This is a review of Richard Dawkins’ new book for the next issue of SR.

This is a very timely book. The resurgence of religion as a form of cultural identity, mass political expression and community solidarity has been one of the most dismal phenomena of recent years. Just as dismal is the increasing reluctance of those who would describe themselves as secularists or atheists to engage on an intellectual level with the absurdity of religious belief as an idea. Respect for religious belief has become the orthodoxy rather than simple tolerance or ridicule. Dawkins has responded to this climate by writing a summary of the principal scientific and philosophical refutations of religious belief. For the most part he trains his fire on various brands of Christianity, pointing out that this is the set of beliefs with which he is most familiar. However his anti-religious arguments can be applied with equal validity to Islam, Hinduism or the gods of the ancient Greeks.

Readers who have not grown up in a religious environment can have, at best, an abstract understanding of the grip that what seems to be an arbitrarily cobbled together bundle of prohibitions, speculations and exhortations can have on those who take them seriously. Believers take it for granted that they communicate directly with their god and he or she is aware of everything that they, and everyone else on the planet, does, says and thinks.

By way of illustration Dawkins recounts a conversation the anthropologist Pascal Boyer once had with a Cambridge University theologian. When told that Boyer had once studied a tribe which had a strong belief in witches’ power to spoil crops the theologian remarked, “you have to explain how people can believe such nonsense.” Dawkins points out that this Christian theologian believed that a man born without a father died for three days and then disappeared into the sky.

Dawkins writes as a liberal rationalist. He is equally contemptuous of all forms of religious superstition. This is the book’s strength. He’s at his weakest when trying to explain the resurgence of religion. He essentially identifies it as a type of collective delusion. So while resolutely materialist in many other matters he is not able to trace the ideological connection between the hopeless lives that hundreds of millions of people live or the comparative weakness of the forces representing alternative ideologies.

Anyone looking for a good, clearly written hatchet job on the absurdities of religion to give as a Christmas present has had their prayers answered by this book.