Dawkins' atheism really is fundamentalist

I felt I ought to reference this little interview with Alistair McGrath on the subject of Richard Dawkins' atheism. In it McGrath makes a number of good points. I particularly warmed to these which are concerns of mine about Dawkins' brand of atheism.

Dawkins has his own definition of faith - "blind trust, in the absence of evidence, even in the teeth of evidence”, or as a “process of non-thinking”. Needless to say, these are highly pejorative, and don't correspond to what Christians actually think. Countless Christian writers - from Thomas Aquinas to C. S. Lewis to Josh McDowell - have emphasized that faith is based on evidence; that faith makes sense; and that faith can be defended in the public arena. Dawkins seems determined to portray people who believe in God as non-thinking. In doing so, he ends up in a hopeless mess, failing to distinguish between "religion" and "belief in God", and - maybe more importantly - between "a religion" and "a worldview".

Dawkins fails to take seriously how worldviews - such as Nazism or Stalinism - can lead people to acts of extremism and violence. He's so convinced that only religion causes these problems that he fails to look long and hard at the evidence. Most tellingly, he substitutes creedal statements for evidence-based arguments at this point. Here's an example: “I do not believe there is an atheist in the world who would bulldoze Mecca – or Chartres, York Minster, or Notre Dame.” Now this noble sentiment is a statement about his personal credulity, not about the reality of things. The history of the Soviet Union is replete with the burning and dynamiting of huge numbers of churches, not to mention the persecution of Christian clergy. Dawkins's naïve plea that atheism is innocent of the violence and oppression that he associates with religion is simply untenable, and suggests a significant blind spot on his part.

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