A Critique of Richard Dawkins: Properly Understanding Faith
Faith is to hopelessly believe by blindness, so we are told. Those who have faith ignore science and rational thought altogether and live in a fictitious world. The atheist biologist, Richard Dawkins, is one of the leading proponents behind the claim that “faith is blindness.” In fact, “one of the core New Atheist assertions,” writes Alister McGrath, “endlessly and uncritically repeated on New Atheist websites, is Richard Dawkins’s dogmatic statement that faith is “blind trust in the absence of evidence, even in the teeth of evidence.”[1]Furthermore, Dawkins assures us that “faith is belief without evidence and reason; coincidently, that is also the definition of delusion.” Or that faith “seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness.”[2]Or that faith is “evil precisely because it requires no justification and brooks no argument.”[3]
Suppose Dawkins’s assessment of faith is correct. If so, then some of the most reputable theologians and philosophers throughout history have all misled us while in the grips of a delusional fantasy. Of course, this is all nonsense. Theologians and philosophers have not misled us, nor are they delusional. When faith is properly understood, it does not amount to blind belief. In fact, “faith is a response to evidence, not a rejoicing in the absence of evidence.”[4] Atheists like Dawkins often gain a sense of…
