Some excerpts:
No wonder atheists are angry: they seem ready to believe anything
Richard Dawkins's latest attack on religion is an intellectually lazy polemic not worthy of a great scientist
Madeleine Bunting
Saturday January 7, 2006
The Guardian
On Monday, it's Richard Dawkins's turn (yet again) to take up the cudgels against religious faith in a two-part Channel 4 programme, The Root of All Evil? His voice is one of the loudest in an increasingly shrill chorus of atheist humanists; something has got them badly rattled. They even turned their bitter invective on Narnia. By all means, let's have a serious debate about religious belief, one of the most complex and fascinating phenomena on the planet, but the suspicion is that it's not what this chorus wants. Behind unsubstantiated assertions, sweeping generalisations and random anecdotal evidence, there's the unmistakable whiff of panic; they fear religion is on the march again.
There's an aggrieved frustration that they've been short-changed by history; we were supposed to be all atheist rationalists by now. Secularisation was supposed to be an inextricable part of progress. Even more grating, what secularisation there has been is accompanied by the growth of weird irrationalities from crystals to ley lines. As GK Chesterton pointed out, the problem when people don't believe in God is not that they believe nothing, it is that they believe anything.
Not knowing how to answer the big questions of life, we shelve them - we certainly don't develop the awe towards and reverence for the natural world that Dawkins would want. So the atheist humanists have been betrayed by the irrational, credulous nature of human beings; a misanthropy is increasingly evident in Dawkins's anti-religious polemic and among his many admirers.
This is the only context that can explain Dawkins's programme, a piece of intellectually lazy polemic which is not worthy of a great scientist. He uses his authority as a scientist to claim certainty where he himself knows, all too well, that there is none; for example, our sense of morality cannot simply be explained as a product of our genetic struggle for evolutionary advantage. More irritatingly, he doesn't apply to religion - the object of his repeated attacks - a fraction of the intellectual rigour or curiosity that he has applied to evolution (to deserved applause). Where is the grasp of the sociological or anthropological explanations of the centrality of religion? Sadly, there is no evolution of thought in Dawkins's position; he has been saying much the same thing about religion for a long time.
There are three areas in his programmes where the lack of rigour is most striking. First, Dawkins is featured in Jerusalem; the point is that religion causes violence and most of the world's conflicts can be traced back to faith. If only they didn't have segregated schooling in Israel and Palestine then peace could emerge. Likewise in Northern Ireland.
Pinning all the blame on religion blindly ignores the evidence; the Rwandan tragedy was about ethnicity, the Holocaust about a racist political ideology. Crucially it fails to grasp the modern phenomenon of fundamentalism and how religious identity is being mobilised in an attempt to carve out positions of power within a rapidly globalising world; this kind of violent religion is a political product of rapid social and economic change.
And then there was this:
Johann Hari: Why Richard Dawkins is heroic
He is one of the few brave enough to stand up to the massed legions of the faithful
Published: 10 January 2006
We have never needed Richard Dawkins more than now. In this country, we have produced at least eight followers of a religious death cult prepared to commit mass murder to gain access to Paradise. And they are not the biggest religious killers operating on our soil: the Catholic Church tells Africans that condoms contain tiny, invisible holes that make them "useless" in preventing Aids, condemning tens of thousands of innocent people to a slow death from ignorance.
And to round out this post, here's the Telegraph highlight:
A provocative two-part film (concluding next week) by evolutionary biologist Professor Richard Dawkins, championing the illumination of science over “the process of non-thinking called faith”. Religion, suggests Dawkins, be it Christianity, Islam or Judaism, is “divisive”. And the “childish certainties” of fundamentalist belief are, he asserts, downright dangerous.
From Lourdes to Jerusalem via an evangelical megachurch in Colorado and its tetchy pastor (120million Americans believe in the literal truth of the Bible), Dawkins gamely takes his argument to those least willing to listen.
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