British Crusading Atheism: Richard Dawkins’ Criticism of Religious Belief and God

  • Justyna Herda The John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Faculty of Philosophy
Keywords: Richard Dawkins; religious faith; God; atheism; science

Abstract

The paper investigates the category of religious faith, religion and God presented and criticized by leading British atheist – Richard Dawkins. He is a biologist but his writings on faith and religion are highly popular all over the world. Dawkins argues that any form of faith in supernatural reality is opposite to rational and justified scientific investigation. One cannot be a scientist and believe in God at the same time becausescience is based onrational premises and religious faith is not. He claims that religious faith is a source of all evil in the world. In his criticism Dawkins does not undertake serious discussions with any contemporary philosophers of religion or theologians but he invents his own notion of religious faith. It seems that Dawkins’ atheistic position is a sort of belief which does not differessentially from religious faith defined byhim as a belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.

In the paper some particular views of Dawkins are considered critically: a) a notion of religious faith, b) religious faith as a source of evil, c) a problem of existence and nature of God.

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Published
2020-06-09
Section
Articles