I made reference in Sunday’s sermon to the polite conversation at Oxford between celebrity atheist Richard Dawkins and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. Since the only book I’ve read by Dawkins is the execrable God Delusion, I’m not inclined to be as generous toward the man as my friend Kevin Hargaden in this post. Nevertheless, Kevin is such a skillful writer and thinker, he usually gets my attention—as he does here:
In seriousness, Dawkins has won his reputation as a public intellectual on merit. But it comes from the biology work he did in the early 1980′s and not the stuff he has been increasingly consumed with these last two decades. The God Delusion is a truly horrendous book and it rather took the funk out of Dawkins’ reputation. He is just, it seems, another Daniel Dennett with a nicer accent. His atheism is a variety of logical positivism crossed with neo-liberal sociology wrapped up in a paper thin adoration of an unreasonable thing called “Reason“. He is bound in advance to win every engagement on the terms he sets. But he is mute in the face of Capuchins dedicating their life to helping the homeless or local churches rallying around the families left behind after suicide. Such things are merely voluntary acts of random kindness in his world view. He avoided any public engagement with Christians that wasn’t a debate and he avoided any Christians that actually speak for the global church. Hence he seeks out the Haggards and creationist nutters. That way, he avoided Christianity.