapter 3. The reason so many people don’t notice atheists is that many of us are reluctant to ‘come out’. My dream is that this book may help people to come out. Exactly as in the case of the gay movement, the more people come out, the easier it will be for others to join them. There may be a critical mass for the initiation of a chain reaction.

    American polls suggest that atheists and agnostics far outnumber religious Jews, and even outnumber most other particular religious groups. Unlike Jews, however, who are notoriously one of the most effective political lobbies in the United States, and unlike evangelical Christians, who wield even greater political power, atheists and agnostics are not organized and therefore exert almost zero influence. Indeed, organizing atheists has been compared to herding cats, because they tend to think independently and will not conform to authority. But a good first step would be to build up a critical mass of those willing to ‘come out’, thereby encouraging others to do so. Even if they can’t be herded, cats in sufficient numbers can make a lot of noise and they cannot be ignored.

    The word ‘delusion’ in my title has disquieted some psychiatrists who regard it as a technical term, not to be bandied about. Three of them wrote to me to propose a special technical term for religious delusion: ‘relusion’.² Maybe it’ll catch on. But for now I am going to stick with ‘delusion’, and I need to justify my use of it. The Penguin English Dictionary defines a delusion as ‘a false belief or impression’. Surprisingly, the illustrative quotation the dictionary gives is from Phillip E. Johnson: ‘Darwinism is the story of humanity’s liberation from the delusion that its destiny is controlled by a power higher than itself.’ Can that be the same Phillip E. Johnson who leads the creationist charge against Darwinism in America today? Indeed it is, and the quotation is, as we might guess, taken out of context. I hope the fact that I have stated as much will be noted, since the same courtesy has not been extended to me in numerous creationist quotations of my works, deliberately and misleadingly taken out of context. Whatever Johnson’s own meaning, his sentence as it stands is one that I would be happy to endorse. The dictionary supplied with Microsoft Word defines a delusion as ‘a persistent false belief held in the face of strong contradictory evidence, especially as a symptom of psychiatric disorder’. The first part captures religious faith perfectly. As to whether it is a symptom of a psychiatric disorder, I am inclined to follow Robert M. Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: ‘When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Religion.’

    If this book works as I intend, religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put it down. What presumptuous optimism! Of course, dyed-in-the-wool faith-heads are immune to argument, their resistance built up over years of childhood indoctrination using methods that took centuries to mature (whether by evolution or design). Among the more effective immunological devices is a dire warning to avoid even opening a book like this, which is surely a work of Satan. But I believe there are plenty of open-minded people out there: people whose childhood indoctrination was not too insidious, or for other reasons didn’t ‘take’, or whose native intelligence is strong enough to overcome it. Such free spirits should need only a little encouragement to break free of the vice of religion altogether. At very least, I hope that nobody who reads this book will be able to say, ‘I didn’t know I could.’

    For help in the preparation of this book, I am grateful to many friends and colleagues. I cannot mention them all, but they include my literary agent John Brockman, and my editors, Sally Gaminara (for Transworld) and Eamon Dolan (for Houghton Mifflin), both of whom read the book with sensitivity and intelligent understanding, and gave me a helpful mixture of criticism and advice. Their whole-hearted and enthusiastic belief in the book was very encouraging to me. Gillian Somerscales has been an exemplary copy editor, as constructive with her suggestions as she was meticulous with her corrections. Others who criticized various drafts, and to whom I am very grateful, are Jerry Coyne, J. Anderson Thomson, R. Elisabeth Cornwell, Ursula Goodenough, Latha Menon and especially Karen Owens, critic extraordinaire, whose acquaintance with the stitching and unstitching of every draft of the book has been almost as detailed as my own.

    The book owes something (and vice versa) to the two-part television documentary Root of All Evil?, which I presented on British television (Channel Four) in January 2006. I am grateful to all who were involved in the production, including Deborah Kidd, Russell Barnes, Tim Cragg, Adam Prescod, Alan Clements and Hamish Mykura. For permission to use quotations from the documentary I thank IWC Media and Channel Four. Root of All Evil? achieved excellent ratings in Britain, and it has also been taken by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. It remains to be seen whether any US television channel will dare to show it.*

    This book has been developing in my mind for some years. During that time, some of the ideas inevitably found their way into lectures, for example my Tanner Lectures at Harvard, and articles in newspapers and magazines. Readers of my regular column in Free Inquiry, especially, may find certain passages familiar. I am grateful to Tom Flynn, the Editor of that admirable magazine, for the stimulus he gave me when he commissioned me to become a regular columnist. After a temporary hiatus during the finishing of the book, I hope now to resume my column, and will no doubt use it to respond to the aftermath of the book.

    For a variety of reasons I am grateful to Dan Dennett, Marc Hauser, Michael Stirrat, Sam Harris, Helen Fisher, Margaret Downey, Ibn Warraq, Hermione Lee, Julia Sweeney, Dan Barker, Josephine Welsh, Ian Baird and especially George Scales. Nowadays, a book such as this is not complete until it becomes the nucleus of a living website, a forum for supplementary materials, reactions, discussions, questions and answers—who knows what the future may bring? I hope that www.richarddawkins.net, the website of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, will come to fill that role, and I am extremely grateful to Josh Timonen for the artistry, professionalism and sheer hard work that he is putting into it.

