Outgrowing God: A Beginner's Guide

Everyone wants to compare this book to The God Delusion, for obvious reasons. But I would rather review it on its own merits, for what it is, recognizing its purpose and intended audience. While the content is similar, there are differences; it covers more of the Bible, has expanded coverage of morality, and is a more concise and focused presentation of atheism and evolution that is more accessible to a younger audience or to the beginning skeptic. In that regard, it deserves its own treatment, which is as follows:Outgrowing God is a concise yet comprehensive statement of atheism and the perfect resource for the burgeoning skeptic or the individual struggling to escape the intellectual prison that is religion.Dawkins—a reliably great writer—begins the book by reminding us that thousands of gods have been invented throughout history, and that humanity is getting ever closer to the correct answer—from polytheism (belief in many gods) to monotheism (belief in one god) to atheism (belief in no gods).Dawkins shows how it’s no more reasonable to have faith in any one particular religion or god over any other, and that the fact that we all grow up believing in the religion in which we were raised should raise some red flags. Today’s religion is tomorrow’s mythology, just as belief in Zeus, once considered to be real, is now known to be fiction.Dawkins proceeds to dissect the Old and New Testaments to reveal the inconsistencies, contradictions, historical and scientific inaccuracies, plagiarism, and immoral teachings that permeate the text. All signs point to the Bible as a man-made document, pieced together with the fragments of distorted history, borrowed mythology, and the manufactured fulfillment of old prophecies, translated through multiple languages and written by scientifically illiterate authors (it was written centuries before the advent of modern science). While there’s nothing wrong with mythology, as Dawkins admits, there’s no reason to elevate the Bible over the myths of ancient Greece, Egypt, Babylonia, India, or anywhere else.But it’s not only that the Bible is an unreliable source of history; it’s also oftentimes an extremely unpleasant and immoral text. This is why Penn Jillette wrote, “When someone is considering atheism I tell them to read the Bible first and then Dawkins. Outgrowing God—second only to the Bible!”Is this fair? Well, consider the following verse, which is representative of the bloodlust found throughout the Bible:“However, in the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them—the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites—as the Lord your God has commanded you.” (Deuteronomy 20:16)And how about:“Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.” (Numbers 31:17-18)The Bible is full of barbaric punishments for petty crimes, genocidal ethnic cleansing, and treating women and girls as property, with dozens of verses similar to the ones above. So yes, Dawkins treatment of the “Good Book” is more than fair.Dawkins concludes the first part of the book with a few chapters on morality. He shows that, rather than receiving our morality from the Bible, we apply our pre-existing moral codes to the Bible to decide which verses to ignore (like stoning homosexuals to death), which to commend, and how to interpret them. Dawkins shows that there are far better explanations for morality and where it comes from—including biological, psychological, cultural, and social explanations—than the simplistic assertion that good and bad acts are objectively decreed from an invisible supernatural entity. It’s plainly obvious that morality evolves, and has evolved far ahead of the brutality found in scripture.Still, whether or not God exists is independent of whether or not we require Him/Her/It/They for moral behavior. Is there evidence that God exists, beyond the unreliable mythology that is the Bible? Dawkins answers this question in the second part of the book, which is devoted to science and evolution.This is familiar territory to anyone who has read Dawkins previous works, yet it is more concisely expressed. He systematically demonstrates the superfluousness of the God hypothesis with clarity and fascinating examples from biology. The complexity of life cannot be explained by random chance, or by the invocation of a designer that must necessarily be more complex than the life it is meant to explain, but rather by the slow accumulation of mutations carried out over immense periods of time subject to the constraints of natural selection.Chapter 11 is one of the best parts of the book, where Dawkins posits evolutionary explanations for religion itself. Superstition, hyper-active agency detection, and overactive pattern detection is built into the human mind for good evolutionary reasons (it’s better to think the rustling of leaves is a lion and be wrong than to ignore it and be eaten). The unfortunate byproduct of this is a tendency to see agency everywhere, manifested as belief in gods, spirits, angels, demons, mystical forces, etc.Dawkins wrap up the book with a reminder that the history of science is a relentless assault on common sense. Wherever things have seemed most obvious (the earth is stationary, life requires a designer), science has shown otherwise. It will continue to do so. With evolution as an incontrovertible fact (there is no alternative explanation that makes any sense, unless you really believe that all animals just popped into existence via divine creation), the religious have retreated into the mysteries of physics as “proof” of God's existence. Don’t follow them. As Dawkins wrote, “If you think you’ve found a gap in our understanding, which you hope might be filled by God, my advice is: ‘Look back through history and never bet against science.’”

