From Barnes & Noble
Evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins is not an atheist who sits quietly in the pews. The scientist Discover dubbed "Darwin's Rottweiler" refuses to regard religion as mere harmless nonsense; he views it instead as one of humanity's most pernicious creations. In The God Delusion, he attacks arguments for the existence of God; accuses religions of fomenting divisiveness, war, and bigotry and castigates believers in intelligent design.
Jim Holt
What Dawkins brings to this approach is a couple of fresh arguments — no mean achievement, considering how thoroughly these issues have been debated over the centuries — and a great deal of passion. The book fairly crackles with brio.
— The New York Times
Publishers Weekly
The antireligion wars started by Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris will heat up even more with this salvo from celebrated Oxford biologist Dawkins. For a scientist who criticizes religion for its intolerance, Dawkins has written a surprisingly intolerant book, full of scorn for religion and those who believe. But Dawkins, who gave us the selfish gene, anticipates this criticism. He says it's the scientist and humanist in him that makes him hostile to religions fundamentalist Christianity and Islam come in for the most opprobrium that close people's minds to scientific truth, oppress women and abuse children psychologically with the notion of eternal damnation. While Dawkins can be witty, even confirmed atheists who agree with his advocacy of science and vigorous rationalism may have trouble stomaching some of the rhetoric: the biblical Yahweh is "psychotic," Aquinas's proofs of God's existence are "fatuous" and religion generally is "nonsense." The most effective chapters are those in which Dawkins calms down, for instance, drawing on evolution to disprove the ideas behind intelligent design. In other chapters, he attempts to construct a scientific scaffolding for atheism, such as using evolution again to rebut the notion that without God there can be no morality. He insists that religion is a divisive and oppressive force, but he is less convincing in arguing that the world would be better and more peaceful without it. (Oct. 18) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
In this hard-hitting critique of religious belief, Dawkins (Oxford Univ.) explains why the belief in God is both wrong and dangerous. Unlike his past works that only touch on the subject (e.g., The Selfish Gene; The Blind Watchmaker), this book is thorough and pulls no punches. Dawkins starts his "attack" by covering the various definitions of God as well as nearly every classical argument for the existence of God. He then proceeds to build his case based on a Darwinian/scientific perspective of why he believes there is no God, period. He concludes by offering a scientific explanation for religious belief but not before treating religious-based morality to his rapierlike criticisms. While he does acknowledge that many of his criticisms would also apply to political or sociocultural beliefs, he does not take that line of thought any further, which is a shame. Nonetheless, both fans of Dawkins and his many opponents will want to read this book. Recommended for all academic libraries and larger public libraries with an interest in the topic. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 6/15/06.]-Brad S. Matthies, Butler Univ. Lib., Indianapolis Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Dawkins's passionate disavowal of religion and his "I can no other answer make" statement that he is an atheist-and why you should be, too. Dawkins, eminent Oxford scholar, defender of evolution (The Ancestor's Tale, 2004) and spokesman for science (Unweaving the Rainbow, 1998), delivers ten chapters arguing the non-existence of god, along with documentation of the atrocities religions have wrought. This is exceptional reading-even funny at times. (A footnote declaims that in the promise of 72 virgins to Muslim martyrs, "virgins" is a mistranslation of "white raisins of crystal clarity.") By God, Dawkins means a supernatural creator of the universe, the prayer-listener and sin-punisher, and not the vague metaphoric god some invoke to describe the forces that govern the universe. Accordingly, Dawkins focuses heavily on the monotheistic religions with quotations from the Bible and Koran that sanction genocide, rape and the killing of unbelievers. Dawkins is concerned about fundamentalism in America, a phenomenon that stigmatizes atheists and is at odds with the Founding Fathers who ordained the separation of church and state. (Jefferson said, "The Christian God . . . is cruel, vindictive, capricious and unjust.") He worries that we abuse the vulnerability of children (who are primed via natural selection to trust elders) by indoctrinating them in religions they are too young to understand. Indeed, natural selection is Dawkins's strong card to explain why you don't need a god to account for the diversity, complexity and grandeur of the natural world. In other chapters, he uses evolutionary psychology and game theory to account for why we don't need a god to be good. He also conjectures thatreligion may have arisen as a byproduct of the ways our brains have evolved, and he invokes "memeplexes" (pools of memes, the cultural analogues of genes) to account for the spread of religious ideas. You needn't buy the total Dawkins package to glory in his having the guts to lay out the evils religions can do. Bible-thumpers doubtless will declare they've found their Satan incarnate.
From the Publisher
“You needn't buy the total Dawkins package to glory in his having the guts to lay out the evils religions can do.” —-Kirkus Starred Review
