More on Dawkins

Was thinking around some of Roberto's comments on a post late last week. I don't think it's as simple as dismissing someone as un intellectual if they don't bother doing the research before they write on something. There's other words for that. Dawkins is no doubt an extremely capable and intelligent man - in his field. But in the same way I wouldn't pretend to have the capacity to write about, say, organic famring methods in Yemen, with any degree of accuracy, perhaps dawkins could take the lesson on board? That the overwhelming response to his work from rational, real, intellectually capable Christians is that he simply misses the point nearly all the time - by assuming his presuppositions equal truth and 'setting up straw men to knock them down'. If I were the receiver of all this criticism (or Christicism (C) ) from an established school of intellectual enquiry i.e. theology - I might want to listen and learn from them . . . ?

Bishop Mike put me the way of a review, which included this gem about the nature of God.

Dawkins speaks scoffingly of a personal God, as though it were entirely obvious exactly what this might mean. He seems to imagine God, if not exactly with a white beard, then at least as some kind of chap, however supersized. He asks how this chap can speak to billions of people simultaneously, which is rather like wondering why, if Tony Blair is an octopus, he has only two arms. For Judeo-Christianity, God is not a person in the sense that Al Gore arguably is. Nor is he a principle, an entity, or ‘existent’: in one sense of that word it would be perfectly coherent for religious types to claim that God does not in fact exist. He is, rather, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever, including ourselves. He is the answer to why there is something rather than nothing. God and the universe do not add up to two, any more than my envy and my left foot constitute a pair of objects.