I’m not chasing you Paul - I just noticed this post whilst passing, and wondered whether anyone else felt the same as me: that Dawkins is letting his anti-God passion take over from his former ability as a popular communicator of biological science. A keen mind seems to be giving way to rant and rhetoric - especially in ‘The God Delusion’. The latter part of verse 21 and the first part of verse 22 of Romans 1 comes to mind.

A recent article by Dawkins in The Times newspaper rested his conclusion that God does not exist on the lack of credibility of visions. Thus a friend of his came to faith (somewhat dubiously) after a vision of the devil on the Outer Hebrides, which was subsequently attributed by an ornithological friend of Dawkins to the call of the Manx sheerwater. The whole article was so meagre, it didn’t merit publishing, yet it provoked a deluge of correspondence - much of which showed a similar poverty of mind - in the arguments both for and against Dawkins.

I agree with your comment - that Dawkins should not be allowed to limit his argument to the ground of an outmoded modernistic worldview that ‘truth’ is to be found exclusively in the empirical observations of modern science. This is so outmoded, that I’m surprised nobody else (apart from ourselves, of course!) has commented on it. No serious-minded scientific thinker today would be so dogmatic as to assert that ‘science’ alone brings us into contact with the world as it really is. The challenge given by Einstein to Newtonian physics, and the mysterious subverting of existing ‘laws’ by the world of subatomic physics, have seriously undermined a confidence in such certainties. The best that science has to offer is paradigms which provide a working description until another hypothesis arises.

Dawkins more than anyone knows that the belief of a bygone scientific era in a progression from simple to complex forms of life, with the ‘building-blocks’ being the simpler forms, has been swept aside by the discovery that the ‘simpler’ forms are in themselves incredibly complex. Whether this kind of development allows for a continuing belief in a self-selecting evolution of life in the universe I don’t know - but it underlines the tentativeness of scientific observation, rather than its certainties.

Science no more gives us direct access to reality than anything else; it relies just as much on faith as religious belief - which has a better claim to provide us with such access. This should not be surprising, if God is taken to be the supreme fact in the universe, on which all other life depends.