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London: Black Swan, 2007
420 pp., $9.99 (paperback).
The God Delusion is a provocative title; billions of people the world over believe in the existence of a god or gods. But Richard Dawkins insists that his book’s title isn’t hyperbolic. The Penguin English Dictionary’s definition of delusion is: “a false belief or impression,” and he dedicates the first third of the book to showing why it is delusional to believe in God (27).
Throughout the centuries, religious thinkers have put forth many arguments for the existence of God, and Dawkins devotes a full chapter to thoroughly refuting the most influential of these arguments. For example, he points out that the first three of Thomas Aquinas’s five “proofs” involve an infinite regress. Consider his second proof, which Dawkins summarizes as “Nothing is caused by itself. Every effect has a prior cause, and again we are pushed back into regress. This has to be terminated by a first cause, which we call God” (100–101). However, Dawkins points out that this argument relies on the assumption that God is immune to regress: We supposedly can’t ask who created God, how that entity came to be, and so on.
Dawkins’s argument against the existence of a god rests on two main premises: First, natural selection thoroughly explains how intelligent life came to be; and, second, a supernatural, intelligent creator is “statistically improbable” (183). Despite how central it is to his argument, Dawkins doesn’t spend much time defending the theory of evolution (though he did write a separate book on the subject, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution). In The God Delusion, he argues that our knowledge of natural selection indicates it is more probable that intelligent life developed from inanimate matter than via an intelligent creator. A world created by design, Dawkins writes, “is ultimately not cumulative.” It implies a jump from inanimate matter to advanced life in one fell swoop, “and it therefore raises more questions than it answers” (169). Unfortunately, Dawkins does not point out that there is no evidence for God from which to derive statistical probabilities, and his argument erroneously gives weight to arbitrary claims.
One of the book’s greatest strengths is its focus on the fundamental clash at...