PDF Summary:The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins

In The God Delusion, University of Oxford biologist and anti-religion activist Richard Dawkins seeks to demystify religion and discredit faith. He explores the unlikelihood of God’s existence; how evolution by natural selection explains the centrality of religion to the human experience; and how religion promotes immoral values, impoverishes the human mind, and provides justification for intolerance and persecution. He argues that ultimately, we as humans must free ourselves from our self-imposed shackles by destroying faith and religion and positively embracing the full potential of our species.

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We can treat memes as somewhat analogous to genes. Those memes that are “good” at survival get passed on; those that aren’t don’t survive. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the memes are advantageous to human survival; it simply means that the memes themselves are successful at being copied and passed down with comparatively few “transcription” errors along the way.

Some common religious memes that have survived and successfully replicated include belief in an afterlife, the eternal rewards that await martyrs, and the idea that non-believers must be punished or killed.

Religion and Morality

Aside from its likely falsehood, religion is also flawed because it’s not the source of human morality. To be sure, religious people certainly claim that Darwinism cannot account for the existence of altruism, kindness, or empathy. But, in fact, kindness and altruism have perfectly rational Darwinian roots.

Kinship Altruism

The individual human trait of selfishness is not advantageous in natural selection. In fact, the drive for gene survival provides a powerful incentive for individuals to behave altruistically toward those in their kin group, with whom they share a genetic link. After all, taking care of your children and ensuring that they grow up strong and healthy enough to have children of their own is the best way to ensure the survival of your own genes. It is easy to see why natural selection would favor kin altruism as a replicating behavior through generations.

Reciprocity and Mutual Obligation

The reciprocity reflex is also a powerful evolutionary mechanism. We are hardwired to repay favors, even from strangers. From an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense because it increases everyone’s chances of survival. The reciprocity reflex causes the other members of the group to help you if you have helped them, creating networks of mutual obligation and support.

Immoral Religion

Because morality can be explained by natural selection, we don’t need religion to account for it. In fact, religion promotes abhorrent values that are totally at odds with modern morality.

Take the Old Testament, the holy book of Judaism and Christianity (and, to a lesser extent, Islam), in which we are taught to celebrate:

• A cruel, jealous, and vindictive God who drowns all the men, women, children, and animals in the world (save for Noah) when he feels that they are not sufficiently pious and obedient
• Lot inviting a group of men, who wish to sodomize the two angels he is harboring in his home, to instead gang-rape his daughters (with whom Lot later commits incest)
• Abraham’s unflinching willingness to slaughter his son Isaac in cold blood simply because God commanded him to do so (God eventually saves Isaac after being convinced of Abraham’s loyalty)
• Joshua’s destruction of the city of Jericho and the genocidal slaughter and enslavement of its citizens

Biblical vs. Modern Morality

Almost no one today, even the most pious believer in the Bible, thinks that collective punishment, gang-rape, incest, child murder, slavery, or genocide are practices worth emulating. Most religious people concede that we shouldn’t take everything in religious texts literally.

But if even the self-proclaimed faithful are going to pick and choose which parts of the Bible they like and which parts they don’t like, they are implicitly acknowledging that the Bible isn’t a universal standard for morality; obviously, they’re using some other, non-biblical standard.

They, like non-religious people, are using the common standards of modern morality that are in place in most advanced 21st-century societies. Whether we consciously acknowledge these values or not, the overwhelming majority of people in modern societies accept notions such as representative democracy, freedom of speech, freedom from cruel and unusual punishment, religious toleration, and equal rights for women and minorities. But these values exist in spite of religion, not because of it.

The Fostering of Religious Hatred

Religion is one of the great sources of in-group loyalty, but also hatred and fear of the other. Because religion teaches people that they have access to a divine truth, it inevitably breeds intolerance toward those who don’t share the same beliefs. After all, those who don’t share your faith—the “other”—are enemies of God and his holy word.

