Ruth Gledhill wonders whether Dawkins is more than the angry atheist, which he appears to be and whether he is a believer after all. She portrays him as a man who has belief, but who is just unwilling to admit. Sugary excerpt:
“Love is not a rational process and I’m as susceptible to love as anybody else,” he says. “To say God is love, if that is an actual definition, then I believe in God because I believe in love. But God isn’t love, God is something supernatural, and in certain religions, love is supernatural. When you say love is not rational, there are two ways of interpreting that. You could say that love is not intelligible by rational means, and I’m not sure I believe that. As a scientist I believe that love is intelligible on rational grounds. That doesn’t mean that a particular person who is in love can learn anything, gain anything, or understand their own emotions in rational terms. But I do believe that love, like any other manifestation of brain stuff, is intelligible in rational terms, although maybe not in practice.”
So love is merely a biological phenomenon? “Anything to do with life is biological. So, in a way, you haven’t asked me a very big question and I haven’t answered it.”
People of faith make the assumption that people who don’t believe don’t have a soul, are empty and in the dark. I find it interesting that there is much more of a burden put on atheism and non belevers to justify and explain why they don’t believe as if that mere fact is an abnormality and an impossibility. In other words, Atheists and nonbelievers are either people who believe and don’t know it or people who are stubbornly refusing to see the light. However, all of this circular reasonning leads nowhere except to one issue and that is the value of human existence and human beings without God. Is humanity precious in itself or do humans have to tie themselves to God to make their life meaning, valuable? What if Dawkins is exactly what he puports to be, an atheist who thinks that God is delusion, would that make him a sas pitiful little man or a man with the courage to say no and to assume the consequences of his worldview.
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