Anglicans hit out at atheist Dawkins
Pastor Dale Morgan
Anglicans hit out at atheist Dawkins*
By Jonathan Wynne-Jones - Telegraph UK
Last Updated: 1:07am BST 14/10/2007
The Archbishop of Canterbury launched a fierce attack yesterday on the
modern cult of atheism and singled out the eminent scientist Richard
Dawkins.
Dr Rowan Williams responded to critics of religion by arguing that
atheists had missed the point and failed to understand what Christians
really believe in.
Dr Rowan Williams
Dr Williams holds a copy of Dawkins' The God Delusion
In a fierce attack on the Oxford professor and other leading atheists,
he said: "There are specific areas of mismatch between what Richard
Dawkins may write about and what religious people think they are doing."
He added: "There are few things more annoying than people saying 'I know
what you mean'." Dr Williams described Prof Dawkins as a "lively and
attractive writer" but said his arguments were not fully engaging with
religion.
He suggested that Prof Dawkins, the author of the best-selling The God
Delusion and a leading Darwinist, was a good scientist but a poor
philosopher.
"Our culture is one that deeply praises science, so we assume because
someone is a good scientist, they must be a good philosopher," he said
in a lecture at Swansea University.
In a message to the critics, he said: "Don't distract us from the real
arguments by assuming that religion is an eccentric survival strategy or
irrational form of explanation."
When asked by an audience member "whose fault is Dawkins?", Dr Williams
replied that religious believers themselves were partly to blame, adding
that in the past God had often been reduced "to the kind of target
Dawkins and others too easily fire at".
Dr Williams said many fellow Christians would not recognise their
religion as it was described by critics.
He said: "When believers pick up Richard Dawkins or Christopher
Hitchens, we may feel as we turn the pages: 'This is not it. Whatever
the religion being attacked here, it's not actually what I believe in'."
He told the audience he wasn't simply interested in defending his
beliefs, but also in upholding the principle of intellectual debate.
The first argument against religion he looked at was that of it being
explained as an evolutionary survival strategy, passed on through
generations. Dr Williams said that Darwinian theory had wrongly been
used as a way to interpret culture, not just biology, by Prof Dawkins.
He rejected Prof Dawkins's theory which assumes culture is transmitted
in a similar way to biology, through "memes" as opposed to genes, and
added: "I find this philosophically crass and undeveloped at best,
simply contradictory and empty at worst."
Dr Williams added that to see religion as a survival strategy was to
misunderstand it.
More than 1,000 people heard the lecture, both inside the auditorium and
in overflow rooms nearby.
Prof Dawkins has been scathing in his assessment of Christian theology,
which he has described as vacuous. In a Channel 4 programme, The Enemies
of Reason, in August he said: "There are two ways of looking at the
world — through faith and superstition, or through the rigours of logic,
observation and evidence, through reason.
"Yet today reason has a battle on its hands. Reason and a respect for
evidence are the source of our progress, our safeguard against
fundamentalists and those who profit from obscuring the truth. We live
in dangerous times when superstition is gaining ground and rational
science is under attack."