The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

Evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins objects to belief in the kind of God many of us have outgrown: the Big-Daddy-in-the-Sky or Celestial-Parent type of God. It is true that this is the kind of God most people believe in, but many of us have moved beyond the duality of "the Creator" and "the created." Dawkins summarizes and dispenses with more sophisticated theistic thinking in his first chapter. He describes pantheism as using "the word God as a non-supernatural synonym for Nature, or for the Universe." His only argument against pantheism or what he calls "Einsteinian religion" is semantic; he thinks it is misleading and confusing to use the word "God" as something other than a supernatural being.

Dawkins does a drum beat on the theme of if-it's-not-rational-don't-believe-it. He is so incredibly left-brained that you might as well chop out his right brain and throw it away. Overall, I don't have much to quarrel with in his book. However, he is asking us to get rid of religion without putting anything else in its place; and his defense against this objection is a feeble attitude of look-how-wonderful-science-is. In going after fundamentalists and people who take the Bible literally, Dawkins oversells Darwin and evolutionary theory. Personally I never felt that evolution was in conflict with religion.

On the very last page Dawkins seems to have remembered his right brain and for the first time he uses the word "intuitive." He has been forced into it by consideration of the weird science found in quantum mechanics and cosmology. If you are fundamentalist in your religion, you should probably stay away from this book. But it's an interesting read for those of us who think knowing the nature of reality (the Truth) is more important than whether there's a God or not.