Reviews and Comments

I loved this book when I read it for the first time, when I was about 18, as a young and newly "converted" atheist. Re-reading it now, as a less young atheist, I find a lot of issues with it. The first 4 chapters of the book are mostly okay, and overall I agree with what Dawkins says. In particular, he does a decent job showing how some of the most popular "arguments for God" can be easily dismissed. He doesn't really show why "God almost certainly doesn't exist", despite the title of chapter 4, but he does again a decent enough good job showing why God is not necessary as an explanation for "life, the universe, and everything". The rest of the book, however, is a lot less convincing, in an of itself, but also considering the author's recent "feats". When he talks about the roots of religion and morality, he leans a lot on Darwinian evolution (which is not necessarily bad) and evolutionary psychology (which is, to say the least, very problematic), but lacks an anthropological perspective. He's certainly right to denounce mainstream religions for their misogyny and homophobia, but this feels really insincere coming from someone who's a misogynist (despite the fact that he claims to be a "feminist") and a transphobe, as he has showed plenty of times in the past decade. But the worst part of the book is definitely the section where he talks about the "mild" child sexual abuse by Catholic priests, comparing it to the more "severe" abuse of religious indoctrination. He seems to think that physical and psychological abuse are two distinct things, instead of being interconnected. To conclude, I agree with Dawkins that God doesn't exist, but there are better books to read on the subject, and definitely better people to listen to.