Review: "The God Delusion" by R. Dawkins

I would not have bought this book had I not read The Selfish Gene. In other words, Dawkins probably wrote this book because he knew he could surf the wave of his 1976 bestseller to voice some of his opinions, or just plainly cash in on some windfall royalties.

For me, this book preached to the choir and hardly thought me anything new. In fact, I doubt anybody can learn anything fundamentally new from this book. For atheists, it will be at best an eloquently articulated rehash of their (non-)belief. For mild deists and die-hard bigots alike, it will just be derided as the "narrow minded", "intolerant", and "nihilistic" rant of an arrogant academic craving attention from the spotlight of his literary fame.

For Dawkins, religion isn't just the quixotic belief in a mighty and just god, it is instead a horrendous institution of obscurantism and violence that inoculates its members from one generation to the next via the self-replicating memes of bigotry. His prompt dismissal of the idea that religion could be a source of social communion and well-being seems a artificial, be it only for its overly-assertive and unrelenting confident tone.

Towards the middle of the book, Dawkins indulges in painfully pedantic arguments proving the non-existence of god. He formulated page after page a tedious reasoning concluding that god has to be such an extremely complicated being that his existence would be (nearly) impossible. Not only was this argument utterly boring, it was also unconvincing. He could very well have restricted himself to the slew of concise yet withering arguments that point to the non-existence of god instead of getting the reader bogged down in a tiresome probabilistic analysis. (Such arguments, incidentally, can be welled from either the realm of science or that of moral logic.)

To be fair, though this book cannot claim the "must-read" label of The Selfish Gene, Dawkins should be credited for being one of the most prominent scientists to encapsulate his loathing of religion from the often-underestimated perspective of evolutionary biology. Up to now, positivism and secular humanism have often been promoted from closed and hermetic philosophical circles with very little resort to scientific observations. This brings me to the last (and most interesting) chapters of the book where religion is hypothesized to be an archaic by-product of evolutionary forces. For those who were looking at a scientific understanding of the origin of religion, Dawkins gives us a good starting point. (It is incidentally, the only part of the book backed with readable citations, namely a reference to Daniel Dennet's work.)