Outgrowing God: A Beginner's Guide

Simplifying the complex! Exactly! Dawkins again managed to clarify further why we must move on, in order to advance/evolve our minds.

“...cut yourself adrift from comforting, tame, apparent certainties and embrace the wild truth” ~RD Dawkins 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.

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.

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!

A great read not only for youth, but also for those interested in exploring evolutionary biology from a world renown leader in the field of atheism. Highly recommended!

This book. Plus YouTube lectures. You’ll be on your way to your parters house with lots of questions.

Religion, like politics and sex, are subjective and one believes what they believe and work from there. Almost no one studies religion for years and compares and then decides to be this or that, almost everyone is what they became as kids, no coincidence, and this book targets a younger audience, as well as older ones, with some reasons to question it. It may not convince believers but it's worth considering and knowing. After all, what ever you believe, roughly 80% of the rest of the world thinks you're wrong, yet every person thinks somehow that they are right and the others are wrong, which doesn't trouble people as much as it should!

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!

Simple and lucid explanation, easy reading for youngsters. Worth knowing the other side of piety. Enjoying it.

Outgrowing God – or “The God Dillusion Lite” as you might call it, may have a slight impediment in its mission to educate the god-fearing masses in the folly of their beliefs and practices. Most of the people who read it will already be atheists or agnostics. At least that’s what I think. I may be wrong. So the book could languish largely unread by those “blessed” with blind faith who themselves will never say “I may be wrong”. I challenge those people to read the book. It can’t do any harm to think, can it? I thought that my own reading of the book would have an element of “preaching to the choir” (pardon the pun) as I need little convincing of the case, aligned as it is to my own take on the subject. Some of the arguments for Darwinism came across to me as labouring the point, but I was happy to go with the flow, and the author’s numerous examples are interesting in their own right. Dawkins then extrapolates the discussion by pointing out how ground-breaking Darwinism was at the time it came out and suggesting that in the future some mind-boggling science may in turn become the accepted knowledge of tomorrow. He gives some thought-provoking examples of this stuff, including the Multiverse. I think that the book has something for everyone across the belief spectrum and I would encourage everyone to read it. It’s written in an easily accessible style and it’s not heavy going at all. After all, there might be a lot of truth and wisdom in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, but I wouldn’t take it as gospel.

Very easy to understand. It reads like you’re having a conversation with Mr. Dawkins. It’s definitely a “beginners guide” but I enjoyed it as an adult.

Such a well thought out book Done with quiet thought provoking analysis, but always with respect to humans of all faiths or no faith at all. His compliment to science as the guide to truth is very revealing

Richard Dawkins one of the best