| The God Delusion |
| 1 | Also by Richard Dawkins The Selfish Gene The Extended Phenotype The Blind Watchmaker River Out of Eden Climbing Mount Improbable Unweaving the Rainbow A Devil's Chaplain The Ancestor's Tale THE GOD DELUSION Richard Dawkins Published 2006 by Bantam Press a division of Transworld Publishers Copyright Richard Dawkins 2006 In Memoriam Douglas Adams (1952-2001) 'Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?' Contents Preface Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 A deeply religious non-believer 9 Deserved respect 11 Undeserved respect 20 The God Hypothesis 29 Polytheism 32 Monotheism 37 Secularism, the Founding Fathers and the religion of America 38 The poverty of agnosticism 46 NOMA 54 The Great Prayer Experiment 61 The Neville Chamberlain school of evolutionists 66 Little green men 69 Arguments for God's existence 75 Thomas Aquinas' 'proofs' 77 The ontological argument and other a priori arguments 80 The argument from beauty 86 The argument from personal 'experience' 87 The argument from scripture 92 The argument from admired religious scientists 97 Pascal's Wager 103 Bayesian arguments 105 Chapter 4 Why there almost certainly is no God 111 The Ultimate Boeing 747 113 Natural selection as a consciousness-raiser 114 Irreducible complexity 119 The worship of gaps 125 The anthropic principle: planetary version 134 The anthropic principle: cosmological version 141 An interlude at Cambridge 151 Chapter 5 The roots of religion 161 The Darwinian imperative 163 Direct advantages of religion 166 Group selection 169 Religion as a by-product of something else 172 Psychologically primed for religion 179 Tread softly, because you tread on my memes 191 Cargo cults 202 Chapter 6 The roots of morality: why are we good? |
| 2 | 209 Does our moral sense have a Darwinian origin? 214 A case study in the roots of morality 222 If there is no God, why be good? 226 Chapter 7 The 'Good' Book and the changing moral Zeitgeist 235 The Old Testament 237 Is the New Testament any better? 250 Love thy neighbour 254 The moral Zeitgeist 262 What about Hitler and Stalin? Weren't they atheists? 272 Chapter 8 What's wrong with religion? Why be so hostile? |
| 3 | 279 Fundamentalism and the subversion of science 282 The dark side of absolutism 286 Faith and homosexuality 289 Faith and the sanctity of human life 291 The Great Beethoven Fallacy 298 How 'moderation' in faith fosters fanaticism 301 Chapter 9 Childhood, abuse and the escape from religion 309 Physical and mental abuse 315 In defence of children 325 An educational scandal 331 Consciousness-raising again 337 Religious education as a part of literary culture 340 Chapter 10 A much needed gap? |
| 4 | 345 Binker 347 Consolation 352 Inspiration 360 The mother of all burkas 362 Appendix: a partial list of friendly addresses, for individuals needing support in escaping from religion 375 Books cited or recommended 380 Notes 388 Index 400 Preface As a child, my wife hated her school and wished she could leave. Years later, when she was in her twenties, she disclosed this unhappy fact to her parents, and her mother was aghast: 'But darling, why didn't you come to us and tell us?' Lalla's reply is my text for today: 'But I didn't know I could.' I didn't know I could. |
| 5 | I suspect - well, I am sure - that there are lots of people out there who have been brought up in some religion or other, are unhappy in it, don't believe it, or are worried about the evils that are done in its name; people who feel vague yearnings to leave their parents' religion and wish they could, but just don't realize that leaving is an option. If you are one of them, this book is for you. It is intended to raise consciousness - raise consciousness to the fact that to be an atheist is a realistic aspiration, and a brave and splendid one. |
| 6 | You can be an atheist who is happy, balanced, moral, and intellectually fulfilled. That is the first of my consciousness-raising messages. I also want to raise consciousness in three other ways, which I'll come on to. In January 2006 I presented a two-part television documentary on British television (Channel Four) called Root of All Evil? From the start, I didn't like the title. Religion is not the root of all evil, for no one thing is the root of all anything. |
| 7 | But I was delighted with the advertisement that Channel Four put in the national newspapers. It was a picture of the Manhattan skyline with the caption 'Imagine a world without religion.' What was the connection? The twin towers of the World Trade Center were conspicuously present. Imagine, with John Lennon, a world with no religion. Imagine no suicide bombers, no 911, no 77, no Crusades, no witch-hunts, no Gunpowder Plot, no Indian partition, no IsraeliPalestinian wars, no SerbCroatMuslim massacres, no persecution of Jews as 'Christ-killers', no Northern Ireland 'troubles', no 'honour killings', no shiny-suited bouffant-haired televangelists fleecing gullible people of their money ('God wants you to give till it hurts'). |
| 8 | Imagine no Taliban to blow up ancient statues, no public beheadings of blasphemers, no flogging of female skin for the crime of showing an inch of it. Incidentally, my colleague Desmond Morris informs me that John Lennon's magnificent song is sometimes performed in America with the phrase 'and no religion too' expurgated. One version even has the effrontery to change it to 'and one religion too'. Perhaps you feel that agnosticism is a reasonable position, but that atheism is just as dogmatic as religious belief? |
| 9 | If so, I hope Chapter 2 will change your mind, by persuading you that 'the God Hypothesis' is a scientific hypothesis about the universe, which should be analysed as sceptically as any other. Perhaps you have been taught that philosophers and theologians have put forward good reasons to believe in God. If you think that, you might enjoy Chapter 3 on 'Arguments for God's existence' - the arguments turn out to be spectacularly weak. |
| 10 | Maybe you think it is obvious that God must exist, for how else could the world have come into being? How else could there be life, in all its rich diversity, with every species looking uncannily as though it had been 'designed'? If your thoughts run along those lines, I hope you will gain enlightenment from Chapter 4 on 'Why there almost certainly is no God'. Far from pointing to a designer, the illusion of design in the living world is explained with far greater economy and with devastating elegance by Darwinian natural selection. |
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