The God Delusion

By: Richard Dawkins

Narrated by: Richard Dawkins, Lalla Ward

Length: 13 hrs and 52 mins

Publisher's summary

Discover magazine recently called Richard Dawkins "Darwin's Rottweiler" for his fierce and effective defense of evolution. Prospect magazine voted him among the top three public intellectuals in the world (along with Umberto Eco and Noam Chomsky). Now Dawkins turns his considerable intellect on religion, denouncing its faulty logic and the suffering it causes.

He critiques 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. In so doing, he makes a compelling case that belief in God is not just irrational, but potentially deadly.

Dawkins has fashioned an impassioned, rigorous rebuttal to religion, to be embraced by anyone who sputters at the inconsistencies and cruelties that riddle the Bible, bristles at the inanity of "intelligent design", or agonizes over fundamentalism in the Middle East or Middle America.

©2006 Richard Dawkins (P)2006 Tantor Media, Inc.

Critic reviews

"Richard Dawkins is the leading soothsayer of our time....The God Delusion continues his thought-provoking tradition." (J. Craig Venter, decoder of the human genome)
"The God Delusion is smart, compassionate, and true....If this book doesn't change the world, we're all screwed." (Penn & Teller)
"The world needs...passionate rationalists....Richard Dawkins so stands out through the cutting intelligence of The God Delusion." (James D. Watson, co-discoverer of DNA, author of The Double Helix)

Charming, smart, and unpretentious

When I first listened to the sample of this book about a year ago, I misjudged Mr. Dawkins. I fell into a trap of stereotyping him as a pretentious twit based on the little bit of content I heard. I also think his accent had something to do with it. I thought this book sounded like one written to make atheists feel validated and smug. But after having his books reccomended to me by others, and reading more and more positive things about him, I gave him a shot. I started with "The Greatest Show On Earth", moved on to "The God Delusion", and then listened to "The Selfish Gene". Now I love this guy (and Lalla Ward too). I can't get enough of his clear thinking, his understandable use of language, his vast intellect, and most surprisingly, his sense of humor. This isn't really a science book, but who would guess that a scientist could be so fun?

In The God Delusion, he's basically just making the case that being an atheist is okay, and you don't have to be ashamed to admit it. He lays out every argument made on behalf of belief, shredding them to pieces to the point where there's basically nothing left but blind faith. And profoundly unfounded blind faith at that. But its not done with contempt or maliciousness, but with wit, airtight logic, and a wry sense of humor.

Alternating narration between himself and his wife, who is a trained actress, the audio format is very pleasing to the ears. Very strong performances by both will make sure that you never become bored. This is my favorite Dawkins book.

Mythbuster

I read this book a few years ago, but I’m a big fan of Richard Dawkins so I decided to ‘read’ it again. Even though I was familiar with the material, I found it just as compelling, if not more so, the second time around. I’m addicted to Dawkins’ crisp logical arguments and his brilliant use of analogies and examples.

I have to admire the courage of a man who doesn’t pull any punches in his criticism of religion in general, and especially of religious fundamentalist fanaticism (both Christian and Muslim). I’m sure this has put him in some danger of reprisal from these groups, but he doesn’t hold back because he’s passionate that religion is a force distorting human thought and behaviour to a massive extent.

He emphasizes that children are indoctrinated with religious beliefs at a vulnerable age, an age when young minds are ‘programmed’ by natural selection to believe things that adults tell them, especially when those adults are very solemn and emphatic about the message in question. For example, in modern times an adult would be very emphatic and serious when cautioning a child against jumping into the deep end of a swimming pool or crossing a busy street. The child knows when the adult means business, and these messages tend to hit home. This tendency in children to obey and believe adults when in this serious mode would (in our ancestry) have been favoured by natural selection, because those children would be more likely to survive and pass on their genes. But, Dawkins argues, this leaves the way open for a by-product, a ‘virus’, a meme to hijack the receptive mind of the child. If an idea such as ‘god is watching you all the time and will punish you if you sin’ is impressed upon the child in this solemn way, then the child will grow up and pass this idea on to his children, and so the religious meme can take hold and a vicious cycle may prevail.

Another of his main points is that the truth, or otherwise, of any religious proposition should be open to question as if it was any other ordinary subject. He doesn’t believe that religion should be protected from having to defend its veracity by having a special privileged status as ‘sacred’. This is an unfair advantage. It should be fair game for robust debate.

And a third point that I like is his identification that when people consider the fact that there either is or is not a god, they perceive the probability to be 50/50, because this is a binary choice. Dawkins explains that the binary choice is not 50/50. His example to illustrate this point is the existence of the Tooth Fairy. The Tooth Fairy either exists or not, and this is also a binary situation, but here we can see that the probability of this existing, or a unicorn or the god Zeus, are much smaller than 50%. We should apply the same reasoning to the existence probability of any God, but it becomes yet more unlikely the more specific and detailed (and farfetched) are the proposed properties of this deity (e.g. he created the world less than 10,000 years ago, he killed everyone in a flood, except for a few humans and animals saved in an ark, he had a son via a virgin birth on earth, the son was crucified and came back to life after being dead 3 days, this god knows all the thoughts of all people at all times and answers prayers, he sends good ones to heaven and bad ones to hell etc. etc.).

Dawkins does sometimes go off at a bit of a tangent with some slightly convoluted and tenuous arguments to support his ideas. For example, when discussing the human psychological need to be consoled by a god (‘a god-shaped hole in the brain’), he explains this by alluding to a child’s need for an imaginary friend (specifically, ‘Binky’ in a poem by A.A. Milne). I sort of see what he is getting at, but I think a less sympathetic reader might find this easy to mock and dismiss. It isn’t every child that has an imaginary friend, and those that do have them grow out of them, so to my mind this isn’t all that strong an argument. Personally, the times when I would like there to be a god are when I’m afraid or grief-stricken; those lonely scary times at 3 a.m. when I think about my own death or that of a loved one. At other times I don't feel the need to believe in god.