This man is a highly respected, likeable professor in his field who teaches subjects very well. I have read all his books and got the value from his insights & position although I don't agree with his conclusions but nevertheless, join him in exploring on the edge subjects form all points of view. In debunking some of the religious literature, I am in agreement with what he presented as by its nature, all religion is incomplete and devoid of facts making those that choose it radical & defensive. For those that ponder & wonder, it works!

Outgrowing God: A Beginner's Guide by Richard Dawkins“Outgrowing God” examines the need to move away from the gods and to embrace the grandeur that is reality. Iconic intellect, best-selling author and fellow of the Royal Society, Richard Dawkins provides readers with an accessible guide on how to outgrow God. This clearly written 284-page book includes the following twelve chapters: 1. So many gods!, 2. But is it true?, 3. Myths and how they start, 4. The Good Book?, 5. Do we need God in order to be good?, 6. How do we decide what is good? 7. Surely there must be a designer? 8. Steps toward improbability, 9. Crystals and jigsaw puzzles, 10. Bottom up or top down? 11. Did we evolve to be religious? Did we evolve to be nice?, and 12. Taking courage from science.Positives:1. Well-written, well-reasoned book and accessible for the masses.2. An interesting topic, the need to outgrow “God”.3. Great use of logic and sound reason to persuade the readers at an accessible level. Dawkins is one the leading intellectuals of our time and provides readers of all levels with a useful resource. “The philosopher Bertrand Russell made the point with a vivid word picture. If I were to tell you, he said, that there is a china teapot in orbit around the sun, you could not disprove my claim. But failure to disprove something is not a good reason to believe it.”4. Examines the veracity of the Bible. “No serious scholar today thinks the gospels were written by eye-witnesses, and all agree that even Mark, the oldest of the four gospels, was written about 35 or 40 years after the death of Jesus. Luke and Matthew derived most of their stories from Mark, plus some from a lost Greek document known as ‘Q’. Everything that is in the gospels suffered from decades of word-of-mouth retelling, Chinese-Whispery distortion and exaggeration before those four texts were finally written down.”5. Some thoughts are quite compelling. “When you have a choice of two possibilities, always choose the less miraculous.”6. Examines how myths get started by assessing the Old Testament. “The stories of Adam and Eve, and of Noah and his Ark, are not history, and no educated theologian thinks they are. Like countless such stories from all over the world, they are ‘myths’.”7. Facts are troublesome to the religious. “Genesis says Abraham owned camels. But archaeological evidence shows that the camel was not domesticated until many centuries after Abraham is supposed to have died. Camels had, though, been domesticated by the time of the captivity in Babylon, which is when the book of Genesis was actually written.” Bonus example, “the Book of Mormon explains in detail that Native Americans are descended from Israelites who migrated to North America around 600 BC. As if it weren’t obvious, DNA evidence conclusively shows this to be false.”8. Provides examples of immoral stories in the Bible. “So God, through Moses, ordered each Levite to pick up a sword and kill as many of the other tribesmen as they could. This amounted to a total of about three thousand dead.” Bonus example, “Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man. (Numbers 31: 17–18)”9. Examines morals and morality and defines what good is as opposed to bad. “My theory is that the more plausible the threat, the less horrific it needs to be.”10. The grand theory of evolution in the masterful hands of Dawkins. “We have evolved moral values, inherited from our remote ancestors.” “What Darwin brilliantly realized is that you don’t need the human selector. Nature does the job all by itself, and has been doing it for hundreds of millions of years.”11. Is the world designed? Tackling the bog questions. “The famous German scientist Hermann von Helmholtz (he was both a medical doctor and a pioneering physicist) once said that if a designer had presented him with the vertebrate eye he would have sent it back.” “Designers need an explanation, just as watches do.”12. Examines improbability. “When we say something is improbable we mean it’s very unlikely to just happen by random chance.”13. The growth of cells. “So it was ultimately our DNA that determined how each one of us developed from a single cell into a baby, and then grew into what we are now.”14. Describes the differences between bottom up and top down approaches. “For our purposes, we just need to understand that embryonic development, the process by which bodies are built, is a bottom-up process. Like the way termite mounds are built, or flocks of starlings are coordinated. There is no blueprint. Instead, every cell in the developing embryo follows its own little local rules, like individual termites building a mud cathedral or individual starlings in a wheeling flock.”15. Natural selection. “Natural selection has built into our brains a tendency to notice patterns such as sequences: what follows what. We notice that thunder follows lightning, rain follows after grey clouds gather, crops don’t grow if there is no rain.” Bonus, “Useless or superstitious beliefs, like the need to pray five times a day, or the need to sacrifice a goat to cure malaria, get passed on as a byproduct of sensible beliefs – or rather, as a byproduct of child brains being shaped by natural selection to believe parents, teachers, priests and other elders. And that is favoured by natural selection, because much of what elders tell children is sensible.”16. The God of the Gaps. “Wherever there is a gap in our understanding, people try to plug the gap with God. But the trouble with gaps is that science has the annoying habit of coming along and filling them.”17. The tendency of science to upset common sense. “They overlooked the wonderful bottom-up explanation for what seemed, wrongly, to have top-down creation written all over it. The fact that the true explanation is so blindingly simple meant that it took even more courage to pursue it and work it out in detail. Natural selection evaded all those brilliant minds precisely because it is so simple.”18. The steps of courage to take on the road to atheism.19. Photo inserts included.Negatives:1. Nothing really new here, in fact much has been done better including by Dawkins himself.2. Limited use of visual supplementary material (outside of the photo inserts), that is very few charts and diagrams to complement the narrative.3. “The great Thomas Jefferson, third President of the United States and the main author of the US constitution, kept slaves. Actually, James Madison was the main author of the US Constitution.4. No formal bibliography.5. Dawkins writes with clarity but not with panache.In summary, your enjoyment of this book is directly proportional to your expectations. I must admit I was expecting more so I was left slightly disappointed. That said, even average vanilla ice cream is still above average enjoyment. Dawkins writes with clarity and makes the compelling arguments that we must outgrow “God”. Agreed with all his conclusions just was hoping for more. I recommend it but enjoyment will vary with expectations.Further suggestions: “The God Delusion” by the same author, “God is not Great” by Christopher Hitchens, “Beyond God - Why Religions are False, Outdated and Dangerous” by Peter Klein, “God: The Most Unpleasant Character in All Fiction” by Dan Barker, “Drunk with Blood: God’s Killings in the Bible” by Steve Wells, “Alpha God” by Hector Garcia, “The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture” by Darrel Ray, “The Christian Delusion” and “The Case Against Miracles” by John W. Loftus, “Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible” by Jerry A. Coyne, “God and the Multiverse” by Victor J. Stenger, “Why People Believe Weird Things” by Michael Shermer, “The Soul Fallacy” by Julien Musolino, “Nonbeliever Nation” by David Niose, “Freethinkers” by Susan Jacoby, “Nailed” by David Fitzgerald, and “Think” by Guy P. Harrison.

