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Summary: Hope for Humanity
Review: *Rocking* good book. It's uplifting to read words written by someone so rational and gutsy. Compels one to do good in this world.
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Summary: Brilliant!
Review: A 'Devil's Chaplain' is a marvellous read - witty, insightful, and, of course, exquisitely written. North Americans familiar with Dawkins' science writing will have the opportunity to savour his coruscating humour and poignant tributes their British cousins have enjoyed over the years. I highly recommend it. Another 5 Stars for Dawkins! (but I am curious why the average stars don't reflect the actual ratings).
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Summary: The Theological Insult of Limited Perception
Review: A cogent mind will find evolution a more divine, holy, miraculous and compelling idea than any non-evidentiary fairy tales, however fetching they might be as literature. Bravo Dawkins, again.
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Summary: Examining the Irrational- A Scientific Approach
Review: A very well thought out presentation by Mr. Dawkins. This is the science of evolution (among numerous other things) neatly wrapped in a continuum of rational thought and striking clarity. If you seek truth over "revelation" this book is a must.
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Summary: A very good group of essays
Review: At some point, you begin to wonder if Dawkins is taking on imaginary foes when you read about the folks promoting "intelligent design" and other chicanery, and then you take a look out on the Internet and you find that there are all manner of Americans who think that evolution is a "theory." It did not take long for me to find someone at a "legitimate" fundamentalist site taking one of Dawkins' quotes out of context to imply that he supported the notion. There is no debate folks, just people who are ill-informed or willfully ignorant.
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Summary: Startling Sermons
Review: Charles Darwin said that there was grandeur in his view of life produced by natural selection, but it was not all a pretty picture. He wrote his friend Joseph Hooker in 1856: "What a book a Devil's Chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low and horridly cruel works of nature." Richard Dawkins has taken the quotation for the title of a collection of his writings, A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love (Houghton Mifflin). Darwin also wrote of a particular wasp: "I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living body of caterpillars." But as Darwin (and Dawkins) would remind us, the evolutionary process has produced wonderfully designed creatures, and a wasp who cares for its young by letting them hatch within a hapless caterpillar is simply doing a competent job of getting the young off to a good start. It might be distasteful to us (and should have been to a supreme being), but nature just doesn't care. It isn't kindness of the mother wasp, or cruelty to the caterpillar, but simply amoral nature.But as chaplain, Dawkins notes that while wasps and caterpillars can do nothing about such amorality, we can. "At the same time as I support Darwinism as a scientist, I am a passionate anti-Darwinian when it comes to politics and how we should conduct our human affairs." There is no inconsistency here any more than in the physician who studies cancer, but is bent on eliminating it. And as devil's chaplain, Dawkins urges us to use our evolution-given brains, reject the pacifiers of faith in immortality, and rejoice in our short lives because they are all we have. Dawkins, you see, besides being an eminent Darwinian whose books like The Blind Watchmaker have wonderfully well laid out what evolution means, is also possibly the world's most famous atheist. You will find here his views on religious beliefs and creationists (or their newest incarnation as advocates of Intelligent Design), of course, but on "alternative medicine," crystal healing, homeopathy, and so on. Besides the rants, there is good humor and some warm tributes to friendship, especially in his memorials to his friends Douglas Adams and Stephen Jay Gould. The final chapter, "A Prayer for My Daughter," is a letter he wrote to her when she turned ten, to let her know how he thought she should select what to believe. The great question to ask in all disputes: "What kind of evidence is there for that?" Readers will be reminded of the belligerence of Thomas Henry Huxley, "Darwin's Bulldog," but evolution is only one theme here. Included is his hilarious review of the book by the hoaxer Alan Sokal who submitted a nonsense paper to a postmodern journal and had it accepted. He rages against postmodernism, with its "all views are equal" stance making his scientific view equivalent to a voodoo view. He expresses his doubts about the jury system, and in a wonderful chapter ("Genes Aren't Us") discounts just how important genes are for personality. Another chapter makes us wonder at just how close we are to our ape cousins. Throughout, he is witty, and above all informative on a wide-range of subjects, not just on his refusal to accept what he sees as the diverse delusions of most of the world. Anyone who has admired his previous writings of science popularization will find these personal essays to be very appealing sermons from an accomplished chaplain.
