Richard Dawkins 'The God Delusion'

I love reading, it’s one of those past times which relaxes you but keeps the brain ticking. So when Richard Dawkins released his book “The God Delusion” I could not resist reading it. The reason I am writing about this today is because I have now finished the book and can give my valid opinion of it. I am also suffering from a horrible cold which has caused me unable to work at McDonalds today; can’t work around food when sneezing and coughing every 10 minutes unfortunately. Anyway, on with an overview and my opinion of the book. (Warning! This may turn out to be a fairly large blog entry!)

Richard Dawkins is an atheist, he has actually been dubbed ‘World famous atheist’ on much of the advertising concerning this current book title release. So his book “The God Delusion” is his attempt to disprove God and ultimately the purpose of the book is to cause the reader to become an atheist by the end (this was written within the book). I have now finished the book after having read page to page and can honestly say I’m not an atheist and I will attempt to explain why later.

The book is divided up into many different chapters with names such as ‘A deeply religious non-believer’, ‘Why there is almost certainly no God’, ‘The roots of religion’, ‘The ‘good’ book and the changing more Zeitgeist’, etc. All of these chapters and more attempt to cover from every angle why someone may have a belief in God. Although this sounds good this is one of the key areas in which this book fails. Richard Dawkins is like any other person which means he has his skill areas and failures. Due to this ‘The God Delusion’ in places puts forward very awkward arguments against the existence of God. For example Richard Dawkins at one stage announces that Jesus has may have been misunderstood in the bible. For people that have any knowledge of theology this claim seems outrageous and at first I actually misunderstood it for humour!

This is leads me onto part of the reason why no Christian should feel threatened by this book. Richard Dawkins has next to near no sound theological knowledge. This is very apparent throughout his book when at stages he regards theologians as ‘stupid’ and announces his disrespect of theology. This causes him on stages to say very foolish things and at one stage he actually misunderstands the basic principle of freewill.

Despite my rejection on some of the books points there are a lot of interesting facts and scientific evidence/theory in the book. This is the skill area Richard Dawkins most obviously has and using science theory and evidence he attempts to disprove God. However although in places he puts forward good arguments he always falls short since he has failed to tackle one the biggest questions of all which is ‘How was everything created at the beginning?’. This simple question with a somewhat more complicated answer is something he never can attempt to answer and in a radio interview last year Richard Dawkins was unfortunately slaughtered over this one question by a journalist.

Anyway, I believe I have written enough now. If anyone reading this blog wishes to ask any specific questions about the book then feel free to leave a comment. I have in no way covered all the points this book raises since there is just too much to write.