Richard Dawkins God Delusion represents a culmination of his personal conclusions regarding the efficacy and probability of God's existence. He devotes his treatment of religion to the evolutionary utility of its existence in society. As a scientist, he's interested to discover what purpose faith serves in a human's life. Dawkins is fundamentally opposed to religious belief, personally, which somewhat complicates his arguments. Published in 2006, this book coincides with Dawkins' prestigious achievements in evolutionary biology.
One primary focus of Dawkins' arguments is child development. He attributes the discovery in neuroscience that the human brain actually possesses a specific area which appears to be responsible for religious capacity to social indoctrination. Since parents need their children to listen to them, sometimes they take advantage of the child by encouraging him or her to believe in God. This belief, according to Dawkins, relies upon blind faith and is internally isolating. Children raised in religious homes tend to be discouraged from asking questions; however, this is a generalized opinion on Dawson's part. Serving his argument against the validity or benefit of religion, he demonstrates how a fundamentalist upbringing actually hurts the child when they grow up to discover that they lack the skills of criticism and inquisition and are susceptible to manipulation.
Another interesting facet of Dawkins' book is his own articulation of Christian principles. He devotes an entire section to criticizing Christianity, astutely pointing out how contemporary Christians don't even follow the teachings of Jesus, which they claim to do, because Jesus himself departed from the acceptable Jewish scriptures of his day in order to establish his own system of ethics. Furthermore Dawkins challenges the Old Testament conception of God, arguing that the practices demanded by such a deity were barbaric and disturbing, not worth emulating in a civilized society. Although he raises several interesting points, much of Dawkins' arguments against Christianity demonstrate a colloquial but not academic or historical understanding of the religion. Thus some of his criticism remains contemporary opinion, based upon his observations of peers, but other portions give rise to a more logically consistent analysis of the function of religion as embodied in Christianity specifically.
