| Date: 04 May 2011, 07:07
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The God Delusion is a 2006 bestselling non-fiction book by British biologist Richard Dawkins, professorial fellow of New College, Oxford, and inaugural holder of the Charles Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford.
In The God Delusion, Dawkins contends that a supernatural creator almost certainly does not exist and that belief in a personal god qualifies as a delusion, which he defines as a persistent false belief held in the face of strong contradictory evidence. He is sympathetic to Robert Pirsig's observation in Lila that "when one person suffers from a delusion it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called religion."
As of November 2007, the English version of The God Delusion had sold over 1.5 million copies and had been translated to 31 other languages. It was ranked #2 on the Amazon.com bestsellers' list in November 2006. In early December 2006, it reached #4 in the New York Times Hardcover Nonfiction Best Seller list after nine weeks on the list. It remained on the list for 51 weeks until 30 September 2007. It has attracted widespread commentary, with several books written in response.
Background
Dawkins has argued against all creationist explanations of life in his previous works on evolution. The theme of The Blind Watchmaker, published in 1986, is that evolution can explain the apparent design in nature. In The God Delusion he focuses directly on a wider range of arguments used for and against belief in the existence of God (or Gods).
Dawkins had long wanted to write a book openly criticising religion, but his publisher had advised against it. By the year 2006, his publisher had warmed to the idea. Dawkins attributes this change of mind to "four years of Bush". By that time, a number of authors, including Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, who together with Dawkins were labelled "The Unholy Trinity" by Robert Weitzel, had already written books openly attacking religion. These books did well on best-seller lists, and have spawned an industry of religious responses. According to the Amazon.co.uk website, the book led to a 50% growth in their sales of books on religion and spirituality (including anti-religious books such as The God Delusion and God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything) and a 120% increase in the sales of the Bible.
Synopsis
The book contains ten chapters. The first few build a case that there is probably no God, while the rest discuss religion and morality. It is dedicated to the memory of Dawkins' late friend Douglas Adams, accompanied by the quote "isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?" (from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy).
Dawkins writes that The God Delusion contains four "consciousness-raising" messages:
1. Atheists can be happy, balanced, moral, and intellectually fulfilled.
2. Natural selection and similar scientific theories are superior to a "God hypothesis" - the illusion of intelligent design - in explaining the living world and the cosmos.
3. Children should not be labelled by their parents' religion. Terms like "Catholic child" or "Muslim child" should make people flinch.
4. Atheists should be proud, not apologetic, because atheism is evidence of a healthy, independent mind.
The God hypothesis
Since there are a number of different theistic ideas relating to the nature of God(s), Dawkins defines the concept of God that he wishes to address early in the book. He coins the term "Einsteinian religion", referring to Einstein's use of "God", as a metaphor for nature or the mysteries of the universe. He makes a distinction between this "Einsteinian religion" and the general theistic idea of God as the creator of the universe who should be worshipped. This becomes an important theme in the book, which he calls the God Hypothesis. He maintains that this idea of God is a valid hypothesis, having effects in the physical universe, and like any other hypothesis can be tested and falsified. Thus, Dawkins rejects the common view that science and religion rule over non-overlapping magisteria.
Dawkins surveys briefly the main philosophical arguments in favour of God's existence. Of the various philosophical proofs that he discusses, he singles out the Argument from design for longer consideration. Dawkins concludes that evolution by natural selection can explain apparent design in nature.
He writes that one of the greatest challenges to the human intellect has been to explain "how the complex, improbable design in the universe arises", and suggests that there are two competing explanations:
1. A theory involving a designer, that is, a complex being to account for the complexity that we see.
2. A theory that explains how, from simple origins and principles, something more complex can emerge.
This is the basic set-up of his argument against the existence of God, the Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit, where he argues that the first attempt is self-refuting, and the second approach is the way forward.
At the end of chapter 4, Why there almost certainly is no God, Dawkins sums up his argument and states, "The temptation [to attribute the appearance of a design to actual design itself] is a false one, because the designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer. The whole problem we started out with was the problem of explaining statistical improbability. It is obviously no solution to postulate something even more improbable."
Dawkins does not claim to disprove God with absolute certainty. Instead, he suggests as a general principle that simpler explanations are preferable (see Occam's razor), and that an omniscient and omnipotent God must be extremely complex. As such, he argues that the theory of a universe without a God is preferable to the theory of a universe with a God.
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