The God Delusion

An evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins sees religion as a human construct that is the source of much of the evil in the world, closing people's minds to scientific truths, oppressing women, and threatening people with eternal damnation. As "Darwin's rottweiller," he sets out to annihilate faith. His book-length essay is a bestseller. Since he is human, though, his own understanding of the universe, though devilishly complex, must be based on a hypothesis, a hunch, on faith. Dawkins and his wife, the actress Lalla Ward, perform this book as melody and harmony in two voices. For example, Dawkins will set up a quotation from Einstein, and Ward will speak the lines. Since both have fine English voices, the performance would succeed as music even if it weren't an intellectual tour de force. B.H.C. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine

August 21, 2006
The antireligion wars started by Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris will heat up even more with this salvo from celebrated Oxford biologist Dawkins. For a scientist who criticizes religion for its intolerance, Dawkins has written a surprisingly intolerant book, full of scorn for religion and those who believe. But Dawkins, who gave us the selfish gene, anticipates this criticism. He says it's the scientist and humanist in him that makes him hostile to religions—fundamentalist Christianity and Islam come in for the most opprobrium—that close people's minds to scientific truth, oppress women and abuse children psychologically with the notion of eternal damnation. While Dawkins can be witty, even confirmed atheists who agree with his advocacy of science and vigorous rationalism may have trouble stomaching some of the rhetoric: the biblical Yahweh is "psychotic," Aquinas's proofs of God's existence are "fatuous" and religion generally is "nonsense." The most effective chapters are those in which Dawkins calms down, for instance, drawing on evolution to disprove the ideas behind intelligent design. In other chapters, he attempts to construct a scientific scaffolding for atheism, such as using evolution again to rebut the notion that without God there can be no morality. He insists that religion is a divisive and oppressive force, but he is less convincing in arguing that the world would be better and more peaceful without it.