The God Delusion

The God Delusion makes the case for science as our fundamental source of hope, optimism, and inspiration in life, arguing that religion is an outdated by-product of evolution, that God doesn’t exist, and that we can be just as happy, moral, and fulfilled without it.

I’ve always questioned the existence of God in the form the Bible purports. Why would God appear as a larger-than-life old man if he could be anything? Dawkins, however, takes this idea further with a simple thought experiment: If God created the universe and everything in it, who created God?

This is the first of Dawkins’ 3 main arguments against God’s existence:

If everything in existence goes back to an intelligent, supernatural designer, who designed this designer? It’s a question that infinitely regresses back to itself, and since religion can’t provide a good answer, the idea of God itself falls apart. The Bible is highly unreliable and constantly contradicts itself. Written by multiple authors hundreds of years after the reported events, the Bible is hardly a textbook. Is it “turn the other cheek” or “an eye for an eye?” Was Jesus born in Betlehem or in Nazareth? Since it can’t even agree on simple facts let alone important moral guidelines, the Bible isn’t exactly a trustworthy source of information. Even religious people admit this, rarely taking the Bible literally. Natural selection is a better, more rational, verifiable explanation of life on Earth than God. Science is about sticking with the best hypothesis until a better one comes along. For religion, that was Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, Dawkins claims. If tiny genetic adjustments help a species survive, those adjustments compound. That’s how you get from amoeba in the ocean to fish to mammals to monkeys walking on two legs — and then to us. No God needed.

Only one of these arguments is rooted in science. The other 2 are simply common sense. If that’s all it takes to put a serious dent in God’s “credibility,” what other discrepancies might we be missing?

You make a stir fry and have onions left over. The next day, you make onion soup. It tastes nice, so you buy extra onions the next time. You make more and more soup. Eventually, you forget the stir fry altogether. But the soup doesn’t have as much nutrient variety, so you end up on the toilet all the time. Whoops! According to Dawkins, religion happened in a similar way. A by-product of evolution that succeeded more than it should have. Religion blended in well with a once useful trait for survival: obedience to authority. In times when it was important that your kids didn’t wander off into the desert or…