Secularist Rebuffs of Atheist Activists!

Even as Andrew Sullivan and Sam Harris carry on their debate at Beliefnet, David Heim of the Christian Century reports that not everyone within the secularist realm are happy with Richard Dawkins and his friends.

Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist, dismisses arguments for God’s existence as “infantile” and “vacuous,” and he regards faith an evolutionary accident–“a misfiring of something useful”—that has caused more harm than good. He thinks atheism is the sign of a healthy mind. His book, which has been on the bestseller list for months, apparently taps into some widespread interest in expunging religion.But Dawkins is severely pummeled for his views in the Atlantic, where novelist Marilynne Robinson skewers him for being stuck in Victorian-era science and for having a naïve confidence in evolutionary progress.

In the New York Review of Books H. Allen Orr, a biologist at the University of Rochester, notes that Dawkins never “squarely faces” Jewish or Christian theology and that his arguments resemble “those of any bright student who has thumbed through Bertrand Russell’s more popular books and who has, horrified, watched videos of holy rollers.” Neither Robinson nor Orr thinks Dawkins knows much about history or is any good at philosophical argument—or even at fair argument. New York Times reviewer Jim Holt isn’t quite as harsh, but he too points out Dawkins’s “scattershot reasoning” and “rhetorical excess.”

I appreciate these links from David Heim, which just go to show you that not just we believers find Dawkins to be out of his element when he discusses theology. As for the Sullivan-Harris debate -- well, I'm rooting for Sullivan and from my reading of things, find him outpointing the new young champion of atheism. For like Dawkins, Harris takes on religion in shotgun manner, pillorying the buffoons and then tying the rest of us to them. Sorry, but I don't buy it, and apparently others don't either.

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