Product Description

The international bestselling broadside that has taken the world by storm

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #37 in Books
• Published on: 2007-05-21
• Binding: Paperback
• 464 pages

Joan Bakewell, Guardian
'A spirited and exhilarating read...Dawkins comes roaring forth in
the full vigour of his powerful arguments...'

Economist
'Everyone should read it. Aethists will love Mr Dawkins's incisive
logic and rapier wit...'

Desmond Morris
'This is a brave and important book.'

Customer Reviews

An Atheist Handbook
There have only been 719 reviews to date, so far so I thought it needed another. The title is available in paperback (which has some comments on criticisms of the hardback edition in a new introduction) and amazon are currently offering it at half price.

Why has this book been so controversial? Well Dawkins isn't a theologian (nor does he need to be, but more on that later) he is an evolutionary biologist and is famous from his books wherein he developed the pioneering gene's eye view of evolution (instead of the level of the individual animal) in books such as 'the selfish gene' and 'the extended phenotype' it seems being a symbol of neo-darwinian theory he found himself the target for the oddest attacks, people who said his field wasn't a field at all but an ungodly contradiction of the biblical story. In his biology books, Dawkins famously tosses in a few asides about how silly religious faith is and how so many of their holiest observances seem to be based on just so much made-up fairytale nonsense.

Finally it seems that being on the defensive against creationists did not suit his nature and he published his first non-science book - 'The God Delusion'. Despite taking the offensive he keeps firm hold of his scientific methodology and establishes through reason and logic how pretty much everything in religion is wrong. How silly the arguments are for God, how we don't need it for ethics, How it doesn't even provide much comfort and so on.

None of Dawkin's arguments are particularly new and groundbreaking. What he achives in this book is the rather less revolutionary though incredibly useful act of bringing all the arguments together. This is why I would call it an atheist's handbook. You can neatly look up an argument to trounce a theist and then follow it up with his excellent bibliography. Some of the criticism based on the hardback was due to the fact that Dawkins had no religious training, and he dispenses with this rather juvenile complaint in the introduction to the paperback.

If you're an atheist, you'll love it, if you're someone who just 'doesn't believe in god much' then it might expand your mind and you will probably put it down as an atheist. If you're religious? It will ask you hard questions which I hope anyone reading this will have the courage to do honestly to make them think about what they choose to accept as true.

So far, this is the most important book of the 21st century.

Unblinkered and unblinking
How ironic that a book on religion/philosophy/science should be a runaway best-seller (in the UK of all places!) and that the man who wrote it should be 'Author of the Year 2007'. And how revealing that there are now 719 reviews, so many of which are thinly disguised statements of faith - or lack of it.

At times, Dawkins is a pithy and intrepid advocate of a godless universe. 'Most of us are atheists when it comes to 99.9% of the gods who have ever been worshipped. I just go one God further,' he says (my paraphrase - can't find the page). At other times, however, his attempts to use stats and science to persuade us that God probably doesn't exist are, to my mind, less impressive. There are just too many unknowns. But at least Dawkins admits science's limitations when he says: 'our imaginations are not yet tooled-up to penetrate the neighbourhood of the quantum.' We are, he suggests, creatures of Middle Earth, evolved and adapted to understand things of medium size moving at medium speeds, but pretty clueless about things sub-atomic or inter-galactic.

For me, the book's real strength is not its religion-bashing, or its refutation of scholastics like Aquinas. Dawkins is eloquent and persuasive in arguing that even if we are here by cosmic accident rather than divine design, the miracle of life is just as worthy of celebration and reverence. The last section of the concluding chapter, headed The Mother of all Burkas, is one of the finest pieces of science writing I've read. Succinct, poetic and moving in equal measure, it is a hope that humanity will eventually widen the slit of perception and understanding in its collective, metaphorical burka (through technological advance and/or continuing evolution) so as to experience a deeper and even more enriching reality - while acknowledging that this 'reality' is always a construct: a human one, as opposed to a bat's or a mole's.

This is a book that will never be prescribed on any school curriculum - it is too controversial for that. But is it an act of cowardice or enlightenment that this should be so? Despite the tone he occasionally adopts, Dawkins, like most readers, is more interested in finding answers to the ultimate questions than in scoring cheap points or parroting received wisdom. His is a leading voice in what is probably the most important debate of all.

A classic tin soldier polemic
Dawkins eloquently and vindictively triumphs over theism. A victory made possible by taking all non-atheist worldviews as one large target, assuming science as the sole property of the atheist worldview and by attributing extremist acts worldwide to The religious worldview. In this way all theists (including 50 Nobel Lauerates) are lined up shoulder to shoulder with suicide bombers and tarred with the same `earth-bound, unthinking , intellectually dishonest' brush.
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By relying on his oppositions reluctance to likewise lump all atheists in with Stalin, Mao Ze Dong and Pol Pot, and by romantically presenting atheists as a minority under oppression, his case pacts a strong emotional impact. Dawkins `moral prescriptions' approach to the biblical `narrative description' also fuels his outrage.
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We are left powerfully motivated to get involved in preventing the widespread child abuse committed by blind and unthinking parents who stamp their `facile' theism on their young. (I suppose in America the State has outlawed science that suggests intelligent design as a possibility but surely we could do more? And anyway the ID argument suggestion that there could be a god proves it's not real science doesn't it? )
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I personally grew up as an atheist, a worldview I couldn't possibly have picked up from my parents (that would be child abuse). Unlike all those other people, athiests are the only parents who don't communicate any worldview whatsoever to thier children. Because only atheists are evidence based thinkers. Right?
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Dawkins book is essentially a rejection of pluralism and will be welcomed as a good counter-weight to the current extremist assault on the west. I can't help noticing it wasn't St Paul's Cathedral Al Qaeda attacked but the Twin Towers. Perhaps Dawkins book will become the materialists holy book as we continue to impose our goods, government and un-biased worldview on the middle east.