Dawkins a Double Agent?

Dawkins: God love him!

Ever since I first read The God Delusion, I have held a kind of exasperated respect for Richard Dawkins. It has always seemed to me that he was so incredibly ignorant about religion, yet asked all the right questions, questions that religious people should be answering, issues that religious people should be addressing.

In this respect he has done religion a great service, I have no doubt, in that he has kept the important issues alive and being discussed. I have been consistantly frustrated by the lack of good answers coming forth from the religious community, although some have risen wonderfully to the challenge, notably the Chief Rabbi, Dr. Johnathan Sacks, in his wonderful book The Great Partnership. But also Professor John Lennox:




I do think that Dawkins has become more and more a character of ridicule over the last few years however, to the point now where many atheists are exasperated with him and his bizarre opinions, as I have blogged about before. This is perhaps best summed up by Professor Terry Eagleton, who refers to Dawkins as "the least well-equipped to understand what he castigates", saying:

"Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology."

In a similar vein, I had to draw attention to this rather old article in the Telegraph I spotted today by Matthew Norman, which states:

"What I suspect must have happened was that, some time in the late Seventies, the leaders of the world’s great religions met in secret conclave to discuss the threat posed by the march of science.Appreciating that the unravelling of the genetic code would one day enable life to be created in a test tube, thereby usurping the primary function of the Creator, they came up with a wickedly ironic plan. They would recruit the world’s leading geneticist, and run him under deep cover as a double agent for Big Religa. His brief was first to win the slavish respect of the atheist community, as he did with his meisterwork "The God Delusion"; and then to pretend to go so infuriatingly and offensively doolally that atheists would find the faiths he derided infinitely more appealing than their fiercest foe, and flock to them.This plot he has carried out to the letter. I would now rather spend a year in a Cistercian monastery or a madrassa than a minute listening to Richard Dawkins."

Absolutely brilliant!