The heart of the issue is that Richard Dawkins holds to a particular philosophy of science, and this is ‘The Game’ which has been influential in dictating the rules for the past 300 years or so in western culture. Christianity, and Francis Collins, have naively allowed themselves to be lured onto the ground of Dawkins’ choosing, and so lose the argument.

In fact, Christianity doesn’t lose (as Wesley, Whitefield, Edwards, Finney, ‘revivals’ throughout the 19th century and to the present day testify), but the culture in which it finds itself contextualised can become a place of institutionalised unbelief: “He could not do many miracles there - - - and he was amazed at their lack of faith”.

Christianity has responded in a vain counter-attempt to establish itself as ‘The Game’ in modern times, when it turns the arguments and proofs of modernism against modernism. It has retreated into modernism to fight modernism. Hence an evangelical (or Catholic, for that matter) absolutism which many find distasteful.

I don’t personally believe the answer is to strip the Christian faith of a narrative which embraces all of time and space, and to reduce it to the status of a tribal religion. A people comprising “every nation, tribe people and language” is more than a tribe, according to ‘the tribe’s’ sacred writings. It is indeed a narrative amongst narratives, and does not have an answer to every conceivable issue, or a claim over anyone apart from their voluntary acceptance of its invitation to faith. Let it address the alternative narratives on its own terms, and see then which narrative becomes the one that other tribes wish to make their own.

Absolutism of any kind is offensive, and faith must be allowed to speak for itself, without the spoken or unspoken assumption that no other view is to be tolerated. An absolutism of a similar kind infects Dawkins and modernism in general, and is no less offensive.