Good ol' Richard Dawkins, Mr Public Science himself...

Wowee! I finally got a chance to read a review of Richard Dawkins' book The God Delusion today, and man oh man, the author is scathing at times.

Terry Eagleton, the eminent literary critic, has written an article for the London Review of Book, in which he not only tackles holes in Dawkins' argument, but also presents many of the doctrines of Christianity concisely and clearly. I'm tempted to haul out all the bits that I enjoyed, but I think that mean that I have to copy and paste the whole article, so I'm just going to cut a few snippets out, that are particularly thought provoking and insightful.

For anyone else who wants to read the rest of the article, here you go:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n20/eagl01_.html

"Dawkins considers that all faith is blind faith, and that Christian and Muslim children are brought up to believe unquestioningly. Not even the dim-witted clerics who knocked me about at grammar school thought that. For mainstream Christianity, reason, argument and honest doubt have always played an integral role in belief. (Where, given that he invites us at one point to question everything, is Dawkins's own critique of science, objectivity, liberalism, atheism and the like?) Reason, to be sure, doesn't go all the way down for believers, but it doesn't for most sensitive, civilised non-religious types either. Even Richard Dawkins lives more by faith than by reason. "

"Dawkins rejects the surely reasonable case that science and religion are not in competition on the grounds that this insulates religion from rational inquiry. But this is a mistake: to claim that science and religion pose different questions to the world is not to suggest that if the bones of Jesus were discovered in Palestine, the pope should get himself down to the dole queue as fast as possible. It is rather to claim that while faith, rather like love, must involve factual knowledge, it is not reducible to it. For my claim to love you to be coherent, I must be able to explain what it is about you that justifies it; but my bank manager might agree with my dewy-eyed description of you without being in love with you himself. "

"Dawkins thinks it odd that Christians don't look eagerly forward to death, given that they will thereby be ushered into paradise. He does not see that Christianity, like most religious faiths, values human life deeply "

"On the horrors that science and technology have wreaked on humanity, [Dawkins] is predictably silent. Yet the Apocalypse is far more likely to be the product of them than the work of religion. Swap you the Inquisition for chemical warfare."

"Nor does [Dawkins] understand that because God is transcendent of us (which is another way of saying that he did not have to bring us about), he is free of any neurotic need for us and wants simply to be allowed to love us. Dawkins's God, by contrast, is Satanic. Satan ('accuser' in Hebrew) is the misrecognition of God as Big Daddy and punitive judge, and Dawkins's God is precisely such a repulsive superego. This false consciousness is overthrown in the person of Jesus, who reveals the Father as friend and lover rather than judge."

"Because the universe is God's, it shares in his life, which is the life of freedom. This is why it works all by itself, and why science and Richard Dawkins are therefore both possible."

Last but not least: food for thought. "Dawkins quite rightly detests fundamentalists; but as far as I know his anti-religious diatribes have never been matched in his work by a critique of the global capitalism that generates the hatred, anxiety, insecurity and sense of humiliation that breed fundamentalism. Instead, as the obtuse media chatter has it, it's all down to religion."