A Rebuke of God and Religion, With Unwanted Extras
Introduction
Dawkins took a thorough approach in researching and writing this book. It does attack God and religion from virtually all possible angles. It is similar to The Selfish Gene, in that a considerable portion of the book is dedicated to refuting and attacking named individuals that Dawkins disagrees with. His attacks are mostly lodged at what he calls “Christian apologists”. Dawkins lodges the criticisms in his trademark humorous and witty way that will infuriate the religious and tickle the non-religious. I found his sarcasm quite entertaining.
Deism and Evolutionary Psychology
I went into this book already firmly believing that anything supernatural, beyond the Deistic belief in some kind of original creator that has since left, is an illogical fairy tale. And Dawkins delivers a book rife with logical arguments that support my existing beliefs. For those of you who are not familiar, Deism was the belief system of most of the USA’s founding fathers, like Jefferson and Franklin. Deism is the deadbeat Dad religion, as a Deist believes a higher power created the universe, set things in motion, and then promptly abandoned the project (and humans) forever. My high school teacher explained Deism by saying that “When a King builds a ship, he doesn’t care about the rats on the ship.”
The most interesting parts of the book were on Evolutionary Psychology and the adaptive benefits humans obtained by believing in deities, divine intervention, and the afterlife. Dawkins makes a fine scientific presentation of why all human cultures develop their own supernatural explanations and beliefs in the afterlife.
Dawkins’ Politics and Personal Beliefs Were the Downfall of This Book
However, Dawkins’ used this book to push his personal, superfluous beliefs of total Atheism, Feminism, and Liberal idealism and this weakened the book immensely.
Dawkins Says You’re an Idiot if You’re Not an Atheist
I went into this book a Deist and the author made no compelling argument for Atheism that changed my mind in the slightest. He keeps repeating “But who created the creator?”, which, to be fair, is a valid question that no one can answer. But, he treats it as conclusive proof of the impossibility of a higher power ever existing in the past, which it is not. No one can prove or disprove whether a higher power originally created the universe and has since been on a cosmic vacation, being humored by our self-destruction and sipping Margaritas. Given the obviously unverifiable nature of the issue, Dawkins’ repeated attempts to argue a higher power COULD NOT EXIST comes across as desperate.
Dawkins is a Proud Feminist
He focuses heavily on the alleged misogyny of religion, which is a subjectively moral, and thus wholly unconvincing, argument. He’s basically saying we shouldn’t believe in God because religions are not historically very nice to women. He even has a woman do the Audible narration WITH HIM, and she always speaks during the alleged horrors that religion has wrought on women. Talk about playing the victim and sympathy card…
This is the weakest part of Dawkins’ arguments and it makes the book much worse than it would otherwise be. The book is called “The God DELUSION”, not “God and Religious People Are Mean to Women”. Religion’s treatment of women is wholly irrelevant to whether God exists or not. This book is about humans believing in something that does not really exist. However, Dawkins has littered his book with moral and emotional appeals against religion, which undermines the validity of his otherwise sound logical arguments.
I find it very peculiar that Dawkins has adopted Feminism instead of advocating for evolution’s clearly visible and adapted gender roles for Homo Sapiens. You would think he would advocate for what evolution has evolved men and women to be, instead of aligning with Feminism, which promotes females unnaturally taking on the evolutionary roles of males. The study of evolution is about the way things are, not how we want them to be. Dawkins knows more than anyone that our Psychology and Biology cannot change during our lifetimes to accommodate the radical propositions that Feminism idealizes.
Focusing so much on religion’s alleged harm to women, and having a woman co-narrate the book for purposes that are all-too-transparent, gives the book a manipulative vibe, like those Sarah McLaughlin PETA commercials with the overly dramatic music designed to extract money from you. There’s plenty of evidence against God’s current existence to present without needing to resort to such low-level tactics.
Dawkins is a Dirty Hippy
Lastly, Dawkins blasts you with more of his personal, non-scientific beliefs in “Kumbaya” Liberalism with a repetitive chorus of “We don’t need religion to be good or happy! Let’s all sit in a circle and hold hands.” Again, whether God and religion is “good” or “bad” is a subjective and moral issue, not a scientific one. Dawkins points to all the murder and horror that has been enacted in the name of God and religion. He argues that, if John Lennon got his way, and there was no God or religion, then the all the murder and horror in the world would go away too. However, this is the same faulty logic that gun control advocates use, when they argue that if the guns were taken away, people would stop murdering each other If there were no guns, people would kill each other with knives or invent other projectiles to kill each other. You can take away a gun, and make the act of killing more difficult and personal, but that doesn’t stop the human desire to kill. Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.
Coming from an expert in evolution, Dawkins’ views are profoundly naive. This book is clear evidence that someone can be highly logical and scientific on one hand, and then be completely illogical and emotional when it comes to politics. Dawkins should know more than anyone that murder and hate MUST exist in modern humans because it was evolutionarily adaptive in our ancestors. If pacifism and docility led to the increased survival and replication of our ancestors, then we would exhibit more of those traits. BUT WE CLEARLY DO NOT.
He invites the reader to believe that all war, and most murder, would be abolished if only God and religion were abolished. Obviously, if there were no God/Allah/Vishnu, people would find other reasons to fly planes into buildings. Do we take away the planes too? When the existence of a benevolent, intervening God is obviously absurd to anyone that opens their eyes, how can Dawkins ignore that the emotional, delusionary human mind will just fabricate some other reason to kill? It’s not like the human mind needs any evidence or logic to believe in things. Removing God and religion will not stop war and violence. Only removing Homo Sapiens from existence could do that.
It must be Dawkins’ constant mingling with the university folk that has HIM so delusional…