God Is Not Great is a 2007 book by journalist Christopher Hitchens in which he makes a case against organized religion.
Hitchens begins by describing his early scepticism toward religion and argues that faith persists due to human fear of mortality. He claims religion imposes itself on others and frequently incites violence.Hitchens posited that organized religion is "violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism, tribalism, and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children"
He critiques religious interference in public health, referring to the Catholic Church's stance on condoms in Africa, resistance to vaccines in some Islamic groups, religious circumcision and religious female genital mutilation.
He argues that religious metaphysics are false and that advances in science make leaps of faith increasingly redundant.
Hitchens contends that all reported miracles are unverified and that belief in them relies on fabricated or unreliable testimony. He argues that many religions originated in fraud or delusion.
Critical reception
Positive Reviews
Bruce DeSilva considered the book to be the best piece of atheist writing since Bertrand Russell's Why I Am Not a Christian (1927), with Hitchens using "elegant yet biting prose.The book was praised in Kirkus Reviews as a "pleasingly intemperate assault on organized religion" that "like-minded readers will enjoy".
In The Sydney Morning Herald, Matt Buchanan dubbed it "a thundering 300-page cannonade; a thrillingly fearless, impressively wide-ranging, thoroughly bilious and angry book against the idea of God"; Buchanan found the work to be "easily the most impressive of the present crop of atheistic and anti-theistic books.
Michael Kinsley, in The New York Times Book Review, lauded Hitchens's "logical flourishes and conundrums, many of them entertaining to the nonbeliever".
Jason Cowley in the Financial Times called the book "elegant but derivative".
Negative Reviews
David Bentley Hart interpreted the book as a "rollicking burlesque, without so much as a pretense of logical order or scholarly rigor". Hart says "On matters of simple historical and textual fact, moreover, Hitchens' book is so extraordinarily crowded with errors that one soon gives up counting them.Responding to Hitchens's claim that "all attempts to reconcile faith with science and reason are consigned to failure and ridicule", Peter Berkowitz of the Hoover Institution quotes paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. Referencing a number of scientists with religious faith, Gould wrote, "Either half my colleagues are enormously stupid, or else the science of Darwinism is fully compatible with conventional religious beliefs—and equally compatible with atheism.
William J. Hamblin of the FARMS Review criticized Hitchens for implying unanimity among biblical scholars on controversial points and overlooking alternative scholarly positions, and felt that Hitchens's understanding of biblical studies was "flawed at best."
Stephen Prothero of The Washington Post considered Hitchens correct on many points but found the book "maddeningly dogmatic" and criticized Hitchens's condemnation of religion altogether.
