The God Delusion

Author: Richard Dawkins

No other book in the history of my "reading career" (is reading a career?) has given me as much trouble as The God Delusion. It took me TWO MONTHS to read this 374-page bastard. For someone who can normally knock out a 500-pager in roughly a week, this sort of plodding progress is inexcuseable. I do have an excuse though, and it has nothing to do with the book's heavy-duty subject matter. It's Dawkins' heavy-handed writing style that tripped me up. Despite the fact that he is a world-respected scientist, no one has ever bothered to tell him about "economy of language". He frequently uses twelve words where two or three would be sufficient. In fact, a friend of mine dubbed this book "The Language Delusion" after I read her a couple typical paragraphs.

While I could sit here all day and talk about the stylistic shortcomings of this book, I would never dispute the sociological importance of it. Dawkins (like John Lennon before him) imagines a world without religion. A world in which people subscribe to higher ideals of evolution, Darwinian natural selection and the logical order of a living, breathing planet. He argues (and rightly so) that religion in all of it's guises has done the human race much more harm than good.

Setting out to disprove what Dawkins calls "the God hypothesis" is no easy task. Critics have often fired back with the old "okay, so you can't prove the exsistence of God, but you can't disprove his exsistence either" arguement. Well, based on this sort of logic Dawkins claims we can't disprove the flying spaghetti monster or bigfoot either. What we can do is make an educated assumption based on all the evidence. Or in the case of God, the lack of evidence.

I just can't in good conscious recommend this book, despite its important underlying message. From a purely literary standpoint, it's a bloody mess. It's tough to get into and even tougher to get out of. So unless you enjoy being beaten to death with verbosity, I'd pass on The God Delusion. Go read something a little more accessible, like a thesis on theoretical quantum physics or something.

Score: 5/12 monkeys