God . . . in other words

From The Times:

Richard Dawkins may be Britain’s foremost atheist, but he is willing to be inspired and uplifted. Is he a believer after all?

We meet in the North Oxford Gothic splendour of his grand house near the colleges of Oxford, of which his own, New College, is one of the grandest and oldest, founded by a Bishop of Winchester and steeped in the religious and choral tradition of the Church of England. I am at once curious and anxious. In the background, as we speak, are the carved wooden fairground figures collected by his wife, Lalla (Ward), daughter of the seventh Viscount Bangor and known to Doctor Who fans as Romana. What does seem fantastic is to find myself, as a daughter of the cloth, a nongraduate and a traditionalist Anglican, quizzing this rather awe-inspiring Oxford don and author of The God Delusion (GD) about the existence of the Almighty. Or not.

Dawkins in the flesh bears no resemblance to the angry, hate-filled antireligionist he is portrayed as. In fact, he even believes that children should know their Bible. “You’d be rightly written off as uncultivated if you knew nothing of the Bible. You need the Bible to understand literary allusions,” he says at the end of our chat. By then I’ve concluded that, by many Anglican standards, and certainly by most Einsteinian ones, Dawkins is quite religious. He would get on famously, I feel, with the Archbishop of Canterbury.

More here.

Comments

[papalaz]

More linguistic sophistry from the God botherers - reminds me very much of Lewis Carroll.

When will a true believer step up to the mark and take on te proper arguments?

I'd guess never!

[Pete Chapman]

“No, it’s part of a language so it doesn’t really matter what the word means.”

If Dawkins actually said that then he really is heading straight into the upper ranks of the great masters of modern thought. One day he will be mentioned in the same breath as Samuel Goldwyn ("That's a definite maybe.") and Yogi Berra ("It's deja vu all over again.").
Don't get me wrong, "The Blind Watchmaker" was an important book for me but there's always been something half baked about the way Dawkins presents his arguments. Now maybe he was just yanking the writer's chain when he goes to the dictionary to look up numinous and transcendent but he has been wailing on about religion and either plays dumb or really doesn't consider these concepts as worth knowing about. I guess they're just a "part of language", right?
I really want to be on his side but there are times when he makes me doubt my atheism. In fairness though any interesting interview should be as much of an ambush as a conversation. Thanks for posting this piece.

[Jesse M.]

Well, the context of the "part of the language" comment was just about using expressions involving the word "God" in casual speech, it wasn't any sort of intellectual argument:

I ask him what words he uses when he swears. The same as everyone else, he says. For example, “O God help us” when he gets a dreadful essay from a student. Does he ever think then that he’s invoking God? “No, it’s part of a language so it doesn’t really matter what the word means.”

[JonJ]

Precisely. What he meant was simply that "God help us" is a cliche phrase that lots of us learned as kids and therefore blurt out as a sort of reflex in certain situations. Why his saying that should make one doubt one's atheism I don't quite understand.

You might as well say that any one who blurts out "Damn!" is affirming the existence of God, because it is short for "God damn you!" or "God damn it!" The interviewer was the one making the dumb comment, in my opinion, and Dawkins was just brushing it aside.

[Bruce/Crablaw]

I don't worship Thor or Wotan, but be damned if I am going to scratch out Wednesday and Thursday on my calendar and replace them with some excrescent variant.

The entire English etymological heritage need not be purged for the good of the revolution.

One of the most annoying features of the modern atheist movement is its focus on trivialities. They complaint about the coins and bills having the word God on them. Well, they shouldn't. But to focus on such petty gripes while theocratic power amasses and infiltrates even the civil service of the U.S. government, skewing education and health policy, is a sad farce. They are worried about a National Day of Prayer when it's the other 364 days of the year in which the real damage gets done.

[papalaz]

Consdering the games that she plays with words and definitions it is fascinatig that she makes the classic Xtian misunderstanding of the difference between logos and lexis

[Scott Ahlf]

A fanatical atheist believes this---
"If you claim that something is true, I will examine the evidence which supports your claim; if you have no evidence, I will not accept that what you say is true and I will think you a foolish and gullible person for believing it so."

How unreasonable! I think I'll crash some planes into buildings, or go beat up gays---
I mean, us fanatical religious zealots and fanatical atheists are the same---
Can't you tell? Exactly the same---