Category: autobiography

Richard Dawkins on the 20th anniversary of The God Delusion

October 2, 2026 • 9:30 am

The God Delusion came out in 2006, two years after Harris’s The End of Faith, a year before Hitchens’s God is Not Great., and the same year as Harris’s followup book, Letter to a Christian Nation. (Dan Dennett’s Breaking the Spell also came out in 2006, but I consider that a different kind of book from these.)

The four books together could be considered the foundation of “New Atheism”, which is pretty much like “old atheism” save that it leveled more aggressive attacks on religion, emphasizing its harms, and was more science-oriented than was the atheism of, say, Robert Ingersoll. (Carl Sagan wasn’t quite so aggressive against faith, but did use science to attack religion.). Now I can’t prove that these books helped promote America’s continuing rejection of faith, instantiated in the rise of the “nones,” but a lot of people have told me that this was indeed the case.

What I can say is not the case that “New Atheism” is dead. That’s like saying that “Mendelian genetics is dead”: it was an advance that changed a lot of minds, and it’s been assimilated into the culture as we move on. The blockheads who proclaim that “New Atheism is dead” are simply saying that “the arguments against faith by Dawkins et al. fail to embrace woke-ish social justice”. (This led to the lame movement “Atheism Plus”, which really is dead except in those few people who still insist that arguments against religion and gods must perforce embrace their preferred moral philosophy.)

At any rate, Dawkins has just published in the Torygraph his two-decade retrospective on The God Delusion, and you can read it for free by clicking on the headline below.  He claims no particular expertise in physics, but does show the intellectual vacuity of “scientific” evidence for God I discussed the other day, like the “fine-tuning” and “Big Bang” arguments.

If clicking on the headline doesn’t work, you can find the article archived here.

You can (and should) read the whole thing, but I’ll give a few choice quotes about arguments for God that are being resurrected by the likes of Stephen Meyer and Ross Douthat:

On Oct 2 it will be 20 years since The God Delusion was published. Coincidentally, books by Sam Harris, Dan Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens came out at around the same time. This led someone (not any of the four of us) to invent “New Atheism” as a “project”.

We wrote our books independently without collusion, and as far as we were concerned there was no such project. It was sad that the old arguments needed to be restated. Even sadder, they still need to be re-stated, in 2026.

The delusion of God will not lie down. Partly because it serves as a comfort blanket for those whose idea of logic takes the form, “life would be intolerable without X, therefore X must exist”. Then there’s the Great Stalin Syllogism: “Stalin was an atheist. Stalin was a horrible man. Therefore God exists.” The variant that begins, “Hitler was an atheist” is equally illogical, and therefore untouched by the fact that he wasn’t.

My guess is that the “life will be intolerable without X” argument is the one underlying the weakness of the media for religion, including places like the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Free Press. These places are too savvy to tout the “scientific” arguments for God. Instead, they proclaim the existence of a “god-shaped hole” in our minds, ergo there must be a god which fits that hole.

Of more interest is the so-called argument from design. The biological version nowadays appeals only to those whose mental “nowadays” predates 1859. Darwin mortally wounded it, and his successors finished the job. To Darwin’s sword I can add only pinpricks such as the following. If God designed cheetahs to be beautifully effective killers of gazelles, and if God designed gazelles to be beautifully effective escapers from cheetahs, whose side is God on? Is he a sadist who enjoys the spectator sport?

Of more interest is the so-called argument from design. The biological version nowadays appeals only to those whose mental “nowadays” predates 1859. Darwin mortally wounded it, and his successors finished the job. To Darwin’s sword I can add only pinpricks such as the following. If God designed cheetahs to be beautifully effective killers of gazelles, and if God designed gazelles to be beautifully effective escapers from cheetahs, whose side is God on? Is he a sadist who enjoys the spectator sport?

But the arguments below still have a puff of stale air in their sails:

If Paley’s relative judgment is now reversed, it is not because the cosmology version of the argument from design has grown any more powerful. Rather it is that the biological version has disappeared altogether. If Paley had lived after Darwin, he would probably have agreed, for his knowledge of biology was deep and detailed.

What, then, of the cosmology version today? Our universe began in a singularity some 13.8 billion years ago. The “Let there be light” moment – when conditions cooled enough for electrons to bond with nuclei, forming the first neutral atoms – came about a quarter of a million years later.
There was then a further delay of about nine billion years before the sun (and Earth) came into existence. In a triumph of wishful thinking, this sequence of events is seen by some as a vindication of the Book of Genesis. Seriously!
Nobody knows what came before the universe. A strong school of thought among physicists denies the very word “before”, because time itself began in the Big Bang. Commonsense abhors this paradox, but common sense evolved to think no more deeply than was needed to survive and reproduce.

