The Guardian gives us an extract from Dawkins’s new book, in which he talks about things I’ve been pondering myself for the past couple of days, I suppose prompted by that long discussion on ‘Explain’.

All Sagan’s books touch the nerve-endings of transcendent wonder that religion monopolized in past centuries. My own books have the same aspiration. Consequently I hear myself often described as a deeply religious man…Steven Weinberg made the point as well as anybody, in Dreams of a Final Theory: “Some people have views of God that are so broad and flexible that it is inevitable that they will find God wherever they look for him. One hears it said that ‘God is the ultimate’ or ‘God

Why did no one (until G Tingey in comments today) tell me Richard Dawkins has set up a foundation and a website? It’s apparently (judging by the dates on some of the postings) been there since May. This is September. I’m out of touch.

So it republishes this Johann Hari piece about the real reasons to feel disapprobation for the pontiff. Here’s an item that stirred a certain amount of distaste in me.

For over a decade now, he has been one of the primary defenders of priests who go to the poorest, most vulnerable people in the world and tell them condoms are the cause of AIDS. In the past year, I have sat in two Catholic churches

Andrew Brown doesn’t admire Dawkins’s new book, despite agreeing on the basics.

In his broad thesis, Dawkins is right. Religions are potentially dangerous, and in their popular forms profoundly irrational. The agnostics must be right and the atheists very well may be. There is no purpose to the universe. Nothing inconsistent with the laws of physics has been reliably reported. To demand a designer to explain the complexity of the world begs the question, “Who designed the designer?” It has been clear since Darwin that we have no need to hypothesise a designer to explain the complexity of living things. The results of intercessory prayer are indistinguishable from those of chance.

Despite all the trillions of words in theological … Read the rest