Before I discuss this book, I have to say that I am an atheist. There is a minute amount of agnosticism in me – I cannot be sure that there is no god – but I have encountered no reason to believe in one. My review of this book is strongly coloured by this view, as is every other review you will find on the Internet, positive or negative.
Despite (or maybe because of) my atheism, I find the question of religion very interesting. Why does religion exist? Why do other people believe? How is it possible to actually convert to a different religion – how can you decide to believe?
So I approached this book with curiosity and hoped for an intelligent discussion. I didn’t expect him to prove the non-existence of God (as you can’t really prove a negative) but hoped that he would presented a systematic and coherent overview of the arguments for and against. I was sorely disappointed. It’s not just a bad book, it is an atrocious book – because it works against its own stated goal of convincing people to leave religion. It really is preaching to the choir – I find it very hard to believe that anyone would come round to his point of view because of this book.
The God Delusion has two massive problems: its content and its voice. The book is a disorganised diatribe.
The content is difficult to summarise because it is somewhat unfocused. Dawkins attacks religion from every angle – why arguments for God’s existence are invalid, why we don’t need religion anyway, why religion is bad, etc. He might have done a better job if he had limited himself to fewer themes.
But that’s far from being the main problem with the content. A larger issue is Dawkins’s reliance of cheap rhetoric instead of reasoning. He much prefers anecdotes (“this religious person did this bad thing – isn’t religion bad?”) to actual arguments. He has the bad habit of appealing to randomly-chosen “authorities” such as Thomas Jefferson and Albert Einstein – but only on his side of the debate. I’m convinced that it would be possible to dig up equally famous Americans who are or were strongly Christian, but of course he doesn’t do that.
Where he does attempt to engage in actual argument, I get the impression that he doesn’t know much about religion or philosophy. He just has a loud voice and thinks that qualifies him to write a book about/against religion. I agree that one doesn’t need to be a theologist in order to have an opinion about religion – but in order to refute theologists’ arguments, one needs to know and understand those arguments. But when he sets out to debunk arguments for God’s existence, he makes sure to include and subsequently destroy the weakest ones. Attacking straw men, indeed.
His arguments and anecdotes are very focused on Christianity and to a lesser extent Islam. His chapter about “The ‘good’ book and the changing moral zeitgeist” is an egregious example, where he gleefully points out what a horrible source of moral guidance the Bible is. That may be an argument against Christianity but it is not an argument for either the non-existence of the god or the evils of religion in general.
The chapter titled “What’s wrong with religion” (which mostly talks about the violence that Christianity and Islam frequently lead to) makes the same mistake of focusing on specific religions rather than religion in general. The more valid point (faith as the antithesis of reason, “faith is an evil precisely because it requires no justification and brooks no argument”) gets very little attention. And of course all the good things that people have done in the name of their religions are ignored completely.
The content is also somewhat confusingly organised. I would have liked a clearer separation between discussing the likelihood of a religion (any one) having a point (i.e. God’s existence) and the desirability of having a religion. It is a book against religion from all angles – religion is false, religion is bad, religion leads to bad things. This is too broad an agenda, and these different threads are not kept apart sufficiently clearly.
The central thesis (if there is one) is further weakened by Dawkins’s frequent forays off-topic, whenever something particularly upsetting catches his eye. In a section supposedly discussing polytheism vs. monotheism, he suddenly rants about the “obscene… sums of tax-free money sucked in by churches”. There are several rants about other signs of how religion permeates American society, and how atheists are discriminated against.
Yet while the content might not convince, it does no actual harm to the atheist argument. But his tone of voice does. The whole message is delivered in an almost repulsive tone: obnoxious, raving, condescending. (The title is a good indicator of the general tone.) His introductory statement is “I shall not go out of my way to offend, but nor shall I don kid gloves to handle religion any more gently than I would handle anything else”. Either he’s lying, or I’m glad I’ve never met him in person; based on this he must be the kind of man who throws mud on passers-by and flings insults at people he meets in the street, just because he can.
Whenever he has a choice between two words, he chooses the more offensive one. Introducing Jesus as an insipid milksop is not a good start if you want a Christian reader to actually listen seriously. And instead of refuting arguments he doesn’t agree with, he dismisses them as ludicrous, infantile, vacuous, silly, and so on. (He must have sat there with a thesaurus at hand.) If this is what an atheist sounds like, who would want to be one?
He does better in his more scientifically-oriented chapter on various possible “roots of religion”, where he discusses different darwinist hypotheses for how religion may have arisen. I would think it is because this is an area where he actually has some expertise.
There are only two points of his that I really cannot argue with. One is his opposition to giving religion special status in society, and protecting religious claims from all criticism. As he quotes Douglas Adams:
Religion… has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever. What it means is, ‘Here is an idea or a notion that you’re not allowed to say anything bad about; you’re just not. Why not? – because you’re not!’
And Dawkins himself continues:
If the advocates of apartheid had their wits about them they would claim – for all I know truthfully – that allowing mixed races is against their religion. A good part of the opposition would respectfully tiptoe away. And it is no use claiming that this is an unfair parallel because apartheid has no rational justification. The whole point of religious faith, its strength and chief glory, is that it does not depend on rational justification. The rest of us are expected to defend our prejudices. But ask a religious person to justify their faith and you infringe ‘religious liberty’.
The other (related) point is religious upbringing and education. He approaches the topic with his usual mixture of anecdote and passionate shouting, rather than rational argument, but I have to agree with his basic points. I think that schools should not be allowed to promote any religion, and I wish it was somehow possible to make sure that parents do not stuff their children’s heads full of superstition.
Dawkins:
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.
At Christmas-time one year my daily newspaper, the Independent, was looking for a seasonal image and found a heart-warmingly ecumenical one at a school nativity play. The Three Wise Men were played by, as the caption glowingly said, Shadbreet (a Sikh), Musharraf (a Muslim) and Adele (a Christian), all aged four. Charming? Heart-warming? No, it is not, it is neither; it is grotesque. […] Imagine an identical photograph, with the caption changed as follows: “Shadbreet (a Keynesian), Musharaff (a Monetarist) and Adele (a Marxist), all aged four.” Wouldn’t this be a candidate for irate letters of protest? It certainly should be.
Conclusion:
I am sorry I supported Dawkins by buying his book and wish I could have my money back.
If this was not enough, here are some other thorough reviews you may want to read:
Daylight Atheism attempts to summarise the book;
San Francisco Chronicle finds it fine and significant;
The Guardian cheers him on;
London Review of Books revels in pointing out Dawkins’s weakest arguments;
Prospect labels him “incurious, dogmatic, rambling and self-contradictory”.
Amazon UK, Amazon US.
