Reading materialist atheist like chewing glass?

Friend Edward Sisson writes to say, “While researching an entirely different subject, I came across this post by blogger "Shannon Love" of "Chicago Boyz" in 2006, tearing into a Richard Dawkins book. His treatment of the practical effects of atheism, and comparison of religion to atheism, is all the more effective because he declares himself to be an atheist.”

As in:

I keep losing my personal heroes.

Richard Dawkins is one of the century’s great evolutionary theorists and someone whose work I really admire. His work revolutionized the way scientists thought about evolutionary theory. I think I can safely say that I have read everything that the man has written in every major forum. So, as an atheist myself, I looked forward to Dawkins weighing in on the subject of religion, from the perspective of an evolutionary theorist, in his new book, “The God Delusion”.

This weekend I made it to my local bookstore, grabbed a copy of the “The God Delusion” and sat down with a cup of coffee to read it immediately — even before buying it. Imagine my shock and even horror to discover that Dawkins’ book is trite, facile and just plain, well, dumb.

[Shocka! How so?]

Atheists reflexively repeat the mantra that religion causes oppression, war and general cruelty of all kinds, while asserting or implying that atheism does not. Dawkins falls right into this mindless argument in the opening paragraphs of the book and never lets up. (Reading someone like Dawkins making such a pompous, counterfactual argument is like chewing glass.)

Kid this smart wasted on atheism.

He adds,

“The God Delusion” is a trite, shallow unimaginative book. It is not intended to evangelize to non-atheists, but instead preaches to the choir by vomiting out all of the conceits and prejudices that atheists hold in common. As a defense of the atheistic world view it is a pathetic failure. Coming from one of the century’s great scientific minds, it’s just sad.

News, Shannon: He isn’t one of the last century’s great scientific minds, just a Darwin dogmatist with a good writing style. Glad you are not making anything depend on him.

Lighter Moment: Why Richard Dawkins's anti-God bus ad campaign would tank in Australia

In "Atheists Pick on God" (Sydney Morning Herald, November 2, 2008), Simon Webster explains:

LONDON buses will carry the slogan "There's probably no God" next year, in a campaign paid for by an atheist organisation. Transport chiefs say it would never work in Sydney, where commuters wait at bus stops for so long that they eventually die and go to heaven, where God tells them: "There's probably no bus."

The British Humanist Association and prominent atheist Professor Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, are paying for the ads. They believe God is nothing but a figment of the human imagination, much like the T-Card and the North West Rail Link.

The news comes at a time when record numbers of Sydneysiders say they have lost their faith: despite all the promises of a second coming, there never will be an extension to the light rail network.

Premier Nathan Rees has called on them to find it again quickly: if Sydney Ferries is privatised it may be necessary for commuters on the less popular routes to learn to walk on water ...

The rest is here. The campaign would never work in Toronto either. Here, once you give up waiting for the bus and call a taxi, the bus pulls up just behind the taxi - which proves that the atheist's explanation of the universe cannot be quite right.

Arch-atheist Dawkins now thinks serious case can be made for deistic God?

According to British journalist Melanie Phillips, when Richard Dawkins and John Lennox had their second debate, at the same location (in Oxford) where Samuel Wilberforce and T.H. Huxley famously debated, Dawkins offered a surprising (for him) admission:

This week’s debate, however, was different because from the off Dawkins moved it onto safer territory– and at the very beginning made a most startling admission. He said:

A serious case could be made for a deistic God.

This was surely remarkable. Here was the arch-apostle of atheism, whose whole case is based on the assertion that believing in a creator of the universe is no different from believing in fairies at the bottom of the garden, saying that a serious case can be made for the idea that the universe was brought into being by some kind of purposeful force. A creator. True, he was not saying he was now a deist; on the contrary, he still didn't believe in such a purposeful founding intelligence, and he was certainly still saying that belief in the personal God of the Bible was just like believing in fairies. Nevertheless, to acknowledge that ‘a serious case could be made for a deistic god’ is to undermine his previous categorical assertion that

...all life, all intelligence, all creativity and all ‘design’ anywhere in the universe is the direct or indirect product of Darwinian natural selection...Design cannot precede evolution and therefore cannot underlie the universe.

In Oxford on Tuesday night, however, virtually the first thing he said was that a serious case could be made for believing that it could.

