God Is Not Great vs. The God Delusion

Two books, one moment

The God Delusion (2006) by Richard Dawkins and God Is Not Great (2007) by Christopher Hitchens arrived within a year of each other, sold millions of copies each, and defined the popular shape of new atheism. Read in isolation either book is a strong polemic; read together they form a two-front assault on religion that is hard to parry, because the authors almost never cover the same ground.

Dawkins came to the argument from evolutionary biology and the philosophy of science. Hitchens came from journalism, political reporting, and a lifelong engagement with literature and history. Their books reflect those backgrounds down to the chapter level.

At a glance

What each book actually argues

Dawkins structures The God Delusionaround a single core argument: the God hypothesis is a scientific claim about the universe, and it is a bad one. A designer complex enough to design the universe would be more improbable than the universe itself; natural selection, by contrast, is a process that builds complexity from simplicity without a designer. Once that cut is made, Dawkins spends most of the book tidying up — answering the traditional proofs of God, examining where morality actually comes from, showing why a godless universe is not the bleak place theists imagine.

Hitchens does something different. God Is Not Greatbarely engages with the standard arguments for God’s existence; its subtitle is not “why there is no God” but “how religion poisons everything,” and Hitchens reads that claim as an empirical one that can be settled by looking at what religion has actually done. He piles up examples: the Catholic Church and AIDS in Africa, the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the cover-up of clerical sexual abuse, the genital mutilation of children, the long history of religious war. The case is cumulative rather than deductive.

Target audience

The two books are aimed at different readers, even when those readers overlap. Dawkins is writing for someone who is scientifically literate, or wants to be — a reader who takes evolution seriously, understands that cosmology has displaced Genesis, and simply wants the argument against God laid out cleanly and defended against the usual objections. Much of the book reads as a calm primer.

Hitchens is writing for a reader who is already suspicious of authority, who has noticed the gap between what religion preaches and how religious institutions behave, and who has read enough history to take the twentieth century seriously. The book assumes you know who Edith Stein was, why Belfast mattered, what the Fifth Lateran Council did. It rewards a literary and political education; it does not provide one.

Best chapters

In The God Delusion, the strongest chapters are chapter four (“Why There Almost Certainly Is No God”), where Dawkins develops the Boeing 747 gambit, and chapter six (“The Roots of Morality”), which surveys the evolutionary and cultural sources of human ethics. Chapter three, on the arguments for God’s existence, is a tight and useful tour for anyone coming to the debate fresh.

In God Is Not Great, the standout is chapter four, “A Short Digression on the Pig: or, Why Heaven Hates Ham,” a surgical dissection of kosher and halal dietary laws that becomes a broader argument about the petty weirdness of religious prescriptions. Chapter sixteen, on the warrant for genital mutilation, is the most morally concentrated chapter in either book. The chapter on Mother Teresa, drawn from Hitchens’s earlier polemic The Missionary Position, retains its shock even decades later.

Weaknesses of each

The God Delusion has been criticised, fairly, for its treatment of academic theology. Dawkins is impatient with the philosophical sophistication of contemporary religious thinkers and tends to caricature them. Theologians have argued that he is attacking a folk-theology version of God that serious believers do not hold; Dawkins replies that folk theology is what most believers actually have. Both sides have a point. The book is also noticeably weaker in the later chapters on child-rearing and meaning, where Dawkins is out of his area of expertise.

God Is Not Greathas its own vulnerabilities. Because the argument is cumulative, it can feel like a prosecutor’s closing statement — damning, but not obviously structured. Hitchens is sometimes too quick to assimilate religion to totalitarianism (the “celestial North Korea” line), which reads powerfully but flattens distinctions. And the book’s political assumptions — Hitchens was, at the time of writing, publicly defending the Iraq War — sit uncomfortably with some of its readers.

Cultural impact

Both books were commercial blockbusters. The God Delusion sold over three million copies in English in its first decade and was translated into more than thirty languages. God Is Not Great was a New York Timesnumber one bestseller and reshaped the public image of atheism from a sociologically awkward private stance to a confident public one. Together with Sam Harris’s The End of Faith and Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell, they anchored what came to be called the new atheism.

Their reception diverged over time. Dawkins’s reputation is now entangled with his public profile on social media, which has cost him much of the goodwill the book once enjoyed. Hitchens died in 2011, and his book has aged into something like a classic — helped, perversely, by the fact that he cannot keep saying things that complicate it.

Which to read first

If the question is whether God exists as a matter of fact, start with Dawkins. If the question is whether religion, as it actually operates in the world, is worth defending, start with Hitchens. If you read only one, you will have read a good book; if you read both, you will have seen why the new atheism succeeded culturally even when its individual arguments were contested. The two books are complementary in a way their authors clearly understood, and that the Dawkins-Hitchens comparison makes explicit: Dawkins shows that religion is false; Hitchens shows that it is dangerous. Neither alone would have had the impact both together achieved.