Atheist’s discovery of the Divine

In Tributes to Dawkins, John Guillaumier refers to a couple of correspondents in The Times who recently criticised scientist Richard Dawkins and his book The God Delusion. Mr Guillaumier fails to mention these correspondents by name or to rebut their arguments.

Discerning readers would be interested to know Mr Guillaumier’s views of There Is A God, a book written by the late Anton Flew, regarded as the most influential and notorious atheistic philosopher of the 20th century. Prof. Flew turned Deist in 2004.

Prof. Flew wrote: “The God Delusion by the atheist writer Richard Dawkins is remarkable in the first place for having achieved some sort of record by selling over a million copies. But what is much more remarkable than that economic achievement is that the contents – or rather lack of contents – of this book show Dawkins himself to have become what he and his fellow secularists typically believe to be an impossibility: namely, a secularist bigot. (Helpfully, my copy of the Oxford Dictionary defines a bigot as ‘an obstinate or intolerant adherent of a point of view’.”

Mr Guillaumier’s mantra is that religion is inherently unreasonable and that if someone comes to faith in any deity, it is only because of a religious experience that is basically unverifiable and, at worst, a form of delusion.

It would help him to take stock of Prof. Flew’s saying: “I must stress that my discovery of the Divine has proceeded on a purely natural level, without any reference to supernatural phenomena... It has had no connection with any of the revealed religions... In short, my discovery of the Divine has been a pilgrimage of reason and not of faith”.

A favourite proverb runs this way: “A closed mind is a good thing to lose”.