- "Is Richard Dawkins still evolving?", Spectator, October 23, 2008

Personally, I think Dawkins is becoming increasingly incoherent. His latest effort is a bus ad for atheism, which is slam dunk ugly. If the atheists can't hire a better graphic designer, they have more problems than I thought. (What's with the block, upper case letters? Why the fade to yellow on the key message?)

Anyway, why doesn't Richard Dawkins just start speaking in tongues and be done with it. You know, "Is Dawkins also among the prophets?"

Dismantling Dawkins's Case Against God

I've been enjoying Scott Hahn and Benjamin Wiker's Answering the New Atheism.

When Mario's and my agent suggested that we write an Introduction to The Spiritual Brain, our editor suggested I read Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion.

I felt that Delusion was - like most "new atheist" works - far inferior to the earlier generation of such works by such figures as Bertrand Russell or Antony Flew. The new atheists have inherited that self-righteous post-Sixties vehemence which doubtless feels good to the venter and those who share the venter's views, but makes no new point and advances no worthwhile discussion. Anyway, Hahn and Wiker write,

For anyone who has read his other works, The God Delusion is a decided letdown. It is caustic and peevish, rather than genuinely witty or insightful, and has the feel of a book dashed off by someone who is annoyed that his opponents still exist and can barely condescend to dismiss them. As a result, The God Delusionis filled with self-congratulatory smugness appropriate to gala dinners thrown by people of the same tightly-wound (pp. 4-5) intellectual circle who, after too much wine, trade in spiteful quips about the incomprehensible stupidity of anyone not sharing their opinions.

Antony Flew has gone as far as to call Dawkins a bigot,

An academic attacking some ideological position which s/he believes to be mistaken must of course attack that position in its strongest form. This Dawkins does not do in the case of Einstein and his failure is the crucial index of his insincerity of academic purpose and therefore warrants me in charging him with having become, what he has probably believed to be an impossibility, a secularist bigot.

I thought Hahn and Wiker's cover (below) hilarious, and hope you agree.

Evolutionary psychology: The selfish gene in the art world ...

In The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions, American-born but Paris-based mathematician David Berlinski, writes,

More often than not, the disjunction between what scientific figures claim and what they believe represents a strikingly successful exercise in self-delusion.

When it was first published, Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene took the intellectual world by storm. Conversion experiences among young men were widely reported. They still are. The idea that we are all "lumbering robots" designed by natural selection to advance the interests of our genes has become one of those things believed widely because widely believed. The mystery has even been celebrated in art. First promoted at the Cambridge Science Festival, Lifetime: Songs of Life & Evolution is a drama whose "mission [is] to spread the good word on evolution." There are tributes to Richard Dawkins, one song entitled "I'm a Selfish Gene and I'm Programmed to Survive." Although I have not seen it, I am persuaded that this theatrical endeavor is horrible beyond measure. (p. 176)

Ah yes. One should not judge a book by its cover or a show by its hoardings, but in some situations one can safely say that a show does sound, well, ... missable.

If we must all decide how to get home from the show in a hailstorm, we really do not want to depend on the "Selfish Gene Who is Programmed to Survive" (as if).

Events: New debate on God, atheism, and science on very spot where Samuel Wilberforce debated Thomas Huxley

Christian mathematician John Lennox and atheist public understanding of science prof Richard Dawkins will continue in October 2008 their 2007 discussion on the very spot where Thomas Huxley and Samuel Wilberforce duked it out a century and a half ago:

At 6:00 p.m. on the 20th of October, Fixed Point Foundation will host a public DVD screening of last year's God Delusion Debate between Professor Richard Dawkins and Dr. John Lennox, both of the University of Oxford. The screening will take place in the Main Hall of the Oxford Town Hall and is free and open to the public. For more information about the debate, click here.

The following night, Fixed Point will sponsor a discussion between Dawkins and Lennox on the main floor of the Oxford Museum of Natural History at 7:00 p.m. Both scientists will discuss atheism, the Christian faith, and the claims of their respective books: The God Delusion and God's Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? The building marks the historical site of the famed evolution debate of 1860 between Thomas Huxley and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce.
General admission tickets for the October 21st discussion with Dawkins and Lennox are available through Tickets Oxford and can be purchased online at www.oxfordplayhouse.com/ticketsoxford or by contacting the box office at (Tel) 01865 305305 (Fax) 01865 305335. Only 500 tickets are available. They are £15 each and £10 for students.

