The God Delusion
First edition cover
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| Author | Richard Dawkins |
|---|---|
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Subject | Criticism of religion |
| Publisher | Bantam Books |
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Publication date
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2 October 2006 |
| Media type | Hardcover, paperback, audiobook, e-book at Google Books |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 68965666 |
| 211/.8 22 | |
| LC Class | BL2775.3 .D39 2006 |
| Preceded by | The Ancestor's Tale |
| Followed by | The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution |
The God Delusion is a 2006 best-sellingnon-fiction book by English biologist Richard Dawkins, a professorial fellow at New College, Oxford and former holder of the Charles Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford.
In The God Delusion, Dawkins contends that a supernatural creator almost certainly does not exist and that belief in a personal god qualifies as a delusion, which he defines as a persistent false belief held in the face of strong contradictory evidence. He is sympathetic to Robert Pirsig's statement in Lila (1991) that "when one person suffers from a delusion it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called religion." With many examples, he explains that one does not need religion to be moral and that the roots of religion and of morality can be explained in non-religious terms.
In early December 2006, it reached number four in the New York Times Hardcover Non-Fiction Best Seller list after nine weeks on the list. More than three million copies were sold.
The book has attracted widespread commentary, with many books written in response.
Dawkins has argued against creationist explanations of life in his previous works on evolution. The theme of The Blind Watchmaker, published in 1986, is that evolution can explain the apparent design in nature. In The God Delusion he focuses directly on a wider range of arguments used for and against belief in the existence of a god (or gods).
Dawkins identifies himself repeatedly as an atheist, while also pointing out that, in a sense, he is also agnostic, though "only to the extent that I am agnostic about fairies at the bottom of the garden".
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