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If you have doubts about your religion, or indeed your atheism, this is the book for you. In The God Delusion (Bantam Press, £20) Richard Dawkins shows how the Big Bang and evolution provide a much better explanation for our existence than divine intervention. He demolishes the 'proofs' of Thomas Aquinas. He wins Pascal's wager (that it's shrewder to believe God exists, because if he doesn't, it doesn't matter). And as for asking why we are here: "What is the smell of hope? The fact that a question can be phrased in a grammatically correct English sentence doesn't make it meaningful."
So how about the theory that the "irreducible complexity" of the cosmos required intelligent design? The professor elegantly demonstrates how, since God must be more complex than His creation, His existence must therefore be less likely than ours. Moreover, the bottom-up process of Natural Selection dispenses with the need for chance or design. In this context, Dawkins says, religion and its transmission are probably by-products of the intentionality, teleology and faith in elders - not to mention |
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Richard Dawkins is convincing at first, says tim willis, but he’s not consistent
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"invisible friends" - that helped humans survive on the savannah.
So far, so good. Though Dawkins is hardly disinterested, one trusts he has presented his opponents' arguments to their best advantage. But his later chapters, tackling the psychology and morality of religion, undermine that trust. He finds self-evidence where there is none. He dismisses religious morality as relative and random, but not his own. He makes the dubious claim that "most people pay lip service to the same broad liberal consensus of ethical principles" and later misquotes himself when pretending to play Devil's advocate.
It goes on. The great man deplores the damage religious indoctrination does to children then suggests state intervention in families to stamp it out. He laughs at the afterlife, but addresses a soppy passage to his late friend Douglas Adams. He can be as contradictory as the God he despises. But then, who needs God, when we have Richard Dawkins? 
FIRST POSTED OCTOBER 5, 2006
 Last week: Martin Amis's House of Meetings
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