The God Delusion

****/*****                                                                                                                                                       God/Religion

The God Delusion

Richard Dawkins

                Religion was never a major influence in my growing years. To a great extent this was due to the liberal religious views of my parents but also because religion I was born in was not rigid or dogmatic. But this liberalism of my parents did not countenance Atheism. Belief in God was an immutable fact. Though religion was not conspicuous in daily life, God was never too far away. It had to be propitiated on all occasions big or small: by small observances on birthdays, before stepping out of home on the day of school examinations, and through major ceremonies during house warming, marriage and death. I accepted religious views of my parents unquestioningly: belief in rebirth, concept of reward or punishment for our present deeds in subsequent lives, and other such doctrines. These direct offspring of religion were like axioms of mathematics, misgivings about whose veracity never troubled one’s mind. It was only when I was confronted with seemingly insurmountable personal crisis and read about the immense miseries that have afflicted world regularly and continue to do so, that doubts about the omnipotence and omniscience of God first arose. When I read the physics of cosmos, I was wonderstruck by the boundless vistas of understanding which science had unraveled. Wonders of nature were truly awe inspiring but were not inexplicable. One did not have to believe in a creator to explain the immense intricacy and beauty of life or the unfathomable vastness of the cosmos and the dazzling brilliance of the laws of physics which governed it. On the contrary, I felt it will belittle the wonder that this universe is, if we were to resort to explaining all these phenomena by invoking the hand of an omnipotent being. This discovery was like a gush of fresh air which flushed my mind of the debris that had accumulated over the years.

               

In subsequent years I formulated my own views on Atheism from what I gleaned from various books or could think over. But these were half-baked ideas utterly lacking any bulwark and the fabric of my belief in Atheism looked severely moth-eaten even at its best. I discovered that Richard Dawkins’ ‘The God Delusion’ is just the right book to bolster my staggering belief. This is a monumental piece of work and should be read by believers, non-believers and agnostics alike. To the first the book will provide a sounding board to test their beliefs, to the second it will offer a solid foundation for their philosophy and will defog the mind of the third.

Richard Dawkins builds his philosophy of Atheism, coherently and cogently. He begins with asserting that he is ‘a deeply religious non-believer’. He states why he is a religious atheist. He then discusses the various meanings of God as propounded by thinkers and theologians. He discusses the godly attributes of God as told in the Bible. Clearly, devastatingly, and perhaps with a tinge of humorous irony, he lays bare the inhuman God of Bible. He writes about Christian God, as he knows this the best. Same can be said about God of every religion. In a chapter he deliberates upon diverse arguments which have been offered for God’s existence. In the next chapter he explains his opinion, ‘why there almost certainly is no God’. In a section he speculates how this ubiquitous cultural phenomenon could have originated in our species and does our biology makes it an ineluctable component of our mind. At length, he talks about morality and do we need to believe in a God to be moral? He reserves his most scathing arguments when he elucidates ‘what’s wrong with religion’? And why he is so hostile to it. He devotes a full chapter to the abuse of children, physically and psychologically, by religion. If not any other argument, this barbaric and inhuman treatment of young, credulous, minds and bodies, should be sufficient to convince us of the gross lies propounded by religious doctrines. In a chapter he discusses, tongue-in-cheek, whether religion fills up ‘a much-needed gap’ in our lives. Religion was once credited to have provided humanity answers to its two profound quests: Our existence and the nature of the physical world we find ourselves in. Science has surely and comprehensively answered many of these queries. Religious discourse on these profound questions is ridiculously infantile at its best and flagrantly insincere at its worst.

In the book Dawkins unflinchingly confronts the most sacrosanct tenets of Theism. He elucidates and professes clearly and unambiguously only one fact i.e., ‘there is no evidence of God in our universe’. He is absolutely unwilling to compromise in his belief and gives reasons for this intransigence. Book is very well researched and littered with references on every page. Bibliography is exhaustive and will provide much reference for an inquisitive mind. His language, as always, is succinct, lucid, and a delight. This is a marvelous book: informing, stimulating, entertaining, consoling and liberating.