The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins has some definite strengths. It is clear and easy to understand. It is written with a great deal of vigor. Some atheists will doubtless enjoy his take-no-prisoners criticisms of religion. It is funny in places. I laughed a great deal when reading it. Some of the humor seems to be intentional. In discussing an experiment to study the effects of prayer for heart patients he imagines a Bob Newhart style dialogue between God and a patient in the control group who is showing no improvement. The patient asks, "Why has God put me in the placebo group?” and “Couldn't He help me anyway?" God apparently is a bureaucratic type whose hands are tied by the experimental rules.
Moving on… Dawkins likes science. It works. It has given us cars, planes, computers etc. He would presumably agree that some of its creations are pretty awful. Things like nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, and cell phones. He particularly likes the fact that he is a scientist, being a college professor with a PhD and all. This, he assumes gives him the ability to speak with great authority.
He is mistaken. Like any the practitioners of any profession, some scientists are excellent, many more are fair, and too many are semi-competent to incompetent. It's not the position or degrees that determine excellence, its achievement. Einstein tried everything to get hired to teach science or work in a laboratory. He finally had to settle for a job as a clerk (third class) in a patent office. This only changed after he published four earthshaking papers in 1905. Many inventors who contributed so much to technological marvels had no advanced degrees. To skim only the top layers I'll mention a few, ignoring the countless engineers, technicians, and mechanics who contributed. Blaise Pascal had no formal schooling; Henry Beuleh with 90 plus inventions had no high school diploma; Maxine Faget, space capsule designer had only a bachelors degree; Robert Fulton had no high school diploma; George Eastman had no high school diploma; Eli Whitney had no college, Henry Ford no high school diploma, Luther Burbank elementary school only, Alexander Graham Bell no college degree, electron microscope inventor James Hilliar only a bachelor’s degree, Samuel Morse a bachelor’s degree, Marconi no formal education, Louis Tessla, probably the world's greatest inventor, no college degree, neither of the Wright brothers finished high school, Thomas Edison no high school diploma. There is a much longer list of people who made important contributions the development of radio, television, computers etc. that had no college degree. Dawkins' contribution is that he popularized the notion of the "selfish gene". This is the idea that the real actors are not humans, but their genes use bodies for their own propagation, sort of like the alien pods in the movie The Body Snatchers. Dawkins didn't come up with this uplifting idea, but acted as its publicist.
The thesis of the book, or course, is that people who believe in God are deluded. Like believing in the tooth fairy, it is incredibly stupid. Dawkins characterizes it as a symptom of mental illness on page 59. I wonder what he thinks of scientists such as Copernicus, Bacon, Descartes, Pascal, Galileo, Kepler, Leibnitz, Kant, Linnaeus, Lyle, Pasteur, Maxwell, Faraday, Kelvin, Mendel etc, if all believers are delusional. Poor deluded Newton actually wrote more on the subject of theology than he did on science. That acute thinker and epitome of mental health, Richard Dawkins, would presumably point out that these people were all prior to the 20th century. They would have lacked knowledge of the scientific advances of the 20th and 21st century that demonstrates how ludicrous the belief in God is. This is the tack taken by a number of atheists. Leaving aside the temporal snobbery of such a view, I still wonder precisely which scientific discoveries over the last 100 or so years have demonstrated that God doesn't exist. Maybe it's the big bang theory that does it.
The discovery that the universe is expanding, with its implication that it had a beginning was unsettling to some people. Hoyle, Bondi, and Gold came up with a steady state theory as an alternative that would avoid the necessity of a beginning. Hoyle later said that a major motivation for coming up with this theory was that the three of them, atheists all, were disturbed by the theological implications of the big bang theory. The steady state hypothesis was quite popular for a while until it collided with the evidence and sank like a rock. It was quickly replaced by the oscillating universe with much the same motivation; the oscillating universe suffered the same fate. The latest move by the religious skeptics (frequently skeptical only of adverse views) was to postulate multiple universes. Our universe could then have a beginning, but only as a child of the eternal multiverse. This idea has two big advantages. First it does double duty as a way around that other noxious discovery that the constants of nature must be constrained to extremely small parameters for life to develop, making it look like someone tinkered with them. Second the multiverse postulate avoids the possibility of an embarrassing refutation by factual evidence. It would be impossible to prove that there aren't a large or infinite number of universes, all with different physical constants, wandering around in other dimensions, which does away with the necessity of a Tinkerer. The big bang and fine tuning discoveries seem if anything to support the idea of a God.
A number of discoveries about the nature of atoms and sub atomic particles would seem to support theism, though indirectly. Philosophic materialism, the handmaiden of atheism, was first written about by the epicureans who postulated that the only things that exist are atoms and the void. Further they said that atoms are tiny indivisible particles (atom meant indivisible) that when packed tightly together formed all solid objects and when loosely packed made air. This was a bedrock materialist premise prior to the 20th century. One obvious advantage to the theory was its simplicity in describing what it means to exist. Entities like mind spirit etc. were thought to be imaginary due to to their lack of hard physicality. Then it was discovered that the particles in the atom occupied 1 part in 10,000 of the space. Compress the atoms in the human body to where they are all contiguous and it would be the size of a speck of dust. The hardness is produced by force fields. It was also discovered that matter can be transformed into energy (E=MC2). Matter is really congealed energy. This doesn't prove materialism is false, but it robs it of its major intuitive support. Another discovery that undermines materialism is quantum entanglement. One particle can influence another at any arbitrary distance. This is called non-locality, and cannot take place if materialism is true.
I could go on, but I think it's safe to say that scientific discoveries do not reduce the likelihood of God's existence. Dawkins seems to come from a strange and rather bitter place, which makes it seem that he has some psychological problems, especially in connection to religion. He is highly critical of not only the religious fundamentalists, but also the liberals. He is also quite critical of agnostics. "Don't give me that I don't know stuff; you do know that the likelyhood of God’s existence is vanishingly small. Don't be agnostic; be something." He's still not done. He even criticizes some of his fellow atheists for being insufficiently hostile to the believers. Far from being the quintessential objective scientist, the man has issues.