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Summary: Good exploration of Dawkins - From All Sides!
Review: Dawkins new book is a broad ranging essay collection - spanning subjects from religon to Africa; from explanations of "memetics" to personal eulogies to admired colleagues, including antagonist Steven Jay Gould. I'm always skeptical of buying essay collections this wide ranging particularly from thinkers I'm used to reading whole books from. I've no regrets picking this gem up though. Truth be told I bought this book for a graduate paper I was writing and was planning on reading ony the few relevant articles (on which subject, I'll never tell!) The more I started reading those essays, though, the more I realized that this was a naive goal. Given Dawkins crystal clear writing, his wit, the excitement in how he explains things and the absolute diversity of these essays, I couldn't stop reading. Once I got Dawkins thoughts on postmodernism, I HAD to read his thoughts on religion, which led me to the included book reviews on Dawkins late antagonist Steven Jay Gould, which led me to... Before I knew it, though I didn't plan it this way, I'd not only finished the book but was dissapointed that there weren't more essays to read. The long and the short - what I'm saying is that this book is bound to please people of widely diverse interests as there are so many topics covered in this book (even a short, chiding essay about jury duty that will keep us former jurors howling). And those that have read Dawkins and think they know the man and his persona will find more dimensions to him than they ever thoght existed. His remarks on Gould's passing and the section thereon are moving as are his other eulogies. The only area I did not find agreeable is Dawkins hostility to religon, which I do not think is entirely undeserved (his essay on the illogic of religious perspectives on cloning is right on). Rather, I think that Dawkins has a tendency (a very real one) to go wildly overboard into an anti-religou tizzy. I wish he, like Gould, could learn to peacefully and nonzeolously agree to disagree with religion. And really, for those of us who've read Dawkins for years now, I think it is getting a little old. Other than that, no complaints. Buy the book. It is fun, interesting, and there is something in it for everyone. You'll love it - I promise!
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Summary: on his subject controversial - out of his subject sophmoric
Review: Dawkins within his field is always interesting and challenging - although the majority of scholarly opinion, especially in the US, is against him on many points. However, outside his field he often shows an assumption of expetise and seemingly intentional tendency to charicature his "oponent's" positions into straw men. He is often arguing, not against the instituions and destructive "memes" he imagines, but only against some, apparently, deeply ingrained conception of them which he, and in his defense most people, have. I am not religious, but as a student of philosophy (and I have to beg pardon for spelling and grammer as this is being done by a student of philosophy very pressed for time and procrastinating wildly), I am constantly baffled by what he gives as his understanding of these tradtions which seem to obssess him. Consider his arguments against Religion (which are really against the Judeo/Christian tradtion whose concepts of God and creation, for example, are very different from most others)in light of this (paraphrased from failing memory from one of the standard Introductions to Christianity: The Judeo Christuan tradition is characterized by the idea of a wholey transcendent God. It does not, like pagan traditions, seek to explain what is going on in nature and how it developed, but why there is anything in the first place. The classic forumulation of this is why there is something as opposed to nothing. God, for Christians, is not Jove. You do not find him on top of Mount Olympus and he is not visible in, nor directly behind, nature (although nature points to him in various ways). None of the mainline forms of Christianity have any problems with evolution. Nor do they believe it touches upon any of their doctrines. Look this up, many people are surprised by what mainline Christianity actually thinks about evolution. What Dawkins is arguing against is a type of fundamentalist Christianity found, as a theological position, almost exclusively among a vocal but tiny minority in the US South and Midwest. However, it represents a very wide spread misconception, even among religious people of what there traditions actually hold. It is certainly not the position of, for example, the Anglican Communion Dawkins grew up in - so it is hard not to suspect that he is just seting up straw men which appeal to popular misconceptions. Either that or he never bothered to find out what Christianity actually believes and is fighting against what his