. . .Not all physicists accept the premise of the fine-tuning argument. See Victor Stenger’s The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning. Some suggest that it works only if you twiddle one knob at a time. If you turn several knobs together, there could be a very large number of combinations of settings that yield biologically promising universes.

Other physicists, including Martin Rees himself, point out that the currently favoured theory of universe inflation predicts the existence of a multiverse embracing huge numbers of universes. A small minority of these universes happen to have their knobs set to biology-favouring values. We obviously have to be sitting in one of that minority, because here we are – the so-called anthropic principle.

As a biologist, I lack authority to enter this debate. I agree with Paley that the biological argument from design was the big one. Darwin’s solution has correspondingly huge significance. It inspires confidence that the relatively minor cosmological version will in due course yield.

But of course the argument from design is still with us, albeit in a more sophisticated form. It is “the argument from design of features that could not have arisen in a continuously adaptive step-by-step way.” In other words, say the proponents of this nonsense, now known as “intelligent design” (“ID”), there are adaptive features of organisms that could not have arisen by natural selection itself.  All the examples touted so far, including the bacterial flagellum and blood clotting, now have plausible scenarios of origin by selection. Yet ID hangs on. That is not because its arguments are plausible. I have never seen anybody make “scientific” arguments for God, including ID, who wasn’t a believer themselves. If those arguments were plausible, we’d see a ton of avowed atheists suddenly becoming religious, but that doesn’t happen.

There’s a lot more in the piece, including Richard’s answer to the claim that he’s a cultural Christian, ergo God, but I’ll mention just one more response:

“But Dawkins,” the critics cry. “If you’d only read your theology you’d know that God is not complex at all. It’s just Theology 101. God is profoundly simple.”

Ah yes, so simple that he’s capable of listening to a billion prayers simultaneously. So simple he has the bandwidth to judge each and every sin on its merits. So simple that “the very hairs of your head are numbered” and not a single sparrow falls to the ground without his knowledge. All this on top of knowing exactly how to fine-tune the laws and constants of physics to ensure our eventual existence. Ah me, theology. Is it actually a subject at all?

Well, as Dan Barker said, “Theology is a subject without an object.”

Is New Atheism dead? Nope, not at all. It lives on in the minds of every erstwhile believer who, having read the arguments of Dawkins & Co., realized that there’s no more evidence for God than there is for the Loch Ness Monster.

Richard ends his piece with this sentence, “Twenty years on, I stand by what I wrote in The God Delusion.”

If you are reasonably smart, how can you possibly see a rational person’s unwavering belief in God as anything other than a weakness of mind or character? (I am excluding those who were brainwashed into having faith.)

Andrzej’s new book

June 22, 2026 • 10:45 am

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej has written a new book, whose cover is below (the title translates to The Blue Stone of  Sisyphus. Sadly, it’s unlikely to be translated into English).  I had an idea that this might be a memoir or autobiography, but I knew that Andrzej, who has had a varied and fascinating life (for example, as a newborn his life was saved by a Nazi doctor), could not limit his writing to autobiographical details. I asked him what it was about and when it would appear, and got this reply:

I still don’t know when the book will be published, probably not until the fall. And what it actually is, I don’t really know myself, because it’s supposedly a memoir, partly literature (but with zero fiction), partly essays, because there’s a lot of politics in it. A troublesome mix for a bookseller.
And I was pleased to see that the cover featured a picture that I took on January 4, 2014, on my first visit to Andrzej and Malgorzata (Andrzej had asked me about the photo before, and I said SURE!)

 

 

I remember that we were all walking together, and I dropped behind them.  When they walked ahead in a loving pose, I couldn’t resist taking the photo. Andrzej remembered the occasion but got the date slightly wrong:

As I recall, it was the fall of 2013, and we were at the Dobrzyń harbor. We wanted to show you the place where we had scattered Małgorzata’s mother ashes, and the hill where the stronghold had once stood when the Teutonic Order was brought here. You fell behind because you were taking photos of some ducks, and we went ahead, talking about our own concerns.

 

And while I’m at it, I’ll add my other favorite picture of my surrogate parents, along with the late Cyrus on the porch and Hili at lower left. This was taken on July 24, 2024. Good times.

 

Discussion thread: autobiographical

August 1, 2022 • 10:50 am

I’m feeling drained and a bit low (I awoke at 2 a.m. and couldn’t get back to sleep), and really have nothing to say. So I thought I’d start a discussion thread. A suggested topic is this: “What was the best, or worst, or most memorable day of your life?”

I was led to this by an old memory that popped up for no apparent reason, a moment that was way back in 1971, the year I graduated from college. It wasn’t the best or worst day of my life, and maybe not even the most emotional or memorable, but somehow it sticks in my mind. I’ll recount it—not as a way of bragging—but to show how overwork in college nearly ruined me.

