The irony of belief
Belief seems self-explanatory to the people who do it, and although people are typically very good at accusing other people of their beliefs, they tend to accept their own beliefs as gospel truth. This is highly ironic, says Dawkins, because it means that the religious people often preach open-mindedness to others while they pretend their own closed-mindedness is a virtue. This is especially true in Christian religions that seek to make converts.
Science and dramatic irony
Although many problems cannot be answered by science, that doesn't necessarily imply anything about religion, says Dawkins. Instead, he says science is a long process of what essentially boils down to dramatic irony, because back in the past, we didn't know what we know now through time and the revelation of new scientific discoveries. We cannot predict what we might learn tomorrow, so we cannot derive arguments against science based on what they don't know.
The placebo effect
A religious person who believes that religion helps them is actually helped by religion, ironically, because of the placebo effect, says Dawkins. They think it helps, so it does. This is like when someone takes a pain pill that is secretly just sugar, and they report an improvement in their symptoms, because their brains were tricked into feeling better. Dawkins says that this has no bearing on the truth or falsity of a religion.
Religion as a moral standard
Dawkins argues that to say religion is the reason for behaving according to a moral standard is perfectly absurd and begging the question, because religion doesn't make people understand morality; it merely captures what is already essential through the evolution of the human body. Dawkins says that ironically, a person who depends on fear of judgment to refrain from atrocities is not that moral of a person.
The Bible
Dawkins says that for all the religiosity of the Christian church in regards to the holiness and authority of the Bible, their virtues and moral codes are basically independent from what the Bible actually teaches, because they aren't scientifically treating that text in the first place, but rather, they reinforce what they were taught to believe. The Bible typically condemns the kinds of popular religion that tend to dominate the church.