    Above all, I thank my wife Lalla Ward, who has coaxed me through all my hesitations and self-doubts, not just with moral support and witty suggestions for improvement, but by reading the entire book aloud to me, at two different stages in its development, so I could apprehend very directly how it might seem to a reader other than myself. I recommend the technique to other authors, but I must warn that for best results the reader must be a professional actor, with voice and ear sensitively tuned to the music of language.

    Chapter 1

    A Deeply Religious Non-Believer

    I don’t try to imagine a personal God; it suffices to stand in awe at the structure of the world, insofar as it allows our inadequate senses to appreciate it.

    —ALBERT EINSTEIN

    DESERVED RESPECT

    The boy lay prone in the grass, his chin resting on his hands. He suddenly found himself overwhelmed by a heightened awareness of the tangled stems and roots, a forest in microcosm, a transfigured world of ants and beetles and even—though he wouldn’t have known the details at the time—of soil bacteria by the billions, silently and invisibly shoring up the economy of the micro-world. Suddenly the micro-forest of the turf seemed to swell and become one with the universe, and with the rapt mind of the boy contemplating it. He interpreted the experience in religious terms and it led him eventually to the priesthood. He was ordained an Anglican priest and became a chaplain at my school, a teacher of whom I was fond. It is thanks to decent liberal clergymen like him that nobody could ever claim that I had religion forced down my throat.*

    In another time and place, that boy could have been me under the stars, dazzled by Orion, Cassiopeia and Ursa Major, tearful with the unheard music of the Milky Way, heady with the night scents of frangipani and trumpet flowers in an African garden. Why the same emotion should have led my chaplain in one direction and me in the other is not an easy question to answer. A quasi-mystical response to nature and the universe is common among scientists and rationalists. It has no connection with supernatural belief. In his boyhood at least, my chaplain was presumably not aware (nor was I) of the closing lines of The Origin of Species—the famous ‘entangled bank’ passage, ‘with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth’. Had he been, he would certainly have identified with it and, instead of the priesthood, might have been led to Darwin’s view that all was ‘produced by laws acting around us’:

    Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

    Carl Sagan, in Pale Blue Dot, wrote:

    How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, ‘This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant’? Instead they say, ‘No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.’ A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.

    All Sagan’s books touch the nerve-endings of transcendent wonder that religion monopolized in past centuries. My own books have the same aspiration. Consequently I hear myself often described as a deeply religious man. An American student wrote to me that she had asked her professor whether he had a view about me. ‘Sure,’ he replied. ‘He’s positive science is incompatible with religion, but he waxes ecstatic about nature and the universe. To me, that is religion!’ But is ‘religion’ the right word? I don’t think so. The Nobel Prize-winning physicist (and atheist) Steven Weinberg made the point as well as anybody, in Dreams of a Final Theory:

    Some people have views of God that are so broad and flexible that it is inevitable that they will find God wherever they look for him. One hears it said that ‘God is the ultimate’ or ‘God is our better nature’ or ‘God is the universe.’ Of course, like any other word, the word ‘God’ can be given any meaning we like. If you want to say that ‘God is energy,’ then you can find God in a lump of coal.

    Weinberg is surely right that, if the word God is not to become completely useless, it should be used in the way people have generally understood it: to denote a supernatural creator that is ‘appropriate for us to worship’.

    Much unfortunate confusion is caused by failure to distinguish what can be called Einsteinian religion from supernatural religion. Einstein sometimes invoked the name of God (and he is not the only atheistic scientist to do so), inviting misunderstanding by supernaturalists eager to misunderstand and claim so illustrious a thinker as their own. The dramatic (or was it mischievous?) ending of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, ‘For then we should know the mind of God’, is notoriously misconstrued. It has led people to believe, mistakenly of course, that Hawking is a religious man. The cell biologist Ursula Goodenough, in The Sacred Depths of Nature, sounds more religious than Hawking or Einstein. She loves churches, mosques and temples, and numerous passages in her book fairly beg to be taken out of context and used as ammunition for supernatural religion. She goes so far as to call herself a ‘Religious Naturalist’. Yet a careful reading of her book shows that she is really as staunch an atheist as I am.

    ‘Naturalist’ is an ambiguous word. For me it conjures my childhood hero, Hugh Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle (who, by the way, had more than a touch of the ‘philosopher’ naturalist of HMS Beagle about him). In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, naturalist meant what it still means for most of us today: a student of the natural world. Naturalists in this sense, from Gilbert White on, have often been clergymen. Darwin himself was destined for the Church as a young man, hoping that the leisurely life of a country parson would enable him to pursue his passion for beetles. But philosophers use ‘naturalist’ in a very different sense, as the opposite of super-naturalist. Julian Baggini explains in Atheism: A Very Short Introduction the meaning of an atheist’s commitment to naturalism: ‘What most atheists do believe is that although there is only one kind of stuff in the universe and it is physical, out of this stuff come minds, beauty, emotions, moral values—in short the full gamut of phenomena that gives richness to human life.’

    Human thoughts and emotions emerge from exceedingly complex interconnections of physical entities within the brain. An atheist in this sense of philosophical naturalist is somebody who believes there is nothing beyond the natural, physical world, no supernatural creative intelligence lurking behind the observable universe, no soul that outlasts the body and no miracles—except in the sense of natural phenomena that we don’t yet understand. If there is something that appears to lie beyond the natural world as it is now imperfectly understood, we hope eventually to understand it and embrace it within the natural. As ever when we unweave a rainbow, it will not become less wonderful.

    Great scientists of our time who sound religious usually turn out not to be so when you examine their beliefs more deeply. This is certainly true

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