He explains things of science to his not so scientific audience that is understandable and makes sense! Not unlike his writing of ‘The God Delusion. This book is highly recommended for folks who need some answers other than those provided by superstitions. Easy to read and relatively short!

Religious people should take note - this book will convince you otherwise. It leaves little convincing proof of god. Great book.

“...cut yourself adrift from comforting, tame, apparent certainties and embrace the wild truth” ~RDDawkins can get carried away with his science writing, often forgetting that not all of us are versed in the vernacular - but not here. Here, in theology, he writes with meticulous intent. Imagine Einstein speaking to a class of college freshmen, not just blurting out E=mc2, but rather taking the time to explain that “E” represents “energy” and “m” represents “mass” and “c” represents the speed of light, and that the speed of light is 186,000 miles/second. Dawkins isn’t speaking down to us, he’s quite eloquently lifting us up, wielding his unassailable logic with phenomenal grace and clarity. This is a primer for critical thinkers and those who may be wavering at the threshold of reason.

Recebi hoje 22/04/2024. Livro de segunda mão, de capa dura e sobrecapa, em excelente estado de conservação. Está muito bem conservado e limpo.

Again a masterpiece. Where other books are heavy with scientific terminologies, this one is more easy to read and can be read by even a layperson. This kind of book is required to spread science and rationality among general people. I really loved it.

Richard Dawkins one of the best

Tal como sugiere el título, no es un libro pensado para los que ya han leído "The God Delusion" ("El Espejismo de Dios").Pero incluso este tipo de lector encontrará alguna perla de conocimiento nueva.En cambio, el libro es perfecto para jóvenes (o niños muy espabilados) con inquietudes que tienen que ver con la educación religiosa que hayan podido recibir.Dawkins nunca intenta sustituir una indoctrinación por otra. Su enfoque aquí - como en todos sus libros - es a la vez informar sobre hechos establecidos científicamente y luego invitar al lector para que saque sus propias conclusiones.

I love the book. Unfortunately it arrived without the "dust jacket". See the photo c.f. Amazon.ca.