I entered William and Mary in 1967, and had some really stimulating courses. Those included biology (8 a.m. on the first day of school), and, being in the Honors Program, I got to take the equivalent of small seminars on Greek plays, as well as calculus, American literature, and other courses I can’t recall.

I don’t remember working especially hard, but I did do well, getting straight A’s.  And yet I ha a normal social life: going out to parties, drinking (we had to get upperclassmen to buy booze for us), and schmoozing a lot on the weekends.  But somehow that perfect academic record got its hooks into me. The next semester I worked a bit harder, and got straight A’s again.

By sophomore year, when I started taking advanced biology courses, as well as fine arts and chemistry, I was working even harder. I worked mainly because I loved the courses, but also because I needed to be the best—not just in every class, but on every test. (I got only one “B” on a test in my entire college career.) I loved the courses: philosophy, Old English, Beowulf, Ethics, Honors English, and Organic Chemistry, but I also killed myself trying to master the material.

By junior year it was well known that just two students in my class of 969 had maintained straight As; I was one and a sorority girl (a friend and a cheerleader) was another. But then I heard that she got a “B” in one course. That put me on top.  And that’s where I stayed, working 7 days a week, and from after breakfast (with meal breaks) to 11 pm. I did some socializing (I have a lot of anecdotes from my college years, including run-ins with cops, peace demonstrations, and the like), but if you looked up the definition of “grind” in the dictionary then, you’d find my picture.

By the second semester of senior year, my record was still perfect, both on tests and course grades, and I managed to take courses in which success was almost guaranteed: independent research and the like.  Finally, in June, I had my last final exam, and I knew I aced it.  I was going to be valedictorian, and had killed myself for four years to accomplish that. My overwork was unhealthy, of course: though I wasn’t really working for grades, I lost a girlfriend because of my obsessive work ethic, and didn’t have as much fun as other people. I remember my dad telling me, “Would it kill you to get a ‘B’ once in a while?” (Imagine a parent saying that!)

My last final exam ended in on a sunny spring afternoon, and all at once a huge weight dropped from me. It was over, and I knew that I never wanted to go through that again. I went to the Sunken Garden, a “sunken” meadow that’s the epicenter of the College, and lay down on the grass. All of a sudden I started sobbing, and I couldn’t stop. It was the sudden lifting of all the anxiety that had plagued me for four years. I’ll never forget that moment.

Here’s what the Sunken Garden look like: the campus of William and Mary is beautiful. I still remember where I lay down, and I’ve put an arrow there: on the inclined slope on the east side.

Two sequelae:

  1. Yes, I was valedictorian, and was awarded the Lord Botetourt Medal for the highest academic achievement in my class. In the photo below I am holding it: it’s a lovely gold medallion with my name and graduation year etched on the edge. Attaining that was, perhaps, the hardest thing I ever did.  Was  it worth it? In some sense, yes, because my record got me into good grad schools as well as an NSF predoctoral fellowship, making me more attractive to grad schools.  Normally the valedictorian gets awarded the medal onstage at graduation, and says a few words, but since I was a “radical”, known for being a hippie peacenik, they decided to keep me off the dais. They simply called out my name from the stage and asked me to stand up. I did stand up, wearing a black armband because of the war, and I raised my right arm high in the air, making a “black power” fist. That act cost me a summer job that year. When I applied to work at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, I didn’t get the job as a summer researcher, and I heard it was because I was that “radical guy who made the gesture at graduation.” Or at least that’s what I was told.
  2. I remember thinking, as I lay on the grass, that “Somehow, I am going to find a way to never get a grade again.” And so it happened. When I got to Harvard, we had two days of written tests in various subjects, which were meant to determine for your advisory committee which courses you needed to take. I placed out of everything, which meant that I wasn’t required to take any courses; I could just do research. But of course I did take courses, for there will still gaps in my background. So I took classes in probability theory, differential equations, biostatistics, population genetics, and so on. But in each course I told the instructor I was auditing it, and I still did the homework and, if the instructor was willing, got my answers corrected. But none of the courses were recorded on my transcript: I simply signed up for four “research” courses each quarter.  I took these classes for two years, not doing much research and then later, while I was working in the lab, organized reading classes with my fellow grad students (Russ Lande and I, for example, met every week for a year, working our way through Crow and Kimura’s Theoretical Population Genetics. I don’t think I could do that now.)

I’m not sure why I’m writing this, as it’s autobiographical and may not stimulate any discussion, but I’m hoping readers can highlight a memorable moment of their lives—perhaps the most memorable. Lying in the Sunken Garden, sobbing with relief, is something I’ll never forget. And yes, being #1 in my class was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, though if you asked me what I see as the academic thing I’m proudest of, it would be having written Speciation with Allen Orr. I was not proud of being a workaholic.

So, it’s your turn. I’m curious if people will comment (I hope so) and what they will say if they do.