[ book tip by Ann Morgan ] When literary historians look back on the first crop of books to spring up in the twenty-first century, The God Delusion will undoubtedly stand tall among them as one of the most influential works produced at the dawn of the third millennium. A Christmas best seller in the first year it was released, the book rocketed to notoriety and then fame, far eclipsing its author’s earlier efforts, which include The Blind Watchmaker and The Selfish Gene.  

Written with a passion reminiscent of the most terrifying of Adventist preachers, The God Delusion purports to challenge, undermine and ultimately debunk religious faith in general and Christianity in particular. Its author, Richard Dawkins, is not shy about his aim to give courage to all those who feel shackled by half-swallowed religious truth and to hearten atheists to ‘come out’ and stand up for themselves in the face of a society which is warped and hobbled by centuries of religious indoctrination.  

Whether you decide Dawkins succeeds in his mission or not will probably depend on your theological perspective when you pick up the book. Militant atheists (and if you didn’t believe in the existence of such people before, you certainly will after reading The God Delusion) will herald the book as a masterful demolition job on all the mumbo-jumbo keeping mankind in the dark, while fervent theists will indignantly point out the holes in Dawkins’ arguments, the rhetorical tricks, hubris and misdirection used to sweep the reader along, and the occasional factual errors which puncture some of the writer’s more overweening claims (for example, Dawkins’ assertion that the Christian commandment ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself’ actually equates to ‘Love another Jew’ rests on his mistaken assumption that the Samaritans of Jesus’s parable were Jews. They weren’t).  

For those of us in between these two perspectives, the response will probably be more mixed. Certainly enjoyable and compelling, the book has things to add to both the sociological and theological debate. It is also a valuable account of the post 9/11 spiritual scene where, after years of appearing increasingly irrelevant and innocuous, religion has once again proved itself to be an unpredictable and earth-shattering force. Yet Dawkins’ perpetual self-congratulation and his penchant for pulling apart joke opponents and using ridicule rather than reason will grate on all but the most committed of his disciples. It is hard to shake off the feeling that Dawkins is playing rather a lot of dirty tricks and to wonder why he isn't confident enough in his arguments to let them stand on their own.  

For me though, both the fascination and flaw of this book rest on its appropriation of religious language and mores to debunk theology as a whole. Setting himself up as a Messianic figure, Dawkins comes dangerously close to sounding like the bearded wonders he would discredit. Whilst attacking religion for seeming to oppose scientific endeavour and encouraging people to embrace mystery, he tries to shut down theological enquiry on the basis that people should simply be satisfied with the idea that the universe exists because it does.  

The result of this tension is a rich and compelling work, which tells the reader as much about the emotional implications of belief and non-belief as it does about the rational arguments against the existence of God. The full reverberations of it are yet to be felt.  

[ book info ] Dawkins, Richard: The God Delusion. (Book language: English) Black Swan, 2007 (2006). ISBN: 9780552773317.