A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love
Richard Dawkins
"It's an anthology of all his works, but for various occasions, some of them presented elsewhere and some of them not.
Devils Chaplain has kind of a religious connotation from two opposite points of view, and people often confuse atheism with Satanism; but it turns out that that title comes from a quote by Charles Darvin where he's referring to the kind of book a devil's chaplain might around about the clumsy, chaotic nature or nature basically. He also touched on the subject of atheism, particularly in a letter that he wrote to his ten year-old daughter and is giving good and bad reasons for believing. You should believe in evidence and not because someone claims to have a revelation, for example; and he was very conscious of this concept that he had that children are true believers that need to be protected from forming beliefs for the wrong reason. I think the point is that he wants -- it's more important to him that she have the principles for arriving at truth rather than presenting her what he considers to be the truth. So it's quite an interesting grab bag of scientific and religious ideas.
I think what it showed about him as a person, that he was able to respect people who disagreed with him in the scientific field and present very good ideas for his disagreements with other people. I didn't find it as interesting as other books where he developed a theme from the beginning all the way through. I give it a four, I think, because I think it's a good book, but it didn't grab me quite as much as his other books."
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