Dawkins on Aquinas

Ch. 3: Arguments for God’s Existence
Aquinas and DawkinsIn Chapter 3 of The God Delusion Dawkins seeks to dispose of supposed proofs for the existence of God. He turns his attention first to the famous ‘Five Ways’ of Thomas Aquinas. And I’m afraid that this is one of those points where I simply can’t be polite about Dawkins. His presentation is just dreadful. It reads like it is cribbed from a passing schoolboy – one who wasn’t listening in the relevant class, and so had to cobble together an essay based on a reading of a text some way beyond his limited intellectual level. Since Dawkins is clearly not that stupid, I can only assume that he, knowing in advance that he’s right and that people who disagree with him are wrong, simply didn’t think it worth bothering trying very hard to understand something written in a somewhat foreign idiom.

Anyway, look on the bright side: this presents a nice opportunity to grapple with the Five Ways myself. (Okay, that’s a bright side for me. You’ll have to find your own.) But I’ll start that in a new post, once I’ve got a moment to get my thoughts straight – and I hope it will show you why I’m not overly impressed with Dawkins’ account.

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