Is Dawkins softening up?

Posted by Olly Robinson on 4 January 2010 | 0 Comments

Tags: deism, Dawkins, suffering, God

On Sunday 27th, a programme entitled Tsunami: Where Was God? was broadcast on Channel 4. It was an engaging documentary putting a contemporary spin on the arguments surrounding God, religion and suffering. Mark Dowd, the presenter, is a Catholic, and so is arguably not the most impartial of commentators. However overall, he presented an interesting and clear-speaking take on the issue. Towards the end of the programme, he interviews Richard Dawkins, who I was expecting to be as intransigent as ever in his hard-edged atheist position, so I was surprised when Dawkins said:

“The kind of God that I would respect people for believing in would be the kind of God of the deists, who set the universe up in the first place, who set up the laws of physics, perhaps in such a way that it would bring the conditions for evolution into existence, something of that sort, but that kind of grand God of the physicists is not the kind of God who is going to be the slightest bit interested in listening to the odd prayer.”

You can watch the programme using the following link until the end of January, and can see the Dawkins clip at 1 hr 26 minutes into the programme.

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/tsunami-where-was-god/4od#3018059

Dawkins in this interview gives a certain credibility to a deist God. Deism has a respectable history in the modern era ever since enlightenment philosophers such as Thomas Paine and many of the founding fathers of America expressed this philosophy/theology. It is a philosophy that says you do not need faith and scripture to find God, you need reason and clear thinking, for there are strong arguments to be found in the world around us. Find out more about deism here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deism

 

 

Dr Olly Robinson