I read The God Delusion for the sake of a discussion on this very board. I found it terrible. Dawkins may be slightly better read and more polite than outright hatemongers like Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, but that’s like saying that someone is more competent than Dubya–in other words, not very impressive. It’s hard to decide where to begin on explaining the flaws in that book, but the most obvious one is simply how much of what he says is outright false. He repeats as many urban legends as Ann Landers. A quote by James Watt claiming that we can ignore the environment because the Rapture will be coming soon is in there. Two minutes of research would show that the quote is bogus. A story about a British mob who attacked a pediatrician after confusing the word with “pedophile” is in there. That’s another urban legend. One might, of course, insist that those are minor issues, but Dawkins is just as wrong on the major issues. In wrapping up his main case that God doesn’t exist because it’s extremely improbable that God would come into being, he insists that certain physicists including Polkinghorne and Davies have never addressed this issue. Actually both have addressed this issue at great length and so have thousands of the other people, all of whom Dawkins deals with by ignoring them. Other errors I’ve started threads on. There’s the section where he disproves the arguments of Thomas Aquinas by making up quotes of his own invention that Aquinas never wrote and then shooting them down. There’s his bizarre claim about Martin Luther King’s nonviolence tactics being based on Gandhi’s teachings rather than those of Jesus, which King’s words flatly contradict. There are the Bible passages that Dawkins rips out of context in order to flatly misrepresent. There’s his utterly false claim that the four gospels were selected “arbitrarily” from among many. And there’s… well, suffice to say, there’s a lot more falsehoods, so many that multiple books have been written exposing them. Of course, whenever I point these out in GD, someone insists that me might not be lying, and that it might be honest mistakes on his part. If so, then his research standards are appalling low, but the point that the book is completely unreliable remains the same.
But even if I could ignore the majority of the book composed of glaring falsehoods, I would still find it a remarkably bad piece of rhetoric. The claims that Dawkins makes, particularly regarding evolution, are obviously completely bosh. Chapter 5 is chock full of pseudoscience, from the oft-debunked claim that temporal lobe epilepsy causes religion experiences to group selection–the later he admits can’t be supported. In fact, the whole chapter has remarkably few references, especially when considering the scope of the claims he’s making. His central hypothesis that “natural selection builds child brains with a tendency to believe whatever their parents and elders tell them” gets a grand total of zero citation, for the obvious reason that it’s not true. (I’m a teacher, so I know.) While he acknowledges that there’s no certainty behind that hypothesis, I’m basically asked to accept that religion is adaptative on Dawkins’ say-so, which would be problematic even if he were more truthful.
And then there’s the infamous chapter 9, which I hesitate to mention since even Dawkins defenders generally won’t defend it. He says that religious parents should not be allowed to raise their own children. (He also chastises the Catholic Church for once removing a child from his parents. Blatant hypocrisy seems to come standard here.) That might be the one part of the book is useful. I had known previously that some atheist groups often wanted to impose their will on minor issues, such as having a cross in a park, but without reading The God Delusion I would never have known that world’s leading atheist has such total hatred for the most fundamental human rights.
Other then that, the book’s main effect on me was to further convince me that Dawkins’ beliefs are untenable, and thus it did a great deal to help build my faith in the correctness of Christian doctrine.
