The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins is a book everyone should read. It is eminently rational and wonderfully readable, as Dawkins' writings always are. Take, for example, his "amusing strategy" when asked whether he is an atheist. He points out "that the questioner is also an atheist when considering Zeus, Apollo, Amon Ra, Mithra, Baal, Thor, Wotan, the Golden Calf and the Flying Spaghetti Monster." Dawkins just goes "one god further."

Dawkins challenges the privileged position that religion enjoys in society, which puts the "sacred" beyond criticism. He extols the scientific method and criticizes religion's promotion of faith, or belief unsupported and even opposed by facts. And he does not duck any of the criticisms made against naturalism but answers them fairly and cogently.

He examines each of the traditional proofs for God, including the argument from design-the only one of Thomas Aquinas's "still in regular use today"--that whatever looks designed is designed. Charles Darwin blew this "out of the water" since "evolution by natural selection produces an excellent simulacrum of design, mounting prodigious heights of complexity and elegance."

Creationist "logic," he writes, is always that some natural phenomenon is too complex "to have come into existence by chance," and therefore "a designer must have done it." He answers that design raises an even bigger problem of who designed the designer. And he agrees that "chance," considered as a "single, one-off event" as creationists do, also fails. The real alternative to design is not chance but natural selection, which "is a cumulative process," breaking "the problem of improbability up into small pieces," each of which is "slightly improbable, but not prohibitively so." The end product is an accumulation of these pieces, but creationists fail to "understand the power of accumulation."

This is but a small sampling. Dawkins later gets into the origin of religion and the roots of morality or being good without God, with evolution playing a dominant role throughout. He's always careful with his answers. For example, he is "inclined to suspect" (with some evidence) that "there are very few atheists in prisons," but does not claim "that atheism increases morality, although," he notes, "humanism--the ethical system that often goes with atheism-probably does." And he examines both the Old and New Testaments as bases for moral living, and the problem with religion. It is no wonder that this book has received so much attention in the press.

--Earl Wunderli