A few months ago, I wrote about maybe reading the new Richard Dawkins book. I ended up getting the book as a birthday present. I finished reading this one just before the holidays, but I never got the time to tell you all about it.

This book is targeted at fence-sitters. Dawkins wants to nudge skeptical theists and agnostics across the line and make them into full blown atheists. The books starts out strong, with nicely done refutations of common “proofs” for the existence of God. None of the arguments are terribly original, but one presumes that the target audience has not heard them before, or else they would be atheists already.

Unfortunately, after refuting the existence of the almighty^* in the opening chapters, the book really has nowhere to go. It plods on, delving into abortion, evolution, and all the other nonsense that religious people get excited about, but it’s kind of hard to care about these arguments after the rug was pulled out from under them so early on.

I give The God Delusion 3 Jihadis out of 5

Not a bad book overall, but if you’re a seasoned, veteran heretic, there is not a lot of new material.

^{*What he really does here is claim that the probability of the existence of God, while nonzero, is very small.}