Book Bearings
The God Delusion
- 450 pages · about 8 hours
- First published 2006
- 34 editions
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1 About this book
The God Delusion, published in 2006, is the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins's case against religious belief. He treats the existence of God as a hypothesis to be tested like any other and argues that a supernatural creator almost certainly does not exist. The first chapters examine the traditional arguments for God and set out his own; the later ones propose natural explanations for the origins of religion and of morality, argue that people do not need religion to be good, and criticize the influence of religion on society. Dawkins also means the book to raise the confidence of atheists and to encourage them to say openly what they think.
- Philosophy
- Religion and science
- Evolution
- Biological Evolution
- God
- Atheism
- Bible
- War
2 What to expect
A biologist's argument that God almost certainly does not exist and that religion does more harm than good. Dawkins takes on the classic arguments for God, offers evolutionary accounts of religion and morality, and attacks the religious upbringing of children. The writing is clear, witty and combative, a polemic and not a neutral survey, and it has drawn replies from believers and from fellow atheists who find it unfair to theology.
Good for readers who want: arguments for atheism, the debate between science and religion, and a combative polemic.
3 About Richard Dawkins
Bio adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
4 More by Richard Dawkins
5 Similar books
- How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker
- Other Minds by Peter Godfrey-Smith
- The Phenomenon of Man by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
- Physico-theology by William Derham
- Brief Answers to the Big Questions by Stephen Hawking
- The World As I See It by Albert Einstein
- What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell by Erwin Schrödinger
- Mutual Aid by Peter Kropotkin