[3] According to Dawkins in a 2016 interview with Matt Dillahunty, an unauthorised Arabic translation of this book has been downloaded 3 million times in Saudi Arabia.

Dawkins attributes this change of mind to "four years of Bush" (who "literally said that God had told him to invade Iraq").

[6][7] By that time, a number of authors, including Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, who together with Dawkins were labelled "The Unholy Trinity" by Robert Weitzel, had already written books openly attacking religion.

[9] Dawkins dedicates the book to Douglas Adams and quotes the novelist: "Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?

He notes that the former includes quasi-mystical and pantheistic references to God in the work of physicists like Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking, and describes such pantheism as "sexed up atheism".

According to Dawkins, "[t]he five 'proofs' asserted by Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century don't prove anything, and are easily [...] exposed as vacuous.

[1] He writes that one of the greatest challenges to the human intellect has been to explain "how the complex, improbable design in the universe arises", and suggests that there are two competing explanations: This is the basic set-up of his argument against the existence of God, the Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit,[15] where he argues that the first attempt is self-refuting, and the second approach is the way forward.

What worries thoughtful theologians such as Bonhoeffer is that gaps shrink as science advances, and God is threatened with eventually having nothing to do and nowhere to hide.

Dawkins advocates the "theory of religion as an accidental by-product – a misfiring of something useful"[20] as for example the mind's employment of intentional stance.

Instead, our morality has a Darwinian explanation: altruistic genes, selected through the process of evolution, give people natural empathy.

Dawkins sees religion as subverting science, fostering fanaticism, encouraging bigotry against homosexuals, and influencing society in other negative ways.

For example, for the fifth Way, Dawkins places it in the same position for his criticism as the Watchmaker analogy- when in fact, according to Ward, they are vastly different arguments.

[33] Eastern Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart says that Dawkins "devoted several pages of The God Delusion to a discussion of the 'Five Ways' of Thomas Aquinas but never thought to avail himself of the services of some scholar of ancient and mediaeval thought who might have explained them to him ... As a result, he not only mistook the Five Ways for Thomas's comprehensive statement on why we should believe in God, which they most definitely are not, but ended up completely misrepresenting the logic of every single one of them, and at the most basic levels.

During a debate on Radio 3 Hong Kong, David Nicholls, writer and president of the Atheist Foundation of Australia, reiterated Dawkins' sentiments that religion is an "unnecessary" aspect of global problems.

In an interview with the Time magazine, Dawkins said: I think that Gould's separate compartments was a purely political ploy to win middle-of-the-road religious people to the science camp.

[44][45][46] "The God Delusion Debate" marked Dawkins' first visit to the Old South and the first significant discussion on this issue in the "Bible Belt".

[47] The event was sold out, and The Wall Street Journal called it "a revelation: in Alabama, a civil debate over God's existence.

The Giordano Bruno Foundation awarded the 2007 Deschner Prize to Dawkins for the "outstanding contribution to strengthen secular, scientific, and humanistic thinking" in his book.

[73] For example: In Turkey, where the book had sold at least 6,000 copies,[74] a prosecutor launched a probe into whether The God Delusion was "an attack on holy values", following a complaint in November 2007.

In ruling out the need to confiscate copies of the book, the presiding judge stated that banning it "would fundamentally limit the freedom of thought".

[76] Dawkins' website, richarddawkins.net, was banned in Turkey later that year after complaints from Islamic creationist Adnan Oktar (Harun Yahya) for alleged defamation.

[78] List of editions in English: The book has been officially translated into many different languages, such as Spanish, German, Italian, and Turkish.