Richard Dawkins and John Lennox met for the first time in Birmingham, Alabama this past October for another event sponsored by Fixed Point, The God Delusion Debate. The debate, moderated by United States Federal Judge William H. Pryor, examined six theses from Dawkins' book The God Delusion. Garnering the attention of Fox News, Wall Street Journal, London Times, and BBC Radio, the event took place in front of a sold out crowd of almost 1,400. Fixed Point is seeking to generate further public interest on this topic by taking the two men back to their hometown for another event.

Got to hand it to Fixed Point for knowing how to frame a discussion!

Philosopher: Large questions require the language of myth, not shopping bills

Here's British philosopher Mary Midgley's take on Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion, in which she makes a valuable point about why most people, including scientists, must use figurative language:

It seems not to have struck Dawkins that academic science is only a small, specialised, dependent part of what anybody knows. Most of human knowledge is tacit knowledge—habitual assumptions, constantly updated and checked by experience, but far too general and informal ever to be fully tested. We assume, for instance, that nature will go on being regular, that other people are conscious and that their testimony can generally be trusted. Without such assumptions neither science nor any other study could ever get off the ground, nor could everyday life. And when we build on these tacit foundations we necessarily use imaginative structures called myths—not lies, but graphic thought-patterns that shape and guide our thinking. This is not irrational; it is a necessary preparation for reasoning. The Selfish Gene is a powerful myth, so is the Science-and-Religion war, so is Gaia, so is the Social Contract and Natural Selection and Progress and the Hidden Hand of the Market. And, when we get to the largest and most puzzling questions, we have to proceed in mythical language which cannot be cashed in detail at all, but which still serves (as Einstein’s did) to indicate in what sort of spiritual universe we perceive ourselves to be living. This is the province of religion. Adding God is not, as Dawkins thinks, adding an illicit extra item to the cosmos. It is perceiving the whole thing differently.

Glad someone said that.

Dawkins blasted in Skeptical magazine

Dinesh D'Souza draws our attention to the fact that some of atheist crusader Richard Dawkins's fellow atheists (and agnostics?) may be getting fed up with him. How else to explain David Sloan Wilson, whose work on a hypothetical evolutionary basis for religion Mario and I discuss in The Spiritual Brain, having this to say in Skeptic, a magazine the majority of whose readers are probably atheists or agnostics? As quoted/summarized by D'Souza:

"Richard Dawkins and I share much in common. We are both biologists by training who have written widely about evolutionary theory." Moreover, "We are both atheists in our personal convictions." Then Wilson gets to his point. "When Dawkins' The God Delusion was published, I naturally assumed he was basing his critique of religion on the scientific study of religion from an evolutionary perspective. I regret to report otherwise. He has not done any original work on the subject and he has not fairly represented the work of his colleagues." Rather, Dawkins has subjected his atheist readers to "sleights of hand." He has produced a "diatribe against religion" that is "deeply misinformed." Indeed he is "just another angry atheist trading on his reputation as an evolutionst and spokesperson for science to vent his personal opinions about religion."

To this strong stuff from Wilson, D'Souza adds,

Wilson examines Dawkins' central claim that religion is an obvious "delusion." On the contrary, Wilson writes, religion is in general more adaptive for human communities than atheism. "On average, religious believers are more prosocial than non-believers, feel better about themselves, use their time more constructively, and engage in long-term planning, rather than gratifying their impulsive desires...They report being more happy, active, sociable, involved and excited."

Here's Wilson's blast in Skeptic in full.

Sure, Wilson (and D'Souza) but the thing is, everybody KNOWS this stuff. Or should. The data's been out there for a long time. (See Chapter 8 of The Spiritual Brain for a handy little discussion of key findings about the role of spirituality in promoting health - and of reasons why such data tend to get shelved.)

Anyway, it's nice to see people being Skeptical in more than one direction. If the skeptics think that what Wilson is saying is not true, they are only fooling themselves, and rants about Islamic extremists are only distractions.

(Muslim friends tell me that the extremists are not particularly spiritually minded at all; they want power over other people and religion is their ploy of getting it. And the extremists have chosen an orientation to their religion that means they'll likely kill themselves trying ... is that divine justice or what?)

Anyway, D'Souza's always fun and so is Wilson here.

