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)

Understanding our world

Of the many hundreds of books, I have read The God Delusion is in the top 10 most important for helping me to understand the world in which we live the way we have developed this people and how we can make improvements to make life better for all of us. My hope is that more and more people will read this book and that from it, a greater understanding will merge between all people.

very solid arguments, lightly funny, terrific narration

This book brought me back to reason when I was trying to make myself believe in god even though I knew it was all a load of rubbish. I wanted so badly to make friends with some religious people that I had to keep up the charade of believing. I thought they were somehow better off because they were able to believe while I felt like I was faking it. It was nice to hear someone explain soundly the merits of listening to the reasonable voice.

I was a bit sceptical of the book at first because it was so popular. I assumed it would just be a bunch of "atheist rage" like the sort of thing I felt when I first freed myself from religion as a teenager. The text is written in a gentlemanly tone that is touched with light humour and appreciation for some of the cultural aspects that religion has introduced while advocating a very strong stance against religion. There are plenty of religious fanatics I hope would read this book, but they either don't read books or are either too busy reading scripture. That is really too bad, as I do think it could save them a great deal of time, energy, and money. I spent plenty of time reading and listening to the bible and came to the decision that it's completely human-spun nonsense. I wish those preaching at me would read this classically atheist text.

About half of the book is narrated by Dawkins himself in his old-fashioned, plummy RP accent. Hard to find a voice like that nowadays-- it's crystal clear and pleasant to the ears. Ward also does a good job on her parts. It took a while to get used to the back and forth, but it worked.

Dangerous Religion

If you've read much Dawkins, (The Blind Watchmaker, The Selfish Gene, Climbing Mount Improbable, and others) it will come as no surprise to you that he is no fan of religion. What is new in The God Delusion is that the evolutionary biologist goes beyond rational disagreement with those who believe, and argues that religion is dangerous and should be opposed on nearly every front. He recognizes that religion has been an important force in art and literature, but gives it credit for little else in the realm of good.

Dawkins makes no distinction between radical evangelical Christianity, the Taliban and Jihadist Muslims. The worldview of each is equally intolerant of any other belief, and so ultimately equally dangerous.

Dawkins spends about half the book examining historical and philosophical arguments for the existence of God. In doing so, he takes apart the reasoning of many men, noble and ignoble, most of whom are dead. In a historical review such of this, arguing with the dead is unavoidable. Dawkins spends a bit too much time arguing with the more recently dead Stephen Jay Gould, a fellow evolutionary biologist and sometimes nemesis, than is strictly necessary.
One thing that particularly rankles Dawkins is the concept of children being born into a religion. They grow up, typically, thinking that their parents' religion is the one true faith. How lucky for them. Dawkins seethes at calling a four-year-old a Catholic or Muslim child. We do not call them a Democrat or a Republican based on their parents' convictions. They are allowed to make that choice for themselves when they mature. Religion should be a matter of choice, not indoctrination, according to Dawkins. Of all his contentions in this particularly contentious book, this may be the least likely to gain traction.

Because religion in its multitude of forms is so widely practiced, Dawkins assertions will seem radical. They will not, however, seem irrational.

Wow, I can come out of the closet!

This book was a life-changing experience for me. I always knew I was not a believer, but I never could articulate what I was. I owe a debt of gratitude to Richard Dawkins for his rational, elegant, and passionate dissection of the intellectual fraud we call revealed religion. You could say that Dawkins gave me the courage to come out of the closet and put my HL Mencken quotes up on the wall for all to see.

Perhaps the best thing about this book is the moral outrage it no doubt causes among believers, so many of whom probably haven't read (listened) to it.

Once I started listening to this book, I could not stop until the last word was spoken. This is the only audiobook I've listened to twice.

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."