The God Delusion

by Richard Dawkins

Book critics or theatre critics can be derisively negative and gain delighted praise for the trenchant wit of their review. But in criticisms of religion even clarity ceases to be a virtue and sounds like aggressive hostility. A politician may attack an opponent scathingly across the floor of the House and earn plaudits for his robust pugnacity. But let a soberly reasoning critic of religion employ what would in other contexts sound merely direct or forthright, and it will be described as a ‘rant’.

There is no such thing as a Christian child: only a child of Christian parents.

The fundamentalist Kurt Wise proclaims that all the evidence in the universe would not change his mind. The true scientist, however passionately he may ‘believe’ in evolution, knows exactly what it would take to change his mind: Evidence.

It is astonishing, moreover, how many people are unable to understand that ‘X is comforting’ does not imply ‘X is true’.

I suspect that for many people the main reason they cling to religion is not that it is consoling, but that they have been let down by our educational system and don’t realize that non-belief is even an option.

’ I prefer to say that I believe in people, and people, when given the right encouragement to think for themselves about all the information now available, very often turn out not to believe in God and to lead fulfilled and satisfied—indeed, liberated—lives.

You can be an atheist who is happy, balanced, moral, and intellectually fulfilled.

Perhaps you feel that agnosticism is a reasonable position, but that atheism is just as dogmatic as religious belief? If so, I hope Chapter 2 will change your mind, by persuading you that ‘the God Hypothesis’ is a scientific hypothesis about the universe, which should be analysed as sceptically as any other.

children are too young to know where they stand on such issues, just as they are too young to know where they stand on economics or politics.

Being an atheist is nothing to be apologetic about. On the contrary, it is something to be proud of, standing tall to face the far horizon, for atheism nearly always indicates a healthy independence of mind and, indeed, a healthy mind.

‘The world would be astonished if it knew how great a proportion of its brightest ornaments, of those most distinguished even in popular estimation for wisdom and virtue, are complete sceptics in religion.’

Indeed, organizing atheists has been compared to herding cats, because they tend to think independently and will not conform to authority.

‘When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Religion.’

enable him to pursue his passion for beetles. But philosophers use ‘naturalist’ in a very different sense, as the opposite of super-naturalist. Julian Baggini explains in Atheism: A Very Short Introduction the meaning of an atheist’s commitment to naturalism: ‘What most atheists do believe is that although there is only one kind of stuff in the universe and it is physical, out of this stuff come minds, beauty, emotions, moral values—in short the full gamut of phenomena that gives richness to human life.’ Human thoughts and emotions emerge from exceedingly complex interconnections of physical entities within the brain. An atheist in this sense of philosophical naturalist is somebody who believes there is nothing beyond the natural, physical world, no supernatural creative intelligence lurking behind the observable universe, no soul that outlasts the body

If there is something that appears to lie beyond the natural world as it is now imperfectly understood, we hope eventually to understand it and embrace it within the natural.

If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.

We respect your learning, Dr Einstein; but

In this sense I am religious.’ In this sense I too am religious, with the reservation that ‘cannot grasp’ does not have to mean ‘forever ungraspable’. But I prefer not to call myself religious because it is misleading.

Carl Sagan put it well: ‘ . . . if by “God” one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying . . . it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.’

Douglas Adams

but to have an opinion about how the Universe began, about who created the Universe . . . no, that’s holy? . . . We

Supreme Court ruled, in accordance with the Constitution, that a church in New Mexico should be exempt from the law, which everybody else has to obey, against the taking of hallucinogenic drugs.

The rest of us are expected to defend our prejudices. But ask a religious person to justify their faith and you infringe ‘religious liberty’.

2004 James Nixon, a twelve-year-old boy in Ohio, won the right in court to wear a T-shirt to school bearing the words ‘Homosexuality is a sin, Islam is a lie, abortion is murder. Some issues are just black and white!’

The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next.

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.

Instead I shall define the God Hypothesis more defensibly: there exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us. This book will advocate an alternative view: any creative intelligence, of sufficient complexity to design anything, comes into existence only as the end product of an extended process of gradual evolution. Creative intelligences, being evolved, necessarily arrive late in the universe, and therefore cannot be responsible for designing it. God, in the sense defined, is a delusion; and, as later chapters will show, a pernicious delusion.

monotheism is in its turn doomed to subtract one more god and become atheism.

‘Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions.

America is legally secular, religion has become free enterprise.

I am satisfied, and sufficiently occupied with the things which are, without tormenting or troubling myself about those which may indeed be, but of which I have no evidence.

Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.

‘No, I don’t know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots.

Assuming that the majority of these 535 individuals are an educated sample of the population, it is statistically all but inevitable that a substantial number of them must be atheists.

agnosticism, and the erroneous notion that the existence or non-existence of God is an untouchable question, forever beyond the reach of science.

Temporary Agnosticism in Practice,

(Permanent Agnosticism in Principle).

agnosticism about the existence of God belongs firmly in the temporary or TAP category. Either he exists or he doesn’t. It is a scientific question; one day we may know the answer, and meanwhile we can say something pretty strong about the probability.

The fact that we can neither prove nor disprove the existence of something does not put existence and non-existence on an even footing.

God’s existence or non-existence is a scientific fact about the universe, discoverable in principle if not in practice.

Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them.

Yet strictly we should all be teapot agnostics: we cannot prove, for sure, that there is no celestial teapot. In practice, we move away from teapot agnosticism towards a-teapotism.

I have found it an amusing strategy, when asked whether I am an atheist, to point out that the questioner is also an atheist when considering Zeus, Apollo, Amon Ra, Mithras, Baal, Thor, Wotan, the Golden Calf and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I just go one god further.

What matters is not whether God is disprovable (he isn’t) but whether his existence is probable.

Nor, even if the question is a real one, does the fact that science cannot answer it imply that religion can.

NOMA is popular only because there is no evidence to favour the God Hypothesis.

Remember Ambrose Bierce’s witty definition of the verb ‘to pray’: ‘to ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner, confessedly unworthy’.

a universe in which we are alone except for other slowly evolved intelligences is a very different universe from one with an original guiding agent whose intelligent design is responsible for its very existence.

What’s that you say, Lord?

There was a difference between those who knew they had been prayed for and those who did not know one way or the other; but it went in the wrong direction.