Book Review: The God Delusion

Now that I'm done with school for the semester, I have been able to get back to some reading. Last night I finished Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion. If you are not acquainted with him, Dawkins is a British ethnologist and evolutionary biologist most famous for his 1974 book The Selfish Gene. My guess is that his main inspiration for this book was the frustration of having to deal with "intelligent design" nut jobs, but Dawkins attempts to smash a number of religion-based arguments in this book (e.g. without God there is no morality). Although a lot of the arguments he goes after would be pretty easy to dismiss simply through basic logic, some of the chapters are pretty enlightening (I particularly enjoyed the chapter on the origins of morality). While I found some of his arguments not entirely convincing and wished he had expounded more on others, overall this is a very solid work.

I have two criticisms of the book. The first one is that Dawkins has a very sarcastic (some have described it all bullying) style of writing. One gets the feeling he came home in a bad mood and fired this off in one night. Perhaps the bad mood was caused when it was revealed that Tony Blair was spending tens of millions of pounds of taxpayer money on a creationist charter school which happened to be run by a man now caught up in the knighthood-for-donations scandal. The other criticism is that he tries to hit too many topics and doesn't delve deeply enough into some of them. Some of his chapters end with him basically saying "well I'm not an expert in this so here's some more reading material, but you have to admit I already have a better argument than X." Of course, it's already 370 pages long and I'll give him props for not claiming to be an expert in things that he's not.

Rating: * * * 1/2

I'll be the first to admit this book may not exactly be in the holiday spirit. If Dawkins isn't your cup of tea, perhaps you might try one of these books:

Eating Jesus: The Theology Behind Transubstantiation

1 + 1 + 1 = 1, A Primer On The Holy Trinity

I Found God In My Hat: The John Smith Story

Stone Your Wife To Death If She Is Not A Virgin: 101 Biblical Rules For Everyday Life

Hey, We All Hate The Gays Right? A Heartwarming Story Of Reconciliation Between Christians, Jews, and Muslims