The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins

This is a commercially and critically successful book by an English biologist Richard Dawkins. He begins The God Delusion by making it clear that the God he talks about is the Abrahamic concept of a personal god who is susceptible to worship. He considers the existence of such an entity to be a scientific question because a universe with such a god would be significantly different from a universe without one, and he says that the difference would be empirically discernible. Therefore, Dawkins concludes, the same kind of reasoning can be applied to the God hypothesis as to any other scientific question.

This means that the book was not really for me. I am not a staunch monotheist. Many of the Abrahamic religions support the claim of creationism in some or the other way and tend to unquestionably follow the doctrine which their respective religion presents. Richard Dawkins attacks those notions front, right and centre. He tries to put the concept or the entity God to all the scientific evaluation possible and tries to prove how the idea is absurd or just improbable. As a scientist, his approach is highly methodical but largely unhelpful. He tries to apply the same tests and empirical methods to something which is claimed to be out of scope for the physical laws. This is interesting. I remember the argument where two babies are talking in the womb. One says to other about life after birth and the other refuses. I do not want to go into that debate, it is a waste of time and energy. I agree that what Richard tries to put out there is needed for those who are blind believers. Even if the book is successful in sowing doubt in the staunch believers, I guess he would call it a win.

I already mentioned the book is not for me. I am more interested in the spiritual aspects of any religion and they are vague and open to interpretation. Dawkins steers clear from that aspect of the religion which is disappointing. From the standpoint of science, he does not have the right tools and framework to approach this aspect of religion. However, he caters another important aspect which is morality. Many supporters of religion talk about morality as one of the biggest gifts of religion. He takes multiple chapters to systematically break down the correlation and separates religion from morality.

“Do you really mean to tell me the only reason you try to be good is to gain God’s approval and reward, or to avoid his disapproval and punishment? That’s not morality, that’s just sucking up, apple-polishing, looking over your shoulder at the great surveillance camera in the sky, or the still small wiretap inside your head, monitoring your every move, even your every base though.”

Other than morality, it also has a fantastic observation about children. He detests that children are automatically labelled with the religion of their parents. He is appalled by that. I completely agree with his viewpoint. Like a political view or the decision of who to marry, a choice of religion or atheism should be left to the child entirely. He quips that given such a choice a large population would rather be an atheist than identifying themselves with any religion.

“A child is not a Christian child, not a Muslim child, but a child of Christian parents or a child of Muslim parents. This latter nomenclature, by the way, would be an excellent piece of consciousness-raising for the children themselves. A child who is told she is a ‘child of Muslim parents’ will immediately realize that religion is something for her to choose -or reject- when she becomes old enough to do so.”

He spends a lot of time on bashing western religions, Christianity in particular. As an Englishman, his wit is often through sarcasm which I enjoyed pretty much. However, at times his frustration at the perceived stupidity of the masses is apparent as daylight. From the writing perspective, the book appeared simple and easy to follow. I would recommend it to staunch followers of any religions but for those who are already sceptics or casual about their faith, you can give this one a miss.