I picked this book up as an inflight read, completely unfamiliar with the name Richard Dawkins but intrigued by the title. I was not disappointed. The whole book is full of understated humor, particularly when it demonstrates the absurdity of belief in god. And I learned a lot from it; this book is skimpy on theology, but strong on the real world effects of religion and its consequences.
Most memorable were the celestial teapot and the flying spaghetti monster.
Where I was disappointed was the the third chapter of the book, an overview of arguments for Gods existence. None of them is explored in depth; on each proof (and they are famous proofs) I had to settle for one or two points scored and then fliting off to the next one, leaving behind a plethora of references to more complete refutations.
Where this book really shines is starting on the fourth chapter: "Why there almost certainly is no God". In a nutshell, God is so improbable, so irreducibly complex of a being that any simpler explanation is preferred. The notion of an intelligent designer is described as an 'ultimate Boeing 747', making an allusion to Fred Hoyle's example of a Boeing 747 assembling itself by chance in a scrapyard. He argues that a being capable of designing the entire universe is even more improbable than the universe happening by chance.
He prefers a scientific explanation, or rather a series of them. This is where I got to meet Richard Dawkins the biologist, as he spends a lot of the book discussing natural selection, clearing up some misconceptions around it, and explaining how it is a relatively simple explanation for all the apparent complexity around us. There is no way I am going to be able to do justice to his argument from natural selection here, but I believe that is the nutshell.
Richard is hard on Muslims. He does try to talk about the other Abrahamic faiths, but of course Islam does provide him with some truly spectacular examples of religious irrationality and brutality. His politics in general seem somewhat dated to me. He invokes feminism in terms of the kind of linguistic change it brought. I began to wonder if he was capable of using the word "person" without referring to this. I would be really keen to read his reactions to some of the modern anti-imperialist and anti-oppression scholars.
The feminist shift from "man" to "human" or "person" is provided as inspiration for another linguistic shift. Richard proposes we refer to a "child of Christian parents" rather than a "Christian child" (where Christian is whatever religion), as a means to combat the indoctrination of children into religion. He even provides an evolutionary hypothesis for the tendency of children to cultivate unconditional faith.
Children raised in religion is a real pet peeve for Richard, and I sympathize with him. My parents told me explicitly to make my own choices on questions of faith, throughout my life, and I am thankful to them for it. They spared me from nothing less than a nightmare; I was horrified to read about some of the things that people raised religious as children have experienced. I am forced to agree with Richard that forcing indoctrination on children is no less than child abuse, especially in the name of "diversity".
My current roommates tell a story about a five year old boy crying in class. To shut him up, his teacher threatened to call the cops. A five year old would have believed such a threat without question. How much worse is it then, when a kid is told he is going to hell, for all eternity, for any number of sins?
What really excited me in The God Delusion is a swan song to the beauty of the universe as envisioned by contemporary science. I was repeatedly encouraged to envision the universe, and our own complexity within it, as a thing of awesome beauty, made only more grandiose by the truths we have learned about it over the years. I wish I could summon up some of Richard's lyrical power to describe this stuff, but you'll have to read him to get it.