OUTGROWING GOD

A BEGINNER’S GUIDE

The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins’s 2006 bestseller, made its author a household name and put him at the forefront of the so-called New Atheists, a group of intellectuals whose self-imposed duty is to take religion to task for what they perceive as its inherent hypocrisy and irrationality. You might think Dawkins would consider his point made. But like any missionary with a message to spread, he can’t let it go, and now he’s back with Outgrowing God: A Beginner’s Guide.

It is aimed at a younger readership than The God Delusion: ‘Teenagers, let’s say – and young people up to about the age of 99 as well,’ he told the New Scientist. The book is divided into 12 chapters, each using scientific tools to take on some or other aspect of religious belief. For instance, if the story of Noah’s Ark were true, Dawkins asserts, the scientific evidence would show a pattern of animals spreading out from a single place, whereas each continent and island has its own particular set of fauna.

It’s ‘typically robust and entertaining’ stuff, said Mark Smith in Herald Scotland, though Dawkins fails to mention ‘the most powerful reason people need God’, which is ‘his emotional power in the face of crisis and death’. Indeed, ‘for such a clever man’, wrote Hugo Rifkind in the Times, Dawkins ‘can be awfully clodhopping’. He is so angry with religion, he often sounds ‘like Owl hectoring Winnie-the-pooh’, and writes things like ‘This really is the sort of thing theologians spend their time thinking about’ and ‘the Roman Catholic Church was very silly’. The second half of the book, which expounds the delights of evolution rather than bashing religion, is much better: ‘Dawkins is a far better advocate for atheism when he leaves God alone and contents himself with offering us the other, better story instead,’ said Rifkind.