Dawkins begins with a plea to reclaim positive words and phrases that have been hijacked by religion – intelligent design and morality chief amongst them. The only known intelligent design is that created by us, and our future survival and prosperity depends entirely on it, natural selection (or paleo design as he refers to it in this case) will not predict future scenarios and make selections for our benefit.

We need to intelligently design our morality, which itself evolves and is learned naturally through human experience. At least it has in those of us not held back by strict religious moral code. It will be to our detriment if we cannot overcome religion’s hold over politics and thereby modern life and progress.

He also delves into the science behind many moral issues that are usually objected to on religious grounds like abortion, euthanasia, eugenics etc. And the science can give us insights into how to approach the issues from a moral perspective. The problem is that these issues are not black and white and should be discussed intelligently and evaluated on a case-by-case basis.