Richard Dawkins: A Knack for Bashing Orthodoxy

As for your second paragraph, but of course this is advocacy! Dawkins is not acting as a scientist here, I think this much is clear. He is an advocate who draws on his scientific knowledge and his rational philosophy to make his case.

logical falacy: is != ought

As scientists, we cannot make value judgements on these natural phenomena.

The evolutionary explanations for the origin of religious behaviour is entirely irrelevant to the question of whether the claims made by religions are true. Religions make testable claims like the existence of miracles, science can be applied to these claims. More broadly, Dawkins uses a scientific approach to make a very strong argument that religions are not accurate descriptions of reality.

In my own intellectual journey (not necessarily the same as my journey of faith), I find no attraction to reductionism of any kind. It's always seemed to me a truncated worldview, artificial and strained, ignoring the real content of our deepest intuitions of meaning, beauty, love and justice. I side with Plato and Cicero contra Lucretius, Aquinas contra Bacon, etc. (yes, Bacon was a Christian, I disagree with his metaphysics). I believe the Scientific Revolution was a necessary reform on the excesses of Aristotelian Physics, but in many ways we through the baby out with the bathwater when we chucked Formal and Final causes out by fiat. But that's another discussion...

I write that preface to provide some context on what my real concern is with regards to Dawkins and the legions of young enthusiastic atheists that I run into, in person and on the web: the absolute philosophical illiteracy of so many naively confident advocates of reductionist science and the silly caricatures of faith they hold to. Mostly what I find in this generation of non-believer is not reflective, self-conscious atheism but rather an inherited, brittle and angry atheism that assumes the final triumph of reductionist materialist science has been accomplished. For these dogmatics the mere existence of faith or religion of any kind is really appalling and a cause for anger and aggression. There's simply no difference between, say, Wendell Berry and Pat Robertson, C.S. Lewis and Jerry Falwell, Dostoevsky and Fred Phelps.

It's just flat strange and saddening to me, to know that there are those who truly think that the Santa Clause analogy would have been devastating to St. Augustine or Tolstoy or Tolkien. That the existence of reflective intellectual Christians like Annie Dilliard, Flannery O' Connor or Walker Percy so long after Darwin is merely an anomaly to be ignored.

This kind of naivety makes not only for fruitless engagement across the theistic/atheistic boundaries, but for increasing hostility and social disintegration. When I read Dawkins and those that find his simplistic reductions of religion intellectually appealing, I'm not offended as a believer, I'm not threatened intellectually, but I am discouraged about the future of community. If the main participants in the the great God Debate (which is really no more acute now than at any other time in history, and probably a good bit less than late 19th Century Britain at least) don't have the intellectual resources or emotional charity required for deep engagement of such a weighty matter, then we not only have more anger, hostility and misunderstanding, but we become more impoverished in our self-understanding on both sides.

The doctor analogy is interesting, because my health has been _seriously_ compromised by western medicine. They gave me advice that was based on 'the best information available through examinations and tests' and I'll forever pay the consequences. If they had respected others opinions then I would have never suffered the way I have.

I'm not saying science will tomorrow find evidence of a creator god that made the world in six days, not at all. I'm just saying that we don't always know what is best for others, and should never presume to do so. For some people, living a religious life is the best possible outcome. They have a moral and ethical system they can look towards when they aren't sure how to proceed. They have hope when everything else is falling apart, etc etc.

To you and I, and indeed to Dawkins the idea that some bearded guy in the clouds created the world and the universe, will help you through life and grant you seven virgins when you die is delusional and utterly disproved by science. But if this world view is helping someone respect others and live a happy and fulfilled life, then why does it matter what he or she believes? And more to the point, who does Dawkins think he is going around telling people like this that they are idiots?

Make the information available. Tell people about it, grant interviews, attend conferences and seminars and host talks about your ideas. Just don't be a dick about it.