<![CDATA[Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion has significantly shaped contemporary debates on atheism, religion, and science. However, previous philosophical critiques have largely examined its methodological, metaphysical, and ethical problems separately, leaving their structural interconnections insufficiently explained. This study aimed to evaluate the philosophical consistency of Dawkins’s critique across these three levels and to determine how far its conclusions could be sustained when arguments moved between scientific, metaphysical, and ethical domains. The study employed qualitative philosophical analysis grounded in the philosophy of religion. Through conceptual clarification, charitable argument reconstruction, and comparative engagement with both critical and sympathetic scholarship, it examined the scope, assumptions, and implications of Dawkins’s principal arguments. The findings revealed a recurrent pattern of argumentative overextension. Methodologically, the central problem concerned epistemic scope, particularly when scientific explanation, reductive definitions, rhetorical analogies, or empirical generalizations carried conclusions beyond their evidential support. Metaphysically, this developed into a problem of ontological scope, especially in transferring concepts of complexity, probability, and causal explanation from natural entities to classical conceptions of God. Ethically, the analysis identified a problem of evaluative symmetry when causal and moral responsibility was not assessed by equivalent standards across religious and non-religious phenomena. The study concluded that Dawkins’s critique remained strongest when directed toward empirically assessable religious claims, fundamentalism, evidential immunity, and attempts to subordinate scientific inquiry to religious authority. Its conclusions became less decisive when scientific explanatory success was extended to metaphysical or normative questions without additional philosophical premises. The study developed an integrated framework of epistemic scope, ontological scope, and evaluative symmetry to explain how methodological, metaphysical, and ethical difficulties in The God Delusion are structurally connected. This framework reframes the debate from a simple opposition between science and religion toward the philosophical problem of argumentative overextension across explanatory domains.]]>
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