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What do Religious Believers Believe?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 June 2011
Extract
A common response to Richard Dawkins' assault on religious belief has been that he is attacking a straw man. The beliefs of religious believers, so the protest goes, are not as crude and simplistic as the ones which he attributes to them. Here is Terry Eagleton's comment to that effect:
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. Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins…invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince.
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- Information
- Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 68: Philosophy and Religion , July 2011 , pp. 105 - 124
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2011
References
1 Terry Eagleton, ‘Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching’, London Review of Books 19 October 2006.
2 Swinburne, Richard, Is There a God? (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 Some examples of this line of argument are: Swinburne, Richard, The Existence of God (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1979)Google Scholar, and Is There a God?; Polkinghorne, John, Belief in God in an Age of Science (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998)Google Scholar, Science and Theology (London: SPCK, 1998)Google Scholar, and many other works; Ward, Keith, Why There Almost Certainly Is a God (Oxford: Lion Hudson, 2008)Google Scholar.
4 Dawkins, Richard, The God Delusion (London: Bantam Press, 2006)Google Scholar, 134ff, esp. 109 and 148–150.
5 Eagleton, ‘Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching’.
6 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1922), 6.44Google Scholar.
7 I do not have space to discuss here other possible ways of providing a rational basis for belief in the existence of a personal deity, such as appeals to religious experience of the kind defended by Ward, (Why There Almost Certainly is a God, ch. 7). I say something about appeals to religious experience, and why I think they fail, in my On Humanism (London: Routledge, 2004), 41–2Google Scholar, and in ‘The Varieties of Non-Religious Experience’, in Cottingham, John (ed.), The Meaning of Theism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007)Google Scholar.
8 Dawkins, The God Delusion, 306.
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12 Ibid., 68.
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14 Ibid., 94.
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20 Ibid., 84.
21 Ibid.
22 Lash, Nicholas, ‘Where Does The God Delusion Come From?’, in Theology for Pilgrims (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2008), 7Google Scholar.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid., 8–9.