Richard Skinner writes, in Ekklesia:
It’s easy to get annoyed, but Christians really ought to listen to and take seriously what Richard Dawkins has to say...
...theological writers and others can point out at length that what Dawkins does is to set up a straw man – or rather, a straw God – and then demolish it; they can show that Dawkins has not really got to grips at all with a true understanding of God and the religious dimension; but the straw God that Dawkins sets up and then demolishes is often uncomfortably close to the notion of God that we Christians all too frequently seem to talk about, pray to and worship.
What Dawkins demolishes in this book may well be a misrepresentation of God, but it is a misrepresentation, an idol, that we Christians all too have often set up and espoused as the real thing. We should listen to Dawkins because doing so can help us reflect on what we claim to believe, or think we believe, or imply that we believe. His views can act as an acid to eat away the false and phoney elements of our faith.
The entire article put me in mind of a quote from George MacDonald, which played an important part in my own spiritual and intellectual journey. In one of his tales of fairyland, two characters are lost, and decide to simply adopt a very simple plan and stick to it. MacDonald comments:
Any honest plan will do in Fairyland, if you only stick to it.
At the time I read that story, I was in the throes of trying to sort out some very difficult questions in my world-view and my life, and I could see multiple approaches, but could not guess which was the best.
MacDonald's quote resonated with some other thoughts I had had, over the years, in the realm of science. I was exposed, early on, to the concept of aether, the invisible substance that early scientists believed must fill the universe, in order for light waves to propagate through space.
As time went on, the idea was dropped, partly because new theories replaced it, and partly because the requirements that aether would have to meet—it would have to be a fluid, more rigid than steel, but without mass.
I had, at one point in my education, thought to myself that the problem with aether had been that everyone had continued to think of it as the same kind of thing as water, or wood—that if only the concept had been allowed to, it might have evolved into our modern idea of an electro-magnetic field, or the quantum substrate, or the strings of string theory, each of which has some of the various qualities that made aether so unpopular.
Not being a physicist, I had no idea whether this fancy of mine had any real possibility to it as far as the aether was concerned (though I did learn later that Albert Einstein once suggested the same idea—ahem!), but I took this thought, along with MacDonald's dictum about fairyland as a guide. I adopted the frame of mind that any honest plan would do, with the emphasis on honest.
What makes a plan honest? What I meant, at that juncture, was that I would settle on, and pursue, one particular line, but I would be willing to question any and all of my assumptions and methods, and revise them wherever they failed to correspond with experience—with truth with a small "t", which is the only kind we have direct access to.
My idea was that it didn't matter what original hypothesis I started with—as long as I continued to modify it honestly whenever it ran aground I would eventually end with the truth.
I still think this, or something very like it, is so. This is one reason I don't particularly like evangelical atheism. I didn't become an atheist by conversion from Christianity; I became an atheist by pursuing Christianity—as hard, and as seriously as I knew how. As I pursued it, I found that to take it really seriously meant I had to ask some hard questions, and pay attention to the answers. The answers caused me to modify my beliefs, about many things—including God.
I haven't found some supernatural reality as a result of that journey. Instead I found a very natural reality that is just as deep and just as meaningful as anything religion promised.
One day I found myself in a very awkward position. My worldview had changed so much that what I meant by "God" was so different from what the average person means by "God" that I felt dishonest using the word anymore. So I stopped.
Some time after that I realized that there was a name for people like me—atheist.
So I applaud Skinner's position. I do think that if there is any hope for Christianity, it lies down the path he endorses—the path of questioning, and constantly modifying, the meaning of words like "God"—of acting like what one is dealing with is real, not a rhetorical fantasy, and making the necessary adjustments to your theory.
But I would offer one caution.
One problem with any road through Fairyland is that you can never predict where you will come out.
