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Just wrapped up The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. It was a thorough challenge to common held beliefs by most people I know, and I like that it helped me think through other arguments that I’ve read. Dawkins has the luck to be both brilliant and articulate. While I never doubted that Hitchens was a really smart guy, he wrote in such a way that it took a long time for me to understand anything he said.

The Ugly: Dawkins actually writes really well, and there wasn’t much about the book that I thought was wrong or couldn’t relate to.

The Bad: In Hitchens’s book, I’d get lost (or, more aptly, bored) when he went off into too many anecdotes. The same applies for Dawkins, but instead of anecdotes, he’d go too deep into a subject like how memes propagate through generations, or too far into a single metaphor. I’ll admit that I’m a fickle reader who won’t pay attention if the ideas stop flowing quickly, and that happens in the final chapter and in the origin of religions chapter. The rest of the book, however, I loved.

The Good: Dawkins not only debunks all of the arguments offered for a god, but he offers his own actually against a god. This is a big step, though it’s not necessary (but every bit helps).

First, in outlining the arguments for a god, I realized that most arguments aren’t of the “therefore, god exists” but more “see, that doesn’t make sense, so god has to exist.” They followed more the lines of a contradiction proof than a positive proof. The problem is that a god never satisfies the contradiction proofs, because the answer to those arguments only shift the contradiction to another arena, where it seems equally applicable.

Dawkins also offers a play on the intelligent design argument. In a nutshell, it goes, if people are so well designed and couldn’t have come up by chance, and need a designer, how much more improbable is that designer? It’s a play on the ontological argument, applied to the teleological one (look at my vocabulary busting out in a blog post).

While I don’t need Dawkins’s argument against god (I don’t need arguments against flesh-eating, invisible hippos in my fireplace, either), I think it will offer a bit of area for thought for Christians.

Overall, I’d recommend The God Delusion pretty strongly. It serves a different purpose from Letter to a Christian Nation, and relies more on logic to debunk Christian claims, instead of relying on apalling anecdotes like Hitchens. Both are effective, I just find Dawkins’s approach more appealing.