Cornflower wrote:
"On what evidence does Dawkins base his own faith in atheism? Either way it is about faith. Maybe he should de-bunk himself.

Safer ground is to say simply that one cannot find evidence to support a certain belief. "

Your words betray your utter ignorance of the nature of atheism. Atheists do not have faith in atheism, the word "faith" does not belong in the atheist lexicon. The second part of the above quote is what atheists DO say - ie, there is no evidence to support belief X, so I do not subscribe to it.

Atheism is, by definition, the asbence of something (define theism as you will).

Atheism is merely the refusal to accept religious dogma as fact and instead looking to nature and observable phenomena in an attempt to discern reality

Quite so, stickman.

A common form of Christian sophistry is to try and reframe atheism as just another form of faith - which is of course precisely the kind of twisted logic that is taught at Christian schools.

I suppose kids who are brainwashed in this way grow up to believe that their myths and legends are the equivalent of scientific knowledge, and post nonsense to that effect in forums such as this.

stickman said: "Atheism is, by definition, the asbence (sic) of something (define theism as you will). Atheism is merely the refusal to accept religious dogma as fact and instead looking to nature and observable phenomena in an attempt to discern reality"

No, that is not the usual description of atheism and I suggest you Google for the superior OED definition. But no matter, Dawkins' athesism is far more limiting than that, which is precisely the point I am making: Dawkins doesn't just doubt the presence of God he denies God's existence entirely. That is an extreme atheism where God-denial (or belief in the total absence of God) is as much a faith as the 'God-belief' of the religions he criticises.

As I suggested earlier, this is a silly, rigid, unscientific standpoint for him to take when the more robust conclusion could have been: "there is insufficient proof for the existence of a God, so I doubt the existence of God". He is expansive, emotional and carried away with hyperbole, which is unprofessional but then he had a book to sell I guess.

C J Morgan

Why do you restrict your criticism exclusively to 'Christian' schools? In doing so you show ignorance of Dawkins, who was concerned about all, not some religions. Your lack of balance could easily be construed as stereotyping and bigotry.

Cornflower: "C J Morgan. Why do you restrict your criticism exclusively to 'Christian' schools? In doing so you show ignorance of Dawkins, who was concerned about all, not some religions."

My comment was specifically directed at the peculiarly Christian sophistry that attempts to reduce scientific knowledge to the same credulous status as 'faith'. I have no doubt that schools run by other religious groups engage in their own forms of brainwashing, but I haven't seen that particular form of irrationality in the ravings of their graduates. For example, I'm not aware of a Muslim or Hindu version of 'creation science' or 'intelligent design'.

I'd hazard a guess that Dawkins has forgotten more science than correspondents like Cornflower have ever understood. What qualifications does s/he have to question his scientific credentials, beyond the sort of idiotic reasoning that reduces science to the same level as myths and legends?

Atheism:
I guess you have to be one to know one;
For me, having been encouraged by an agnostic mother to attend sunday school we children went to a local Church of England school in Taringa, Brisbane. It was rather a benign form of Christian dogma that I embraced, participated in the church,served in choir and as Altar Boy attended services more regularly than most. That is until I reached a point where I developed serious doubts about many aspects of what was being preached.

In my search for truth I attended other denominations in Brisbane:Baptist, Methodist,Catholic,Lutheran and Apostolic only to learn they were all quite similar which merely served to reinforce my doubts. I too became agnostic and "wandered in the wilderness" until I was introduced to Darwin's "Origin of Species".

I am aware of the furore that Darwin's work created and the ridicule that he was subjected to by one-eyed christians despite the fact he was a practicing christian himself and did not write the work to challenge the existence of God or Creation.

However, science has moved on since his day and more evidence emerges with time to produce scientific evidence which refutes the myths and legends that have been created by 'Man' in order to explain his origins.

Fear of the unknown tends to encourage people to embrace the notion of 'hereafter'and 'resurrection'which of itself tends toward a belief in a supreme being. If people are afraid of death and have a need to believe in a god, then so be it but for this Atheist, I dont want to clutter my mind with dogma.

These days there appears to be an increasing interest in Buddhism as people search for life's meaning and drift away from established sects. Probably a safer course than embracing the evangelicals that create suicidal cults and more bizarre sects.

Cornflower,

You've misrepresented Richard Dawkins quite strongly above. In _The God Delusion_, he posits a scale of atheism/agnosticism from 1 to 7, with 1 being C J Jung's "I do not believe, I KNOW" God exists, 4 being a bob each way, and 7 being absolute certainty that God does not exist. Dawkins puts himself not at 7 but at 6: technically agnostic (He quotes Carl Sagan: "It's okay to withhold judgment until the evidence is in!"), but leaning heavily towards atheism on the grounds that all the evidence indicates that the universe could exist just as it does with no supernatural intervention.

(He also quotes Woody Allen: "If it turns out God does exist, I don't think he's actually evil, the worst that you can say is he's an underachiever")

I read the article you linked above by Prof. Alvin Plantinga ("John A O'Brien Professor of Philosophy" is his job title, not his name). Plantinga's argument is completely empty: he seems to think there is a "problem" with Dawkins' skepticism of what he calls "the God hypothesis", and he paints an invalid syllogism ("If P is not disproven then P must be true", where P is the proposition that the universe came to be without supernatural intervention) as indicative of Dawkins' position.

A more accurate representation of Dawkins' opinion is Occam's Razor: "If P is the simplest explanation AND P is not disproven then P is almost certainly true".

Dawkins isn't a radical believer in anything; he's eminently reasonable. He is also reasonably angry at political pressure from religion to suppress reason, and even more angry at the constant use of faith to justify violence -- hence his consistent but well-mannered anti-religious bellicosity.