So Richard Dawkins has been and gone and if you had $300 you could have heard him speak. What follows was the basis of a letter in The Dominion Post on 25 February 2023.
Richard Dawkins is a renowned evolutionary biologist and campaigning atheist. His visit this weekend raised important issues about scientific method and the status of non-scientifically verifiable realities such as the arts, religion, ethics and philosophy.
In 1859 Charles Darwin’s On the origin of species divided the Church into three broad categories: those who rejected science (biblical literalists), those who rejected religion (whence spring many atheists) and those who sought to blend the two into a creative synthesis (contemporary theology).
Contemporary theologians point out that the Genesis account of the Earth’s origins are neither history nor science. They speak instead of the unity and sacredness of all creation and our role as kaitiaki of the Earth.
In The God Delusion (2006) Dawkins describes how he and a former Bishop of Oxford, Richard Harries, wrote a joint letter on behalf of a group of scientists and bishops to Tony Blair opposing a proposal to introduce creationism (a religious ideology) into the science curriculum of a state-funded school. (They received a vague response.)
Regrettably Dawkins, while thus being fully aware of contemporary theology, campaigns against religion on the basis of caricatures and biblical literalisms.
Dawkins is moved by Schubert and Shakespeare. He would like to find a scientific explanation for that but such a quest takes one down the road to scientism (no truth except what is scientifically verifiable). Dawkins would do better to break free from that straitjacket and acknowledge that there are other truths in life that do not need to be shoe-horned into the scientific paradigm.