Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 165:657 (Jan 2008)
Article: Book Reviews
Author: Matthew S. DeMoss

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BSac 165:657 (January-March 2008) p. 91

Book Reviews

By The Faculty of Dallas Theological Seminary

Matthew S. DeMoss

Editor

The God Delusion. By Richard Dawkins. New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2006. x + 406 pp. $27.00.

From the first page of the Preface, Dawkins’s agenda is clear. His thesis, which he states repeatedly and in various forms, is that religions are dangerous, not only because none of them is true, but also because they all inevitably lead to great evil. So he writes to encourage the adoption of atheism or at least an agnosticism toward religion. This book, he writes, “is intended to raise consciousness . . . to the fact that to be an atheist is a realistic aspiration, and a brave and splendid one. You can be an atheist who is happy, balanced, moral, and intellectually fulfilled” (p. 1). One of his goals is to mobilize the vast number of atheists in the world to “come out” and thus make it easier for others to follow, to create a “critical mass for the initiation of a chain reaction” (p. 4). Dawkins believes that “atheists and agnostics far outnumber religious Jews, and even outnumber most other particular religious groups” but that atheists and agnostics are “not organized and therefore exert almost zero influence” (p. 4).

The title of the book expresses Dawkins’s view of God and those who believe in Him. He defines delusion as “a persistent false belief held in the face of strong contradictory evidence, especially as a symptom of psychiatric disorder” (p. 5). His goal is simply and clearly stated: “If this book works as I intend, religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put it down” (ibid.). This is not merely an attempt to mobilize atheists; it is an apologetic for atheism, an attempted rebuttal of religious views in whatever form.

The “God” whom Dawkins considers a delusion is “a supernatural creator that is ‘appropriate for us to worship’ ” (p. 13). To believe in God without evidence and in the face of strong contradictory evidence would meet the definition of a delusion. Instead of belief in God, Dawkins defends atheistic naturalism, the belief that “there is nothing beyond the natural, physical world, no supernatural creative intelligence lurking beyond the observable universe, no soul that outlasts the body and no miracles—except in the sense of natural phenomena that we don’t yet understand” (p. 14; here and throughout the review, italics are in the original). Those who believe that strong evidence supports belief in God have grounds to dispute Dawkins’s diagnosis of their faith as a psychological disorder.

BSac 165:657 (January-March 2008) p. 92

Dawkins’s first ch...

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