Dawkins claims that his target audience for this book is the religious and and the agnostic. His goal for this audience is to make them realize that they have the option of rejecting religion. Unfortunately, I think it’s highly unlikely that anybody who is actually religious would make it more than a few chapters into this book.
Dawkins lays out great arguments for why he refuses to walk on eggshells around religious belief, for why faith shouldn’t be the only thing we exempt from the free discussion and disagreement we insist upon in every other area of our lives. However, our cultural conventions are such that we ARE used to people tiptoeing around belief, and if you’re trying specifically to get religious people to listen to your arguments for why atheism makes sense, it might not be the best time to treat their beliefs with scorn.
While I’m not Dawkins’ target audience, I found this book quiet valuable. As a prominent atheist, Dawkins has had exposure to every possible argument for God’s existence, and he is able to lay each of them out in turn and explain why he thinks they don’t work. Having thought hard about religion all my life, there was little that I hadn’t considered before reading the book, but having everything laid out in an organized, point-by-point fashion was certainly nothing I had seen before.
I found the book deteriorated a bit into random complaining at the end. Despite that, I think it’s well worth reading for anybody who can stomach Dawkins’ highly irreverent attitude about belief. Even those who can’t make it through the entire thing might want to read the section about WHY we shouldn’t have to treat faith so specially. The argument against holding faith in a place of respect is at least as important an idae to come from this book as the actual arguments for why it doesn’t make sense for God to exist.
February 7, 2009 at 12:56 pm
Have you read any of Dawkins’ other books? I recently read “The Blind Watchmaker,” and found it extremely frustrating for reasons similar to yours. I respect Dawkins enormously as a public intellectual, and certainly think evolution and atheism are
“correct” in any meaningful sense, but his books seems to fail in their attempts to reach those who believe otherwise.
February 8, 2009 at 1:38 pm
Yeah, I remember thinking that “The Blind Watchmaker” was ok, but not earth-shattering.
The first book I read by Dawkins was “The Selfish Gene”. It changed the whole way I thought about evolution and the way I’ve thought about it ever sense. I still think about the book all the time. It’s by far his best book.
February 8, 2009 at 10:51 pm
I do find it refreshing to consider being dismissive of religious people just out of hand. I wouldn’t try to “reach a middle ground” with a skinhead (sorry for the heavy handed example) and many many more people have died at the hands of religion than any particular political or social belief. I do think religion has just been bad for us.