Controversial atheist Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion is intended by its author to serve as a summing-up of his views about the entire subject of religion and, ranging across topics from the arguments for and against the existence of God to today's headlines, he leaves no stone unturned. There's little that is genuinely new, but much that is rarely said frankly, and for that alone the book is a worthy addition to any thoughtful person's library.
But first, an important caveat: Dawkins is a scientist — and thinks and writes like one. What he has to say is plain enough, but only rarely is it fully developed and expressed gracefully. He is intelligent and writing for an intelligent audience, and tends to leapfrog from point to point, assuming that the connections he is making are obvious. Prepare to back-up and re-read, more often than ought to be necessary, in order to figure-out how he got from A to B. This is a book that would have profited mightily from sharper editing.
Dawkins launches with a tedious elaboration of the varieties and degrees of agnosticism, conceding that the negative "There is no God" is not susceptible of objective proof, but likening it to "There is no teapot orbiting Mars." He takes recourse at the last to probabilities to explain that really he's an agnostic, but "I am agnostic only to the extent that I am agnostic about fairies at the bottom of the garden." It's a fine distinction, albeit one wasted on those who fling the (not very) pejorative "atheist" at everyone who doubts even the most garish of Biblical claims.
It's a necessary introduction, though, to what comes next: the complete, ruinous, dispositive demolition of the "Watchmaker" argument, the claim that life is so complicated that it must be the work of a superior intelligence. At last, Dawkins' answer reduces to this: It is obviously no solution to postulate something even more improbable.
And so much for that. He then goes on to rehearse the familiar arguments for and against a transcendent, cosmic intelligence. The treatment is brusque, though; readers just coming to those questions will do better with Bertrand Russell's Why I am not a Christian, or Robert Ingersoll's Some Mistakes of Moses.
Article comments
1 - SHARK
Good summary of the book.
I would add an important point:
the book -- in many places -- is REALLY FUNNY.
BTW: A friend of mine aso complained that parts of the book were too difficult to follow, but I didn't have any problems at all; that might be because I've thought about/studied the subject for some 30 years, tho -- so the book kinda read like "atheist 101" to me.
best,
Shark
2 - RJ Elliott
Religion has its uses, whether "God" exists or not.
It can provide relatively benevolent social control in some forms. In other forms, however, it only brings misery.
It also provides "answers" for people too dumb to comprehend science. Everyone wants answers; but not everyone can "handle the truth." Therefore, religion offers a faux, but convenient, answer to life's many mysteries. You know, supply and demand, so to speak.
Anyway, I haven't read the book, and probably won't. But this was an interesting book review to me nonetheless.
3 - downunder
Religion is immoral, anti nature, unjust, and irrational!
This was convincingly demonstrated by the writings of Ayn Rand:
Religion is based on the monstrous absurdity of "Original Sin."
The start of this morality is damnation. Destruction is its purpose, means and end. This code begins by damning man as evil, and then demands that he practice a good that it defines as impossible for him to practice. It demands, as his first proof of virtue, that he accepts his own depravity without proof. It demands that he start, not with standard of value, but with a standard of evil, which is himself, by means of which he is the to define the good: the good is that which he is not.
To hold, as man's sin, a fact not open to his choice is a mockery of morality. To hold man's nature as his sin is a mockery of nature. To punish him for a crime he committed before he was born is a mockery of justice. To hold him guilty in a matter where no innocence exists is a mockery of reason. To destroy morality, nature, justice and reason by means of a single concept is a feat of evil hardly to be matched. Yet that is the moral code of "Original Sin"
4 - Rod Maingot
I'm in full agreement with downunder. 'Original Sin' is one of many evils of religion.