mother, aunt or local pastor taught him when he was about twelve What interesting arguments he makes regarding religious issues are generally centuries old. He seems unaware of this and puts them forward as if they are groundbreaking and devestating with embarrasingly sophmoric arrogance. These are generally regarding the problem of evil and religious puralism. These have been exhaustively covered by Theologians and Philosophers for centuries. Most christian traditions have developed very well reasoned positions on these questions which are very consistant within their systems. Actually, this was mainly done in the late Roman and middle ages(see Aquinas and Augustine). He actually even misses the most damning point of the problem of evil question (which has the technical name "Theodicy"). It is not that evolution shows what we would call amorality, if not evil, being ingrained in the very heart of nature itself, which he believes the Bible says is inherently good. This actually is exactly what most Christian doctrines already hold - it is the whole concept of the originally good creation falling, being emersed and ingrained with sin, and having to be redeamed. It is this redeamed, originally intended, nature, rather than the existing nature that Christian doctrine confusingly refers to as natural order - and inherently good. This natural order shows through imperfectly in nature and most specificaly in the asperations and moral sense of man. Mankind, it holds, through the grace of God has a sense of this order - albeit a very imperfect sense. That this develops in one way or another is irrelevant in these traditions as all creation, its laws and processes proceed from the trancendant God who is not a part of nature or equal to the sum or any of its laws, but put these laws in motion outside them. The real issue about Evil for Christians is why a loving all powerful God would allow evil in the first place not where it shows up in the present fallen nature. They already believe it is everywhere and man has to continually struggle to rise above it.
Rating: 
Summary: Before you criticize you should be informed
Review: Dawkins, in the words of Michael Ruse, seems to have the moral purity--some would say moral rigidity--of a fundamentalist Christian or a committed feminist. As Michael Ruse also said in a review of this book in American Scientist Journal Vol. 91(6):554-556, Nov-Dec 03. "...I myself share just about every bit of Dawkins's nonbelief..." but Ruse notes that he would like to see Dawkins take Christianity as seriously as he expects Christianity to take Darwinism and would also like him to spell out the arguments for "the incompatibility of science (Darwinism especially) and religion (Christianity especially). So long as his understanding of Christianity remains at the sophomoric level, Dawkins does not deserve full attention." I agree with this review. Dawkins seems to have never studied Christianity in much detail or he would not make so many major mistakes about what Christians believe. Before you criticize you should be informed. I challenge Dawkins to carefully study both sides and then write an informed review. Two other main concerns are apparent. 1) Dawkins never defines "evolution," so when pressed he can always refer to some definition that everybody agrees with, including creationists, such as "change over time" or "natural selection" or , "common descent" (because of evidence of observed variations in animals with a common pair of ancestors), "a change in allele frequencies within a gene pool," etc. 2) He is simply responding to the cry of "wolf" (in this case "creationists") and making wild claims such as, if students are told that some people believe that God created us, business will, in mass, move out of a state that allows this foolishness. His examples of "overwhelming evidence." for slow Darwinism are anything but, and have been long ago refuted.
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Summary: Why do creationists cheat?
Review: I am a big fan of Dawkins, and I enjoyed this book very much indeed as "fun" reading as opposed the the more serious reading that The Selfish Gene, and especially his masterpiece, the Phenotype requires.
So I read these reviews and find that one person has entered at least 3 reviews that I have read in this chain of reviews. He is clearly a creationist and simply makes the same points over and over again -- using the same words even many times, such as "sinners (we all are)".
What's the point? To average down the rating given to this book? Is it a form of preaching? Why is it that these people find it so necessary to shrilly drum their message into the rest of us? Is their salvation dependent on how many of the rest of us they can get to agree with them? And worse, and the reason for this review, is why oh why, with God on their side, do they feel compelled to cheat and post multiple reviews?
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