This is the beginning of a series on Richard Dawkins’ book: “The God Delusion”. I’ll be writing the series “as I read it”, which given the way that life has been looking recently, could result in this series finishing around late 2020, but with a little bit of application, we should be able to get “something” out on this weekly (or so).
I believe that while the easiest, and most tempting response to the sort of criticisms that a fundamentalist atheist such as Dawkins presents is to dismiss him out of hand as a radical who doesn’t have any concept of what Christianity is really on about, I don’t believe that such a response is sensible, nor is it helpful. Whether we like it or not, voices like Dawkins, along with Sam Harris, etc. are being heard loud and clear. So this is an attempt to respond to “The God Delusion” and to sort the truths that the church needs to hear from the “other stuff”.
Because I’m attempting to find the “things we need to hear” and even some issues to wrestle with, this will (attempt to) be the last time I’ll address the style in which Dawkins’ has written his manifesto. I admit, I’ve seen Richard appear on television interviews before, so I was a little prepared for what I would be reading. He writes as he talks, with a steady, calm, English gentleman sensibility - all the while conveying sentiments which border on ridicule. His rhetoric includes regularly referring to religion as one would a virus, commonly using references to the bodies immune system as imagery for those who resist religious thought and ideas.
There is little doubt in reading the little I have already, that Dawkins writes with a deep personal conviction that he is hoping to help people out of a “broken” way of thinking. I don’t think he “hates” religious people, but I think that he has seen a great deal of hurt and “backward thinking” and has identified that he believes the root cause to be this thing we call religion, or even this idea of “God”. Richard Dawkins sets out his intentions early in the book:
“If this book works as I intend, religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put it down.”
and I’ve laid out mine. I realise this post might not have much to comment on it, but stay tuned because coming soon: chapter 1 - a deeply religious non-believer.