“Irreligion”, John Allen Paulos

I have a crush on this book. It’s so neat and clever and pretty and fits nicely into any handbag – ok, maybe it’s the perfect accessory rather than a crush, but “Irreligion” is definitely a book any religious skeptic will always want around.

John Allen Paulos is a mathematician-atheist who has collected, like Dawkins, the most common arguments for the existence of God, and, like Dawkins, he refutes them one by one in a hugely entertaining way. Some of them I understood a lot better in the short and sweet form presented here, even though there is nothing original in them. Paulos’ witty style, spiced with personal anecdotes was a pleasure to follow and quotes like “much of theology [...] is a kind of verbal magic show” are worth remembering.

I cannot possibly badmouth the God Delusion, but at some time in almost any long-term (reading) relationship comes the point where you like to flirt with the cheeky book next door because it makes you laugh in unexpected places and gives you just what you needed in a lighter and quicker way.

“Francis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code”, Matt Ridley

I enjoyed this book immensely! Biographies of brilliant people might be a completely untapped source of reading pleasure for me. Surely, a lot of it is due to Ridley’s easy style and entertaining anecdotes; I have only read his “Genome” and can’t remember how I felt about it, but I’ll definitely read more of his works in the future.

But what I loved the most was finding out about this astonishing man, who I always thought had stood in Watson’s shadow, which was apparently not the case at all.

I was so enamoured with Crick by half-way through the book that I was totally shocked by the revelations about his radical views (at least he held them in the 1960s and 70s) on races, eugenics and sterilisation of “genetically inferior” people. I don’t know what to do with this information and it seems like neither did Ridley. It is mentioned dutifully but the author doesn’t really take a position and maybe that is not the job of a biographer. As I uneasily read on about this man with the incredible imagination, admiration gained the upper hand again and by the end I cried when he dies.

The fact that Crick was a raging (yes!) atheist helped, of course, but the main reason for liking him is expressed in this last sentence of the epilogue: “He would have liked to find the seat of consciousness and to see the retreat of religion. He had to settle for explaining life.”

“A Devil’s Chaplain”, Richard Dawkins

This book for me was mostly a slightly embarrassing reminder of how tastes and opinions change. I had bought and read only some of the essays published in this book in 2002. My review of it was published in our college newspaper. I am too afraid to go back and read it in full, but I remember my dislike of Dawkins and pencilled notes in the book itself remind me how derogatory and one-sided I found the author and his book.

I have since come full circle on the Dawkins Appreciation Curve and embrace his justified arrogance and argumentative strength. This book is a great way to start into Dawkins’ writing as this collection offers essays on all his topics of interest and allows the reader to choose one or all to read up on in more depth.

Most of his arguments concerning religion are familiar to me now from the “The God Delusion” and some of his evolutionary viewpoints are probably better described in the books devoted completely to that particular topic. It was very interesting, however, to read the essays in the section on Stephen Jay Gould, Dawkins’ most publicised adversary. I’ve always wanted to know where their main conflicts lie and even though it’s still hard to grasp from a few forewords to books and book reviews, at least I gained a little insight.

One thing I still cringe about was the letter to his daughter on her tenth birthday, which concludes the book. Maybe I’m just not aware of the tone in which to address a child of that age, but this does not seem to be it. It is a mixture between oversimplification and a patronising voice on one hand, extremely abstract ideas and sentences on the other hand.

The eulogies and lament, predictably, brought a few tears to my eyes and I step a good bit away from my previous criticism of coldheartedness on hearing of the death of a close friend.

I do think, though, prompted by the letter to his daughter and his brief excursion into travel writing about a trip to Africa, that Dawkins should not meddle in styles of writing other than the one he has so obviously mastered: biting, fiercely intelligent, thought-provoking and awe-inspiring science writing.

I have now erased all my pencil marks.

“Why People Believe Weird Things”, Michael Shermer

I thought this book might fit nicely into my new-found love for denouncing idiots but it turns out Shermer is actually quite gentle as a Skeptic.

The first and second part of this book are very enjoyable as we learn about common characteristics of cults and movements like the Satanic panic of the 1980s and the witch hunts. The recovered memory scam, too, was really interesting to read about.

Unfortunately, these first parts are the only ones in which Shermer actually addresses the question posed in the title – the rest of the book he goes into his pet peeves in way too much detail.

