The God Delusion

"Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion gives it to believers with both barrels." Joan Bakewell cheers him on in The Guardian (Saturday September 23, 2006):

Dawkins comes roaring forth in the full vigour of his powerful arguments, laying into fallacies and false doctrines with the energy of the polemicist at his most fiery. … Primed by anger, redeemed by humour, it [this book] will, I trust, offend many.

On 22 September, 2006, Jeremy Paxman interviewed Professor Dawkins as part of the Newsnight book club and asked "why are you so wound up about the position of faith in our society?"

Terry Eagleton (Manchester University), writing in the London Review of Books (Vol. 28 No. 20 dated 19 October 2006) lambasts Richard Dawkins:

Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don't believe there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth understanding. This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince.

Adam Roberts (Royal Holloway, University of London) refers to "Terry Eagleton's traditional theology and a new version of Pascal's Wager" in his review in The Valve and accuses Eagleton of "giving the book one of the least temperate and, I must say, least effective thrashings I can recall the London Review of Books ever publishing."

From The Secular Web "I thought it was a brilliant and moving defense of atheism with a very unfortunate title." (Adam Lee)

Hazel found this interesting review by Peter Brooke from a thoughtful christian point of view. It was published in The Dublin Review of Books under the title Richard Dawkins's God Confusion. Brooke fleshes out the criticism made by a number of reviewers that Dawkins is attacking a simplistic concept of god, "vulgar caricatures of religious faith". Brooke argues that god "is unknowable in his essence and therefore not amenable to any calculation of probabilities based on any logic we can possibly imagine. … the gulf of incomprehension between Dawkins and the Christian tradition on this point is immense". However it is far from clear how one argues from this unknowable god to a personal god, believed in by most christians, who created and oversees the universe.