The Israeli psychologist George Tamarin found that 66 percent of Israeli schoolchildren, most of whom were raised with the stories of the Old Testament, expressed support for Joshua’s aforementioned war crimes against the citizens of Jericho—war crimes that included wholesale slaughter and the selling of children into sexual slavery. They did so on the grounds that the people of Jericho were of a different religion than Joshua’s Israelites and that the slaughter was necessary to prevent God’s chosen people from assimilating with non-believers.

Because it teaches people to suspend their faculties of critical thinking and see themselves as having a direct connection to the will of the almighty, faith can encourage normal people to commit heinous and otherwise indefensible acts against others, all in the name of God— for example, an anti-abortion fanatic murdering a doctor in the name of rescuing innocent “babies” or the 9/11 hijackers killing nearly 3,000 people because they believed that they would be divinely rewarded in the afterlife. Religion teaches the perpetrators of such acts that their crimes are justified, even moral.

Because religion by definition is incapable of providing evidence for its claims, society must end the practice of granting automatic respect or deference to religion. Justifying some hateful action or belief on the grounds of “I believe it” or “It’s my faith” should be accorded no more respect than someone’s political opinions or their support for a particular sports team.

The Role of Religion

What function is religion supposed to perform? Which needs does it purportedly fulfill? Proponents of religion claim that, at its best, religion provides human beings with:

• An explanation of the natural universe, its origins, and our role within it
• An exhortation to moral action
• Consolation in our moments of deepest loss and grief

As we’ve already discussed, the first two claims are patently false. Now, we're going to explore why the final one is likewise invalid.

False Comfort

The claim that religion provides consolation or makes people happier or more secure is dubious at best. Social science research offers no conclusive evidence that atheists are any less happy or fulfilled than people of faith.

We know this anecdotally too. Religious Christians, for example, claim to believe in an afterlife, in which they will be rewarded with joy and bliss for eternity as they are reunited with their deceased loved ones. If they truly believed this, then they wouldn’t fear their own deaths or mourn the passing of friends and family. Instead, they would be excited about death and their coming ascension into paradise. But of course, this is not how religious people behave or think in practice. They despair of their own deaths and grieve the loss of others just as much as anyone. This would seem to indicate that even the devout don’t truly believe in life after death: that they know intuitively that once they die, they are truly gone forever.

Atheists, for their part, can have a more healthy and affirming attitude toward both life and death because they don’t have to reconcile the rational part of their minds with a belief in God or an afterlife. Atheists are free to accept the idea that there was a period of time stretching from the beginning of the universe to the moment of their birth when they did not exist—and that death merely represents the resumption of that state of non-existence.

Not believing in an immortal soul or an afterlife opens your eyes to the truth that your existence is the very briefest flicker of a candle in the vast history of the universe. Your non-existence is the natural and normal state of affairs. You just happen to be living through a fleeting exception. Knowing that, life can be as joyous or as sad as you choose to make it.

The Case for Science

Our brains and sensory organs evolved in such a way as to limit what we can grasp intuitively. But there’s so much more out there in the universe. To take one example, our visual world only represents a tiny sliver of the light spectrum. Beyond the tiny band of visible light, the universe is awash in electromagnetic waves, from X-rays to radio waves to gamma rays. We would never know they were there if we relied solely on our senses.

But there is an extraordinary tool that enables us to truly grapple with the mysteries and complexities of the universe—science. Science enables us to understand the phenomena around us in all their wonder and beauty, from the mind-bending behavior of subatomic particles in quantum theory to the infinite density of black holes to the nature of matter and existence itself. Far from being drab and uninspiring, science uplifts us and expands our intellectual horizons in ways that religion never could.

Ultimately, religion limits the possibilities of human thought and action. You’ll always be constrained by a God who knows more than you and can control every aspect of your life and beyond into eternity. Nothing exists that he doesn’t allow; nothing can be conceived of that he hasn’t already designed. Meanwhile, science removes these limitations from the human mind, and opens us up to a universe without constraints. Quantum mechanics, evolutionary biology, and particle physics provide insights that are far more enriching to the human spirit than simple stories about a creator deity and his rather unsavory band of prophets.

It’s time to free ourselves from the primitive shackles of religion and embrace our true potential as humans.