Do mimsy atheists gyre and gimble in the wabe?

[Ryft]

Such as? Not that I overly disagree with you on the point, I just wanted to know what weaknesses you saw from a theist's angle.

They are the same weaknesses that any self-respecting intellectual would find in this embarrassing piece of propaganda, I should think. As Terry Eagleton pointed out in his critical review of The God Delusion, Dawkins sets up a number of Straw Man caricatures and then courageously battles them to the death. He defines faith as "blind trust" in the absence of evidence, a "process of non-thinking" that is "evil precisely because it requires no justification and brooks no argument." It is a definition of faith utterly foreign to Christian philosophy, an irresponsible Straw Man invention that serves incompetent polemic purposes. He describes God as "a petty, unjust, unforgiving control freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully." This can only be biographical material about Dawkins, describing his take on the Judeo-Christian God, because it is not in any sense representative of what Christianity actually affirms; ergo, another vituperative and intellectually bankrupt Straw Man.

Ironically, after such scathing moral denouncements, he later in the book tried to assert that "good historians don't judge statements from past times by the standards of their own," his apologetic reference to Huxley's astonishing racism. And Dawkins seems oblivious to this incongruency. But he contradicts himself elsewhere in this prejudicial twaddle; e.g., he tries to argue for a who-designed-the-designer argument in various places, "that a God capable of designing a universe, or anything else, would have to be complex and statistically improbable." Ignoring the fact that improbability does not preclude actuality—we're here, after all (Dawkins, Climbing Mount Improbable)—he blissfully contradicts this notion when writing previously, "That scientifically savvy philosopher Daniel Dennett pointed out that evolution counters one of the oldest ideas we have: 'the idea that it takes a big fancy smart thing to make a lesser thing'," this counter-intuitive feature contributing to what makes it so "revolutionary." In other words, the causal force behind a complex thing would have to be even more complex than it—unless it's evolution.

But then Straw Man and Special Pleading are not the only fallacies he commits in this anti-religious drivel. He also engages in the fallacy of Unrepresentative Sample, presenting the fringe as if it were the center, the fanatics as if they are mainstream, which is highly irresponsible and contrary to the principles of scientific integrity. His characterization of the 'science vs. religion' tension is frankly a comparison of apples to oranges, contrasting the worst elements in religion against the best elements in science. "Yet if religion is to be blamed for the fraud done in its name, then what of science?" Marilynne Robinson asks in her review for Harper's Magazine. "Is it to be blamed for the Piltdown hoax, for the long-credited deceptions [related to] cloning in South Korea? If by 'science' it is meant authentic science, then 'religion' must mean authentic religion." Eagleton, in his review for London Review of Books, thought it rather incredible "that in a book of almost four hundred pages he can scarcely bring himself to concede that a single human benefit has flowed from religious faith, a view which is as a priori improbable as it is empirically false."

Dawkins mischaracterizes Luther's angst about reason in the life of faith, which seems to stem from a presumption that both Luther and himself are using 'reason' in the same sense, when in fact Luther was describing something quite different (that reason would dictate that salvation should be something earned). He mischaracterizes Aquinas' "Five Ways" as a priori proofs for God's existence, which they were not (they were a posteriori demonstrations of the internal coherence of theism). When it comes to Stephen Jay Gould's position that science has nothing to say about the question of God's existence, Dawkins dismisses it saying, "I simply do not believe that Gould could possibly have meant much of what he wrote in Rocks of Ages," as if personal incredulity is a substitute for a substantive response. (I choked at him calling Gould's tone "bullying." Dawkins loves his irony.) He snipes at president of the Royal Society, astrophysicist Martin Rees, for making the same argument, that there are questions which "lie beyond science" (Our Cosmic Habitat, 2001), and Peter Medawar feels warranted in expanding "that no conceivable advance of science would empower it to answer" (The Limits of Science, 1985). Eagleton appropriately wishes that Dawkins could have made his points "without being so appallingly bitchy about those of his scientific colleagues who disagree with him, and without being so theologically illiterate."

If I don't stop soon, I'll end up writing an entire book. But before I close this off, I want to underscore what is perhaps the greatest irony of all. His book is titled The God Delusion, and he opens the discussion with his feeling that 'delusion' is most fittingly understood in this context as a "persistent false belief held in the face of strong contradictory evidence." Yet in the entire 400-page tome, he does not present a single solitary piece of evidence that contradicts God-belief! There is a lot of material that allows for skepticism and disbelief, but absolutely nothing that proves God-belief as false with strong contradictory evidence. Not a thing.