Can anyone - even God - be both improbable and impossible at the same time?

Catching up on my inbox here, my friend David Rice III writes me to say, regarding the debate between Alister McGrath and Richard Dawkins on the probability of God's existence (May 30, 2007):

... Dawkins wants to have it both ways when it comes to assessing the probabilities for the existence of God. Here's how it goes..... On the one hand he said that God is not just improbable but impossible when it comes to the status of theistic EXPLANATIONS of certain phenomena (he said flat out that theism CANNOT serve as an explanation) but then he turns right around and claims that God is also an improbable being.

So that while God's existence might not be strictly-speaking impossible, theistic explanations are. But if you were to press Dawkins on WHY theistic explanations are impossible it would be precisely because God does not exist and hence has a probability of zero. So there are two different issues at play here. One is the existence of God per se and the other is the existence of the explanatory role that God provides, or has provided, for certain events or characteristics of the world. Dawkins juggles both of these ideas in the air but both of them refutes the other. If God's existence is improbable then it won't do to say that theistic explanations are impossible, they would also be improbable by extension and hence possible. But if theistic explanations are impossible then the existence of God is also impossible. It's a shell game.

But David, these people have been back-pedalling, stonewalling, and playing both ends against the middle ever since the Big Bang was first explained (1927). They need to be in a different universe. Heck, if I could make them one, I would do it tomorrow.

The teacher, the kids, and the atheist lobby

A high school philosophy teacher tackles Richard Dawkins for impressionable young people:

If we claim that God is the creator of the material universe, the creator of all material things that exist in space and time, then it should be obvious that God will not be subject to the limits of space and time. If God imparts existence, then God does not receive existence. If He did, He wouldn’t be God, but a contingent creature (created, limited, possessing existence and able not to exist). Hence, God is not a contingent being.

The Flying Spaghetti Monster is of course a product of the creative imagination, but it is a product made up of characteristics of contingent beings. We have a flying being, thus a thing that moves in space. If it moves in space, it exists in space and is thus subject to the limits of space. We have “spaghetti”, which is a delicious pasta, thus we have a creature that eats, one that desires a certain kind of food. The Flying Spaghetti Monster is a contingent being, albeit a fictional being. Certainly, if someone claims that God is a limited contingent being who can be the subject of empirical proof, he will have to provide evidence; for one cannot reason to the existence of a contingent being precisely because it is contingent, for it would have the potentiality to be or not to be, like you and me.

Lennox-Dawkins debate - updates

Daniel James Devine live blogged the event last night. Here's how to get a copy of the debate.

Comments variously overheard:

Lennox was persuasive, and was devastating on the topic "Do you need religion to be good," demonstrating that you don't need religion to be good, but without religion it's a moot argument as to what is "good" or "bad" since there is no objective standard. Thus Stalin, Pol Pot, Hitler, and Islamic terrorists have/could be doing the right thing in their own eyes with impunity in the afterlife.

Dawkins was stumped in several places but especially when Lennox questioned him on "how anyone could act in opposition to their genes?" Dawkins really eluded the question by saying that it was just true that humans do act in a way contrary to Darwinian evolution every time someone uses birth control measures. Dawkins never gave a reasoned basis for that action.

On the issue of the birth control. If Dawkins really understood natural selection he would now that birth control is most certainly NOT something that natural selection is not responsible for. After all natural selection gave us the cognitive faculties necessary to develop the pill, the sponge and so forth. It also gave us the desire to avoid all of the responsibilities that come with child rearing. Is Dawkins saying that natural selection isn't responsible for that?

It sounds to me as though Dawkins's key argument is unravelling. Of course, I was in the Lennox fans section of the stands, so to speak. Go here if you want to hear from Dawkins' supporters.

This comment just came in:

I was there last evening. My sense of the crowd was that there was no dramatic shift of opinion toward Lennox’s arguments, though I thought them all extremely powerful and I am certain that seeds of doubt in Dawkins’ atheistic faith were planted in the minds of many secular humanists in the audience. Lennox’s position was bold and unrelenting. I DID find it interesting that Dawkins’ seemed willing on a couple of occasions to smuggle in tacit acceptance of a deistic God, which is not I suppose too surprising since that would be God no one had to meaningfully deal with anyway. The long line of UAB students eager for Dawkins’ book after the event, however, shows that all of us have a great deal more work to do esp. on our campuses. Still, I thought the air at the following reception for John Lennox was justifiably jubilant.