Dawkins has been criticised as being too fanatical in his atheist position, so that his opponents can point to him and say that he’s just another variety of fundamentalist, just as bad as the religious ones. However, although Dawkins does sometimes stray into very controversial territories, reinforcing the idea that he is an extremist and a ‘fundamentalist’, I believe that his occasional excesses are just the result of his passion and commitment to a phenomenally worthy cause, which is to help people to use reason, logic and the evidence of their senses to determine the likelihood of the existence of supernatural beings and to decide whether or not they should live their lives according to rules laid down in ancient scriptures.

Excellent. Highly recommended.

i highly recommend this book/audio book. The book is really well organized for making the overall argument. it is amusing, insightful, and inspiring.

A must read!

As an audible book, it is a very well read, sounds great and could get real funny at times.
This book should not be avoided by anyone. He raises important points and more importantly tries to raise consciousness - although I think he goes too far when he tries to explain the origin of religion by Natural selection. Also, his critisicm of some aspects of religion can best be desribed his own point of view. He brilliantly detsroys the dogmatic aspects of religion and the way people think about religion.
The book is out to convert you. In my case it did not but I learned a lot!

God Bless Richard Dawkins

I had to say that, I would buy this book for everybody in the U.S. If I thought they would read it. I was already an Atheist when I read this book and I suspect that most of you who will read this are as well. Thats great you will love this book its a masterpeice. Just promise to give it to a Christian when your done.

An Engaging New Ideology

There are plenty of reviews detailing this book. Due to so many who will be disturbed by it, I'd like to focus my review more on cautioning the reader in certain respects.

This book represents an ideology; meaning that it seeks to explain everything in the world in light of a stringent set of dogma - the main one being Natural Selection. To make a somewhat crude analogy, Natural Selection is "God" for Dawkins and Charles Darwin is its prophet.

Ideologies have always been rigorously defended, almost as if the ideology was the lifeblood of the defender. The person is a "Christian" an "Atheist" an "Agnostic" and so on. And this is what gets people into trouble. The identification with the ideology, by default, blinds the person to anything else that might truly serve him. It stops him from asking true questions instead of questions that are merely restatements of what he already believes.

Like all ideologies that catch on and have a lasting effect, Darwinism, too, will eventually fade and pass away. In the interim however, it will certainly have a profound effect upon society and the world in general. Some of those effects will be beneficial and some, I have little doubt, will bring unimagined horrors to mankind in the same way Christianity has.

If anything is consistent in this world, it is the mind. It operates in a congruent fashion. Actions spring from beliefs and are inspired in no other way. Yet the believer, the ideologue and defender of those beliefs, seldom evaluates the darker side because he is too preoccupied with making himself "right" and "good" while at the same time, trying to make everyone who doesn't agree with him as "wrong" and "evil."

Like a true ideologue, Dawkins has in no way presented the darker side of Darwinism. He's convinced it's a "consciousness raiser."

Don't neglect your only life

Would you consider the audio edition of The God Delusion to be better than the print version?

I must say that I'm a Christian atheist. I was raised as a Christian and became an atheist as I became more knowledgeable on history and science. It’s a path people must follow on their own. I don’t think arguing with someone will convince them to drop their religious beliefs. Even though you won’t won the discussion, you might plant a seed that may make people search for the truth themselves.


This book presents great arguments against how much time is wasted on religious practices and how prejudice from religious sources negatively impacts our society. The arguments are elegant and presented with a scientific approach.


On the down side, I don’t appreciate the sarcastic tone against religion, especially noted in the first two chapters. That might prevent people from having an open mind throughout the rest of the book. Also some arguments are sort of incomplete or use religious extremists as the only example.


Anyway, this is a must read if you are on the fence. Being on the fence probably means that you have a feeling that it can’t be true but haven’t exactly written down a list of plausible versus implausible arguments.


Two Suggested audible (even better if listened to before this one):
1. On the Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin, Narrated by Richard Dawkins (ABRIDGED)
2. The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology, by Robert Wright, Narrated by Greg Thornton

Disturbing,,,

This book is disturbing, really disturbing. Without any apology, Richard Dawkins will demonstrate you in 10 hours that there is no God. He will look at almost every facet of the problem and will carefully word his arguments showing impeccable logic. He will go over the intelligent design, morality, the need in a God, the scriptures. He will develop every argument and he will never jump to a conclusion. He will go as far as explaining why we should be intolerant of religious faith!
The problem is that after listening to his book 4 times, I don’t see any flaw in his arguments and I spent nights after nights researching his facts.
I guess I need to come out to my parents as an atheist now…. See what you did Mr. Dawkins!

Very thick material, you really have to pause

What did you love best about The God Delusion?

Richard is far and away one of the smartest people on the planet

Has The God Delusion turned you off from other books in this genre?

No, in fact, it's turned me on to more Richard Dawkins books.

What does Richard Dawkins and Lalla Ward bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

The material is so deep and thick, I don't know if I would have been able to read it as a book. Hearing them speak the words and place emphasis where it needed to be and pause when it needed it was invaluable.

If you could give The God Delusion a new subtitle, what would it be?

Intelligence over fantasy

Liberating

The book confirms ideas I had growing up about god and religion: which is just a thick soup full of superstion!
I find courage to break out from my deeply religious background. IF indeed there is life after death, I will seek out Jesus and this god and DEMAND for explanations; they've got a lot of explaining to do!!!!
By the way Mr. Dawkins, I know how the magic trick of catching live bullets with one's mouth is done :)