Sure, the section on creationism was interesting but still slightly too long. It is nice, however, to see a bullet point style list of creationist “arguments” and a scientist’s replies. The arguments are known but nicely summarised.

The section on Holocaust denial is useful as I wasn’t aware of an organised movement of those pseudo-historians. My issues with this section are that a) it is much too detailed for anyone but other Holocaust historians – especially the section of biographies of some deniers screams “I’m a Holocaust scholar, this is what I know about”, rather than “this is what you should know about”, and b) it does not mention anywhere why it is that People Believe these Weird Things.

After reading and totally subscribing to Richard Dawkins’ “God Delusion”, I was also frustrated with Shermer’s attitude to religion – as a former born-again Christian he traipses around its perceived territory, advocating non-overlapping magisteria and giving a lot of what Dawkins calls undue respect.

In the last section, Shermer loses the plot and goes off on a tangent on some physicist with a religiously coloured theory of the universe. The Weird Thing is that Shermer himself now draws on arguments that I could only describe as pseudoscience to explain why this physicist (Frank J. Tipler) believes the things he does. His paragraphs on sibling position seemed especially far-fetched.

With this ironic note Shermer ends a book that started promising but got harder to read and less credible towards the end.

“The God Delusion”, Richard Dawkins

The book cover mentions that Richard Dawkins has recently been voted one of the top three intellectuals alive today and it just makes so much sense. He is effortlessly academic and challenging in his writing style, his arguments and his topics and were it not so desperately ironic considering the subject of this particular book, I would worship him.

Some years ago, on carelessly flicking through “A Devil’s Chaplain”, I got offended at Dawkins’ lack of tolerance for other people’s opinions but now I think I understand what he means when he argues that God is indeed a delusion and that religion deserves no undue respect, no tip-toeing around misconceived notions and no special status in matters of opinion. Dawkins covers it all here, all the angles from which religious zealots could possibly attack his arguments. Creationism is dealt with, but, refreshingly, does not become the main focus of the book as we move from the poverty of the agnostic stance to deconstructed arguments for the existence of God to the roots of religion and much more.

“What is the primitively advantageous trait that sometimes misfires to generate religion?” he asks, and this wonderfully irreverent tone continues throughout the book. While he sometimes seems to go out of his way to use words like “outbreak” or “infested” to show his view of religion as an unfortunate condition, this is probably done to desensitise people, or in his own words, raise the reader’s consciousness.

Dawkins brilliantly illustrates the ridiculous idea of deriving morality from scripture: if religious leaders argue that some passages of the Bible are symbolic, surely the decision of which parts those are and which are to be taken literally is just as easily made by an atheist as it certainly can’t be based on the text itself.

This book is necessary as a loud counterpart to too many religious fanatics, who apparently are finding a foothold in Britain, too.

The last chapter describes how science and a sense of wonder can easily replace and surpass religion as a source of consolation and inspiration. Bill Bryson’s “A Short History of Nearly Everything” and “The God Delusion” have made me realise that I could never be anything but an atheist and thanks to this book I have the knowledge to back it up and the feeling that this is a beautiful state of affairs.

“A Short History of Nearly Everything”, Bill Bryson

When I read this book it changed my life. Then again, reading this book and my life changing may have been co-incidental but when I had finished “A Short History…” I knew that I was

a) completely in awe of science, nature (not the journals) and chance and

b) a full-blown atheist.

Bryson considers each major area of science at a time and walks the reader through all its major achievements and discoveries. It takes a lovely personal spin on things as he gives the big names personalities and stories, and reminds us how the real thinker behind an idea is often not credited.

Being a non-scientist, Bryson manages to take us to great scientific depths without ever becoming too technical, so this book is ideal for anyone with a respect or a curiosity for science or anyone who just needs a little perspective on human life.

The cover promises a story full of “wonder and delight” – true, but given the frequent reminders of various disasters that, statistically, should soon befall the Earth, one might add “panic” to the feelings this book inspires.

But given the amazing string of coincidences that lead to life being here in the first place, we shouldn’t really complain if this lucky streak were to end.

This book has some brilliant quotes, like calling humans “the living universe’s supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously”.

Bryson is obviously a very good travel writer, but taking a stroll through the universe with him is undoubtedly my best Bryson-reading experience.