Richard Dawkins Introduces His New Illustrated Book, The Magic of Reality

We told you about the book ear­li­er this year, and now it’s just about here. Set for release on Octo­ber 4th, The Mag­ic of Real­i­ty will be unlike any book writ­ten by Richard Dawkins before. It is illus­trat­ed for starters, and large­ly geared toward young and old read­ers alike. Per­fect, he says, for any­one 12 and up. When it comes to the struc­ture and gist of the book, Dawkins does a pret­ty good job of explain­ing things. So let’s let the video roll…

Note: If you’re will­ing to tweet about the book, you can view the first 24 pages of The Mag­ic of Real­i­ty here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Richard Dawkins on the Awe of Life & Sci­ence

Richard Dawkins Plays the Piano: “Earth His­to­ry in C Major”


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Comments (8)
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  • Lee says:

    Can’t wait for this one to come out!

  • stefanie lorimer says:

    Dawkins defines real­i­ty. Dawkins defines what is mag­i­cal. Dawkins turns from sci­en­tist to priest. Among the famous books that are aimed at devel­op­ing minds and set out to edu­cate them about the Big Ques­tions (such as “what is real­i­ty”) are the Torah, the Bible, the Quran, the Bahag­vadgi­ta, and indeed the many ‘myths’ which Dawkins is tak­ing on here as ‘junk mag­ic’. This book is an oxy­moron.
    Richard — do sci­ence. Don’t tell peo­ple what to believe.

  • JJ says:

    Well said, Ste­fanie.

  • Simon says:

    This book is about sci­ence, Ste­fanie. But most of all it’s about the bogus myths that attempt to per­vert that sci­ence. He’s talk­ing about mag­ic as an expres­sion of won­der­ment, that’s all. You’ve gone ahead and made the mis­take of the fun­da­men­tal­ly reli­gious: tak­ing things too lit­er­al­ly.

  • Rich says:

    Well said, Simon.

  • Sam says:

    Sci­ence is built on the reli­gious idea of ‘progress’. The idea that humans are moti­vat­ed to con­tin­ue because they are get­ting bet­ter at stuff is a residue of Chris­t­ian val­ues that have dom­i­nat­ed for cen­turies. By shed­ding all asso­ci­a­tions with Chris­tian­i­ty, sci­ence would also have to drop the belief of ‘pro­gres­sion’ and pre­sum­ably all moral codes we have come to assume are ‘evolved’ and not a prod­uct of years of reli­gious con­di­tion­ing. At best this is Chris­t­ian sci­ence.

  • Andrew says:

    Sam, the idea that progress is a fun­da­men­tal­ly reli­gious idea is char­i­ta­ble at best, espe­cial­ly because you’re using the terms reli­gion and Chris­t­ian inter­change­ably. Humankind had been evolv­ing and pro­gress­ing for hun­dreds of thou­sands of years before the Chris­t­ian era helped to bring about one of the dark­est most back­ward times in our his­to­ry. Dog­ma is not for­ward think­ing, and is not con­cerned with human pos­si­bil­i­ties and poten­tial, in fact it’s com­plete­ly opposed to those con­cepts by it’s very def­i­n­i­tion, the sta­t­ic preser­va­tions of arti­cles of faith at all cost

  • Erik says:

    Come on Sam. Sci­ence pre­dates Chris­tian­i­ty.
    Hip­pocrates lived around 400 BC. Many dis­cov­er­ies in Math­e­mat­ics, Astron­o­my, Med­i­cine took place in the 100’s and 1000’s BC in Greece, India, and Chi­na. Many reli­gions make it clear that “progress” is not one of there tenets. It’s manip­u­la­tive to sug­gest that sci­ence and reli­gion share some inte­gral link and there­fore you can’t have one with­out the oth­er.

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