Go here for the original announcement at the Hack.

Also: Naomi Schaefer Riley reflects on the Lennox-Dawkins debate:

Perhaps Mr. Dawkins was surprised by this reception. He recently referred to the Bible Belt states as "the reptilian brain of southern and middle America," in contrast to the "country's cerebral cortex to the north and down the coasts." This debate marks the first time Mr. Dawkins has appeared in the Old South. Maybe his publishers suggested it would be a good idea. After all, "The God Delusion" and similar atheist tracts have been selling like hotcakes (or buttered grits) down here.
But why? Are Christians staying up late on Saturday night to read these books and failing to show up at church on Sunday morning, as Mr. Dawkins might hope? So far, the answer is no, according to Bill Hay, senior pastor of Covenant Presbyterian Church just outside of Birmingham. ...

Didn’t the same thing happen to H. L. Mencken? He persistently portrayed Dayton, Tennessee as a rural backwater - though he actually knew otherwise. Here is my view of why and how that happens, riffing off Leon Kass.

Scientist apologist John Lennox to debate atheist Richard Dawkins October 3, 2007

Flash! Daniel James Devine live blogged the event last night.

Go here for the Hack updates.

A friend writes to say that apologist and scientist John Lennox will be debating Richard Dawkins in Birmingham, Alabama, October 3, 2007, courtesy of Fixed Point. Lennox is the author of God's Undertaker: Has Science buried God? and Dawkins is the author of The God Delusion. My friend tells me that Lennox is "well known as a speaker all over the world, but especially in Europe and the former Soviet block." Here's more on the debate. I have not yet turned up the resolution of the debate (as in, Resolved, that ...) - are they still working on it?

Alister McGrath on Richard Dawkins - atheism is simpleminded narcissism?

Oxford historian Alister McGrath, author of Twilight of Atheism and formerly an atheist himself, reflects on his debates with Richard Dawkins, who seems to have retired from his science career to bash religion.
Simpleminded?

I am disappointed. I would have expected an Oxford professor to use a much more careful, scholarly approach, always trying to see an opponent at his best, and not using simplistic generalizations. I can entirely understand why Michael Ruse and many other atheists are embarrassed by The God Delusion. What concerns me most, however, is what this book shows us about today's atheism. I think this book is being read primarily by atheists who want to bolster their faith, when all around them God is being taken more seriously than he has for many years. It is almost as if atheists want cheap, slick answers, and don't want to face up to the big questions. Dawkins gives them a simple way of looking at life: people who believe in God are mad, bad and sad; atheists are bold, brilliant, and brave. You don’t need to think about things; you don't need to read books by Christians. You can write them off in advance as the predictable rantings of deluded idiots. It’s very worrying, and shows how dogmatic and simplistic atheism has now become.

Narcissism? Interviewer Dinesh d'Souza offers,

Even more telling, during your opening statement you referenced Dr. Dawkins or his work ten times, yet he never made reference to you. At the end of the debate, after your final comment, he simply laughed. Given Freud’s characterization of narcissism, that all libido is invested in the self and no other objects exist, perhaps Dawkins's fundamentalism is really narcissism. Since Dawkins is an atheist then only atheism is relevant. Neither the lives of billions of believers, nor the collective works of Augustine, nor Aquinas’ Summa Theologica, nor the countless acts of Christian charity over the last two thousand years seem to matter to Dawkins.

McGrath doesn't dispute that.

Wow, things are really heating up in this area - and about time too.

Also more on ex-world famous atheist Antony Flew's new book - "There IS a God" - wonderful cover! - but you have to go here and scroll down to see it.

More D'Souza? He also quotes Stanley Fish on shallow, dogmatic atheists and offers a post-mortem on secularism.

My series on the last-ditch anti-God crusade is here.

Thinkquote of the Day

"The God Delusion makes me embarrassed to be an atheist, and the McGraths show why."

- Michael Ruse, ruefully praising Alister and Joanna McGrath's new book, The Dawkins Delusion .

Ruse is well known as a historian of the evolution-intelligent design controversy. I haven't read The Dawkins Delusion yet, but my own conclusion from The God Delusion is that I'd be embarrassed too. By the way, here's Dawkins on how to talk to religious people and other evil morons.

