Haven’t you bothered to read him?

Yes. Great science writer. Writer on history/anthropology/culture – not so much.

‘Dawkins has said that the title “The Root of All Evil?” was not his preferred choice, but that Channel 4 had insisted on it to create controversy. His sole concession from the producers on the title was the addition of the question mark. Dawkins has stated that the notion of anything being the root of all evil is ridiculous’

Haven’t you bothered to read him?

However, these niceties seem to be lost on Dawkins’ target audience, as in this marketing blurb for the DVD on skeptic.com:

The Root of All Evil?, by the Oxford University evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, is his controversial documentary that complements his bestselling book The God Delusion. Dawkins presents his view of religion as a cultural virus that, like a computer virus, once downloaded into the software of society corrupts many of the programs it encounters. It isn’t hard to find examples to fit this view; one has only to read the dailies coming out of the Middle East to see its nefarious effects.

Dawkins is so compelling in his on-camera narrative style in his cultured British accent, marshalling his facts, examples, and interviews so convincingly that when you reach the end you are compelled to answer Yes! to the rhetorical question posed in the documentary’s title.

But why bother with accuracy?

“Faith isn’t believing without proof – it’s trusting without reservation.” William Sloane Coffin

It is not as a child that I believe and confess Jesus Christ. My hosanna is born of a furnace of doubt.– Fyodor Dostoyevski

Doubt isn’t the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith. –Paul Tillich

Faith is the refusal to panic. –David Martyn Lloyd-Jones

Belief is reassuring. People who live in the world of belief feel safe. On the contrary, faith is forever placing us on the razor’s edge. –Jacques Ellul

Faith is much better than belief. Belief is when someone else does the thinking.–R. Buckminster Fuller

Christianity is not a message which has to be believed, but an experience of faith that becomes a message. –Edward Schillebeeckx

I guess it’s this kind of faith, or sort of existential faith, that I value. To stake out a philosophical space, a system of values, and say, this is what I believe and resolve to make real in my life. I guess it is not so different from my ancestral roots in the Mennonite faith:

“True evangelical faith cannot lie dormant. It clothes the naked, it feeds the hungry, it comforts the sorrowful, it shelters the destitute, it serves those that harm it, it binds up that which is wounded, it has become all things to all people.”

I would happily have forgone bestsellerdom had there been the slightest hope of Duns Scotus illuminating my central question: does God exist? But I need engage only those few theologians who at least acknowledge the question, rather than blithely assuming God as a premise.

That would indeed be a vaiid excuse if Dawkins confined himself to disproving the existence of God. But he goes farther than that, accusing religion of being the “root of all evil”, a mind virus, etc. It’s where Dawkins crosses over from being a scientist/logician to a cultural critic/historian, that he loses credibility for me. He ignores how the best thinking in religion such as Sufi writings, OT midrashes, etc illuminate the human condition. For godess’s sake, one huge branch of Christianity, Eastern Orthodoxy, agrees that god does not “exist.”

But of course, Jesus’ didn’t rebuke Thomas. In fact, he honored his request for more proof.

After which, he said:
“Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.” John 20:29

It’s the second part of that verse that we – conservative evangelicals – were taught about repeatedly. In fact, I was often told that Jesus was addressing that remark to all his followers who came after the ascension and who would not get the “proof” that Thomas got, but would instead get a special blessing for believing on faith alone.

I guess we needed a consolation prize.