1. Do stop behaving as if you are God, Professor Dawkins

Comment #21348 by grendelkhan on February 8, 2007 at 9:25 pm

Believing in God was only for sad, mad and bad people who had yet to be enlightened by science.

Dawkins, of course, would just respond that people such as this are senile or mad

I think this is the most pernicious of the straw men that have been flung at Dawkins in general and The God Delusion specifically. Granted, I'm only about halfway through the book, but I think if there were going to be assertions that people with theistic beliefs were uniformly sad, insane, or inherently bad, I'd have noticed them by this point.

The problem is that an apparently well-educated man like McGrath is unable to distinguish between someone saying "religion is a bad idea", and someone saying "religious people are bad". He's got plenty of company there, but that's still no excuse.

Consider how frequently PZ Myers gets critics saying, "look, Ken Miller is a theist, and he's an excellent scientist, in your face!" as if that's a response to anything PZ has ever said. It's the same nonsense--an attack on a belief system is taken as an attack on its practitioners.

A high-school student could make this distinction, but apparently it's beyond McGrath, or at least beyond his readers. He's managed to put together an entire book refuting claims that no one's ever made. It must be so much easier debating your opponents when they're made of straw. Here, I can point out some other responses to things no sensible atheist ever said.

So does Dawkins overstate the case for science in saying that it proves or disproves things relating to God?

Yes, and he's very naughty about this

Note that the relevant chapter is titled "Why there almost certainly is no God".

There are limits to science; science can't actually tell us the answer to lots of important questions such as whether there is there a God and what is the meaning of life.

Indeed, science can't answer those questions. But neither can religion, which is a major point made in the book. It's as though he's never read it, and come to think of it, perhaps the audience for The Dawkins Delusion hasn't.

This is like shooting fish in a barrel. It's beneath serious contemplation. Why does this nonsense even make it into the paper?