I think it is time for a challenge to us all. Here is a five-part documentary on The God Delusion presented by Dr Richard Dawkins, the famous “new” atheist. For anyone with a balanced formation in philosophy and theology, there are holes big enough in this man’s intellectual arguments to drive a coach and horses.
I have no sympathy with this flawed approach, in which atheism becomes a “faith” in itself, a “religion”. But at the same time, we Christians fall time and time again into the same trap and we play into Dawkins’ argument that faith is irrational and leads to violence and killing. The problem is so often that faith is irrational in the minds of too many believers and they behave exactly as the atheists accuse them of doing so.
We should look at this documentary with an open mind, not with smugness and self-defence, but with a humble attitude of taking it as a challenge to our certitudes. Atheism is conquering increasing numbers of our contemporaries, seduced as they are with an idea of a “New Age of Reason” in the face of conservative American Christian and wild-eyed Muslim fundamentalist theocrats.
Let it challenge us, and let it introduce doubts in our mind so that we can let our weakness be filled by the love and beauty of the transcendent and immanent God. Watch, think about it for a day or two, and only then send your comments.
The Blue Flower 
Thank you, Father, for the opportunity to see this video of Richard Dawkins. I read “The God Delusion” a few years ago and undertook, for my own private satisfaction, an analysis of his arguments at that time. If I had to sum up my view of Professor Dawkins’ arguments, I would say that I think he uses some valid criticisms of religious attitudes and actions to try to build something they do not succeed in establishing, that is, disproving the existence of a maturely postulated theistic God, (i.e. conceived as Deep-Person). There’s something of a logical gap, I feel. He mentions “evidence” a lot, but mainly as if a thing called “science” mostly has it and religion does not have any of it. I think this is flawed. I think the kind of evidence he uses for physics and biology is simply of a different kind one uses for belief in another dimension, i.e. what we call “the spiritual” or “the divine”. In his book, Professor Dawkins rejects the idea of “NOMA” – non-overlapping magisterial authority – but, rather like Anselm’s teasing ontological argument, the very notion of the spiritual and the divine is going to be of another kind or scope.
However, I think it may be said that he rightly identifies some of the elusiveness of the ground for religious conviction. As can be seen from much or most religious discourse on the internet, most people express themselves as if their religious position was self-evident or very evident. But they generally rely on either extensive citations of authority, or reasoning based on assumed premises. Some rely on personal experience, which is of course generally non-transferable. I think we may be honest enough to concede that most of us come to our adult religious convictions after a lifetime of inculturation and formation built on almost ineradicable childhood impressions. Some make conscious decisions to change religious affiliation or abandon it altogether, or to pursue one’s current affiliation more deliberately, but mostly I think it’s true that we are (or are doomed to struggle with) what we started out with. So much for being able to dismiss Richard Dawkins and other atheists completely or without some concession that something in religion (or its history) is what gives rise to reactions and campaigns against it!
Anyone who can be so serious about arguing against religion and God as Professor Dawkins is must be taken seriously and searched for what truth may be found in what they are saying.
Fine observations here. I have always argued that bad religion is the cause of atheism as clericalism causes anti-clericalism. We have only to read Nietzsche about the “sad faces” of “unredeemed Christians” – implying that the Redemption and the Gospel has made a difference only for very few. I see Dawkins as highly flawed in his reasoning, but he should be seen as a critic, representing a world to which we are accountable. If we are not authentic Christians (or at least try to be in more than appearance), then we deserve to lose our freedom, churches, everything. We deserve much of the criticism we get.
This was my point about putting up that posting.
I’ve had some interesting and challenging conversations with thinking atheists, sometimes more rewarding than conversations with fellow Christians, but narrow-minded ‘true believers’ of any stripe, whether Protestant Fundamentalist, rigid Traddy, gay activist or atheist (or any of the multitude of ‘fundamentalisms”) are nearly impossible to reason with and close to impossible to learn from. I’ve always seen Mr. Dawkins as a ‘true believer’, picking and choosing his ‘evidence’ to support his previously derived “conclusions”.
I enjoy talking with those who disagree with me, and often learn a great deal – even to the extent of changing my mind sometimes – but there’s little point in a conversation with someone (like Mr. Dawkins) who has his mind rigidly made up.
I absolutely agree with you. Dawkins is a man of ideology and “truth” before being a man of reason and science. He is a poor example, but he is the most well-known of this tendency. My objective was to “shock” us into being thinking Christians. One great thing about Voltaire is he didn’t always agree with people but defended their right to hold their opinions and beliefs.