E-book
The God delusion [electronic resource] / Richard Dawkins.
Record details
- ISBN: 9780547348667 (electronic bk.)
- ISBN: 0547348665 (electronic bk.)
- Physical Description: 1 online resource (463 p.)
- Edition: 1st Mariner Books ed.
- Publisher: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Co., 2008.
Content descriptions
| Bibliography, etc. Note: | Includes bibliographical references (p. [427]-448) and index. |
| Formatted Contents Note: | A deeply religious nonbeliever. Deserved respect ; Undeserved respect -- The God hypothesis. Polytheism ; Monotheism ; Secularism, the Founding Fathers and the religion of America ; The poverty of agnosticism ; NOMA ; The great prayer experiment ; The Neville Chamberlain school of evolutionists ; Little green men -- Arguments for God's existence. Thomas Aquinas's "proofs" ; The ontological argument and other a priori arguments ; The argument from beauty ; The argument from personal "experience" ; The argument from Scripture ; The argument from admired religious scientists ; Pascal's wager ; Bayesian arguments -- Why there almost certainly is no God. The ultimate Boeing 747 ; Natural selection as a consciousness-raiser ; Irreducible complexity ; The worship of gaps ; The anthropic principle : planetary version ; The anthropic principle : cosmological version ; An interlude at Cambridge -- The roots of religion. The Darwinian imperative ; Direct advantages of religion ; Group selection ; Religion as a by-product of something else ; Psychologically primed for religion ; Tread softly, because you tread on my memes ; Cargo cults -- The roots of morality : why are we good? Does our moral sense have a Darwinian origin? ; A case study in the roots of morality ; If there is no God, why be good? -- The "good" book and the changing moral Zeitgeist. The Old Testament ; Is the New Testament any better? ; Love thy neighbour ; The moral Zeitgeist ; What about Hitler and Stalin? : weren't they atheists? -- What's wrong with religion? : why be so hostile? Fundamentalism and the subversion of science ; The dark side of absolutism ; Faith and homosexuality ; Faith and the sanctity of human life ; The great Beethoven fallacy ; How "moderation" in faith fosters fanaticism -- Childhood, abuse and the escape from religion. Physical and mental abuse ; In defence of children ; An educational scandal ; Consciousness-raising again ; Religious education as a part of literary culture -- A much needed gap? Binker ; Consolation ; Inspiration ; The mother of all burkas. |
| Source of Description Note: | Description based on print version record. |
Search for related items by subject
| Subject: | Atheism. Religion > Controversial literature. Ateísmo. Religión > Literatura de controversial. |
| Genre: | Electronic books. |
Other Formats and Editions
Electronic resources
- Choice Reviews : Choice Reviews 2007 May
Dawkins (Oxford), the prolific polemicist who is also a brilliant scientist and erudite writer, has launched another attack on the sacred center of religions: God. He declares God a delusion and devotes 350-plus pages to elaborate on this theme. The book is replete with the absurdities of many self-proclaimed religionists, and disposes of scientific proofs for God with ease. It dismantles the framework in which God becomes plausible, and illustrates how religions have led to war, bigotry, and child abuse. Virulent attacks, whether on belief systems or on governments, whether with words or bloody deeds, arise from moral outrage or the victim complex. They are based on the conviction that their targets represent all that is wrong/evil in the world, and are spurred by the hope that enemies will be eliminated by such words or acts. Their authors are ignorant of, or choose to ignore, anything positive that their enemies might have done. Though it is doubtful that these authors will succeed in completely decimating the adversary, their attacks can have reformatory effects on the enemy and on their own group. For these reasons, more than for any originality in the thesis, this book is a worthy addition to humanity's cultural history. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-level undergraduates through faculty/researchers. Copyright 2007 American Library Association. - Kirkus Reviews : Kirkus Reviews 2006 August #1
Dawkins's passionate disavowal of religion and his "I can no other answer make" statement that he is an atheist-and why you should be, too.Dawkins, eminent Oxford scholar, defender of evolution (The Ancestor's Tale, 2004) and spokesman for science (Unweaving the Rainbow, 1998), delivers ten chapters arguing the non-existence of god, along with documentation of the atrocities religions have wrought. This is exceptional reading-even funny at times. (A footnote declaims that in the promise of 72 virgins to Muslim martyrs, "virgins" is a mistranslation of "white raisins of crystal clarity.") By God, Dawkins means a supernatural creator of the universe, the prayer-listener and sin-punisher, and not the vague metaphoric god some invoke to describe the forces that govern the universe. Accordingly, Dawkins focuses heavily on the monotheistic religions with quotations from the Bible and Koran that sanction genocide, rape and the killing of unbelievers. Dawkins is concerned about fundamentalism in America, a phenomenon that stigmatizes atheists and is at odds with the Founding Fathers who ordained the separation of church and state. (Jefferson said, "The Christian God . . . is cruel, vindictive, capricious and unjust.") He worries that we abuse the vulnerability of children (who are primed via natural selection to trust elders) by indoctrinating them in religions they are too young to understand. Indeed, natural selection is Dawkins's strong card to explain why you don't need a god to account for the diversity, complexity and grandeur of the natural world. In other chapters, he uses evolutionary psychology and game theory to account for why we don't need a god to be good. He also conjectures that religion may have arisen as a byproduct of the ways our brains have evolved, and he invokes "memeplexes" (pools of memes, the cultural analogues of genes) to account for the spread of religious ideas.You needn't buy the total Dawkins package to glory in his having the guts to lay out the evils religions can do. Bible-thumpers doubtless will declare they've found their Satan incarnate. Copyright Kirkus 2006 Kirkus/BPI Communications.All rights reserved. - Library Journal Reviews : LJ Reviews 2006 June #2
A famed Oxford scientist on the suspect logic and dangerous consequences of belief in a Supreme Being. With a nine-city tour. Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information. - Library Journal Reviews : LJ Reviews 2006 November #2
In this hard-hitting critique of religious belief, Dawkins (Oxford Univ.) explains why the belief in God is both wrong and dangerous. Unlike his past works that only touch on the subject (e.g., The Selfish Gene ; The Blind Watchmaker ), this book is thorough and pulls no punches. Dawkins starts his "attack" by covering the various definitions of God as well as nearly every classical argument for the existence of God. He then proceeds to build his case based on a Darwinian/scientific perspective of why he believes there is no God, period. He concludes by offering a scientific explanation for religious belief but not before treating religious-based morality to his rapierlike criticisms. While he does acknowledge that many of his criticisms would also apply to political or sociocultural beliefs, he does not take that line of thought any further, which is a shame. Nonetheless, both fans of Dawkins and his many opponents will want to read this book. Recommended for all academic libraries and larger public libraries with an interest in the topic. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 6/15/06.]â Brad S. Matthies, Butler Univ. Lib., Indianapolis
[Page 75]. Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information. - Publishers Weekly Reviews : PW Reviews 2006 August #3
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 religionsâfundamentalist Christianity and Islam come in for the most opprobriumâthat 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. (Oct. 18)
[Page 62]. Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