Atheism: Dawkins on the need to curb religious liberty

Last year, atheist crusader Richard Dawkins, Oxford's Professor of the Public Understandign of Science, asked to have his name removed from a British petition that would make it illegal to teach one's religion to children, on the grounds that he had not read all of the petition's objects. That, however, should not be mistaken for support for religious liberty, as this article in Commonweal (April 20, 2007) illustrates:

The National Secular Society (NSS), of which Dawkins is an honorary associate, has campaigned for a godless Britain since the nineteenth century, and devotes its Web site to decrying and ridiculing religious faith. The NSS, whose associates include twenty British parliamentarians, as well as such establishment cultural figures as the playwright Harold Pinter, vows to combat “religious power-seekers” and “put them in their place once and for all.” For his part, Dawkins has said he would remove all financial support from Christian, Jewish, and Muslim schools and make them teach atheism; prohibit hospital chaplains from solacing the ill; and undertake other measures to combat the “infantile regression” of religious belief. And what about parents who persist in telling their children about religion? “It’s probably too strong to say the state should have the right to take children away from their parents,” Dawkins told an interviewer. “But I think we have got to look very carefully at the rights of parents-and whether they should have the right to indoctrinate their children.”

It's interesting that, in the Western world, the "godless" movement has quickly developed an authoritarian bent. The arguments are not new at all, as many sources have noted, but the drive for power is.

And, here Brit Michael J. Penfold addresses the Dawkins delusions.

Time Magazine: Maybe materialism is not winning?

"We revere faith and scientific progress, hunger for miracles and for MRIs. But are the worldviews compatible?" TIME asks, conveninga debate between evangelical atheist Richard Dawkins and genome scientist Francis Collins. Time notes,

Can religion stand up to the progress of science? This debate long predates Darwin, but the antireligion position is being promoted with increasing insistence by scientists angered by intelligent design and excited, perhaps intoxicated, by their disciplines' increasing ability to map, quantify and change the nature of human experience. Brain imaging illustrates—in color!—the physical seat of the will and the passions, challenging the religious concept of a soul independent of glands and gristle. Brain chemists track imbalances that could account for the ecstatic states of visionary saints or, some suggest, of Jesus.

The article leads up to the usual materialist rubbish that you might have expected Time to publish, but hang in there: Collins comes off way better than Dawkins. Collins' arguments are not especially stellar and - as he gladly admits - they are hardly original, but they have never really been answered by Dawkins' ilk.

By the way, Dawkins, who should have stayed a scientist, is leading a crusade against religion, according to the Times of London, including inundating schools with antireligious rubbish.

RICHARD DAWKINS, the Oxford University professor and campaigning atheist, is planning to take his fight against God into the classroom by flooding schools with anti-religious literature.

He is setting up a charity that will subsidise books, pamphlets and DVDs attacking the "educational scandal" of theories such as creationism while promoting rational and scientific thought.

The foundation will also attempt to divert donations from the hands of “missionaries” and church-based charities.

Just what the beleaguered school systems need. So much for Dawkins' chair in "The Public Understanding of Science" at Oxford. Maybe they should start looking for an incumbent who has the time for it.

My other blog is the Post-Darwinist, which keeps tabs on the intelligent design controversy.

My previous books are By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg 2004) and Faith@Science. The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007), with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard.

Thinkquote of the day: On Dawkins' popularity

A friend writes, " ... Dawkins [an anti-theistic Darwinist ] is a force to be reckoned with, if only because he commands so much media attention and popularity."

Yes, I came across a beautiful comment for By Design or by Chance? from one of Dawkins' editors:

More than that, the elegant Oxbridge don is a cultural icon. As one of his editors explains: If you’re an intelligent reader, and you read certain literary novels that everybody has to read, along with seeing Tarantino movies, then reading Richard Dawkins has become part of your cultural baggage.[6] (p. 104)

Yes, cultural baggage. We need to keep in mind that it actually does not matter if Dawkins is talking rot. His fans are very anxious to hear and accept that rot. It goes with everything they believe, and against everything they do not believe.

As a result, they will behave - at best - toward those who question it as people do toward those who would deprive them of a pleasure. At worst, they will assume that they have been attacked personally, and respond in kind. My guess (as good as anyone else's) is that we'll see more of that before we see less.

My other blog is the Post-Darwinist, which keeps tabs on the intelligent design controversy.