David Hart, author of Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies, writes about Richard Dawkins’s The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution in First Things. Perhaps surprisingly, Hart thinks the work on the whole is an admirable production. But he lays into Dawkins when it comes to logic and philosophy. Here’s an excerpt:
[W]hat makes The God Delusion so frustrating to any reader who has a shred of decent philosophical training and who knows the history of ideas is its special combination of encyclopedic ignorance and thuggish bluster. . . . His own pet proof of “why there almost certainly is no God” (a proof in which he takes much evident pride) is one that a usually mild-spoken friend of mine (a friend who has devoted too much of his life to teaching undergraduates the basic rules of logic and the elementary language of philosophy) has described as “possibly the single most incompetent logical argument ever made for or against anything in the whole history of the human race.”
That may be an exaggeration. My friend has spent little time among theologians. But that is neither here nor there. All of these failings would be pardonable if Dawkins were capable of correction. But his habitual response to any concept whose meaning he has not taken the time to learn is to dismiss it as meaningless, with the sort of truculent affectation of contempt that suggests he really knows, at some level, that he is out of his depth.
