That there is a huge problem underlying the arguments in The God Delusion is admitted by Dawkins in the preface to the paperback edition. He terms it, referring to criticisms he faced regarding the first edition, the great 'straw man' offensive and, sadly, he's right, though he tells us that those he is attempting to criticise are too dangerous to be straw men (chaps like the egregious Pat Robertson and the even more egregious Osama bin Laden and the Ayatollah Khomeini) and that the vast majority of believers around the world essentially think in such terms. How he knows what that vast majority believe and how they believe it is never made quite clear, but he's very good at sneering at them so presumably this gives him some rare form of scientific insight based on instinct rather than empirical data.
Now the problem is that even if one were to accept the prof's arguments in these terms, his many fans seem to think he has produced knock-down arguments regarding the very folk he clearly states he is not taking issue with. Just a quick example from one of the blurbs quoted on the inside page of my edition: The God Delusion is a good, strong argumentative challenge to any thoughtful believer with the courage to read it with care and try to dispute it. Well, no it isn't in its own terms because it simply doesn't address 'thoughtful believers'. The prof with admirable honesty tells us, regarding the theology of unexceptionable coves as Tillich and Bonhoeffer: If only such subtle, nuanced religion predominated, the world would surely be a better place, and I would have written a different book. Then he tells us this kind of religion is numerically negligible.
So I'm not reading a book that in any real sense deals with my understanding of religious belief or that of any 'thoughtful believer'. And the bigger problem is that I don't think that Dawkins's view of the key features of religious thought actually apply to most of the people of various faiths I've known in my life. He appears to look down on 'ordinary' believers with the scorn that only the truly clever and even more obtuse can muster. Yet I knew as a young teenager that the religious beliefs of, say, my Auntie Norah, a devout Catholic in the simplest sense, were actually a lot more complex and 'thoughtful' than the obvious dogmas of her faith (a truth that applied to every working class Catholic I knew, and there were a lot of them.)
Don't make the mistake of assuming that people who don't sound much like they can think aren't full of thought.
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I suppose in a sense Prof. Dawkins writes in reference to the mass bodies of people who are quite content with their blind acceptance of anything that comes with a religious label. The blind sheep who will do whatever their shrewd leaders direct them to in the name of their God. Perhaps in your lifetime you've had the privilege to know people of considerable intelligence who are capable of being 'thoughtful believers', but it's undeniable that there is a very large proportion of the world who aren't 'thoughtful believers', the ones who are truly 'deluded'. Those are the people, I think, he attacks so unapologetically. The sensationalist offerings of blurb quotes I guess are really just there to sell more books.
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