Richard Dawkins: "A serious case could be made for a deistic God."

When I read "The God Delusion" I was deeply shocked. Like most people I have close friends who don't share my world view, but they are at pains to present themselves as well mannered agonisers after truth, admitting the strengths of the opposing argument while pointing out its weaknesses. What shocked me about Dawkins was not his arguments, all of which in a grossly unsophisticated form we covered in Philosophy I and Theology I. It was the fact that HERE WAS THE TRUE FUNDAMENTALIST . . . far more vicious and one-eyed than any hard-core Christian or Muslim fundamentalist of my acquaintance. Over the years I've known many of the former, and a handful of the latter. Some of them scare me. But Dawkins left them all for dead. Read the book if you don't believe me.

That's why a number of scholars whose beliefs are similar to those of Dawkins have distanced themselves from him.

BUT, IS DAWKINS EVOLVING?

This article by Melanie Phillips in The Spectator would seem to suggest as much. It's well worth reading.

On Tuesday evening I attended the debate between Richard Dawkins and John Lennox at Oxford’s Natural History Museum. This was the second public encounter between the two men, but it turned out to be very different from the first. Lennox is the Oxford mathematics professor whose book, God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? is to my mind an excoriating demolition of Dawkins’s overreach from biology into religion as expressed in his book The God Delusion -- all the more devastating because Lennox attacks him on the basis of science itself. In the first debate, which can be seen on video on this website, Dawkins was badly caught off-balance by Lennox’s argument precisely because, possibly for the first time, he was being challenged on his own chosen scientific ground.

This week’s debate, however, was different because from the off Dawkins moved it onto safer territory– and at the very beginning made a most startling admission. He said:

A serious case could be made for a deistic God.

The rest of the article is HERE.