It is irrelevant to the debate whether Dawkins knows Darwin's first title: "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life," which he shortened to "On the Origin of Species" for the sixth edition of 1872. There is no question that Dawkins, as an evolutionary biologist, knows a good deal about genetics, which has helped us to know a lot more about natural selection than was possible in the Nineteenth Century. Dawkins knows his biology, whereas he is right to point out that many people who call themselves Christians know little about their traditions.

The debate should be about natural selection and how much religion prefers not to consider its ramifications for theological terms such as "purpose," "design," "meaning," and "providence."

One could argue that such language is fine as long as it is strictly confined to religion and not taken at face value, but that is another issue because it would take one back to Matthew Arnold's failed embrace of the Bible as literature, in the aftermath of the collapse of Nineteenth-Century religious orthodoxy. However much he wanted to celebrate literature, particularly Wordsworth, as the power of the imagination, literature as such cannot serve as a foundation. He was caught between a dead tradition and one that could never be born, echoing perhaps the persona in "Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse":

Wandering between two worlds, one dead,/ The other powerless to be born,/
With nowhere yet to rest my head...

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/172861

Gary Paul Gilbert

"Dawkins knows his biology, whereas he is right to point out that many people who call themselves Christians know little about their traditions."

Yes, but it's nice occasionally to see the proud scattered in their conceit, as it were.

The question isn't really whether the experts in either field know their stuff. Dawkins chides self-identifying lay Christians for not reading the Bible, going to church every Sunday, hanging on every word of the hierarchy, and so forth. But I highly doubt that most laypeople (as opposed to scientists and other academics) who identify as non-religious/secular spend the amount of time exploring science or philosophy that Dawkins expects Christians to spend on Christianity.

The idea that only the highly educated/indoctrinated "count" as "real Christians" is a pretty weird way to look at it, anyway. Were Britons in the Middle Ages (or any other era) as well-informed as Dawkins thinks is necessary?

For another take, look at this blog entry on the Guardian site: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2012/feb/14/richard-dawkins-british-christianity

Bill, I didn't find the Guardian article to which you refer too encouraging. That many people in the United Kingdom call themselves Christian--perhaps to avoid sticking out--I don't find reassuring. Lukewarm mind as well be nothing.

I think the problem, to echo Matthew Arnold, is the old paradigm is dead while the new one, secularism, is powerless to be born. Those who believe nothing or think they believe nothing have no need to develop a systematic theology or atheology, whereas the old school did seem to require a foundation of some kind. If there is no meaning in the universe there is no need for a philosopy which would justify existence or find purpose in things.

In any case, belief can also be unconscious, as a person who won't admit belief still adheres to tenets of the tradition while someone who claims to believe lives as if there were no point to anything. It can get murky.

Gary Paul Gilbert

I think my husband, Gary, is right to deny meaning in the universe. What do the galaxies mean, or the dinosaurs? On the other hand, meaning is important in human communities: "Red sky at morning, sailor take warning," "Leaves of three, let it be," "Step on a crack . . . " Meaning is the story we tell about our lives -- the plot that makes it a story.

We're learning not to look for meaning in extra-human events. The recent earthquakes in Haiti and New Zealand, the tsunamis in Malaysia and Japan -- only the tendentious tried to discern what God was punishing in these events. Church people pretty much talked about a Divine comforter, who had shared the human condition and could hold our hands in times of trouble. Not terribly comforting to me, but better than blaming earthquakes on homosexuality.

"What do the galaxies mean"

I guess the answer to that, Murdoch, depends upon the added dimension of faith. Mere spinning gasses and particles in space? Or, ala Dante, L'amor che muove il sole e l'altre stelle. "The Love which moves the sun and the other stars."

JC Fisher

You will notice that the meaning is in the poetry, which is human, and not in the stars.

Following Matthew Arnold, it would be possible to argue that Dante's poetry became more powerful in the Nineteenth Century after the death of the old theology, such as there being different rungs of Hell or that Homer's Odysseus ought to be relegated to a particular rung of Hell simply because he was Greek. Following Michel Foucault, it is possible to say that modern literature was invented in the aftermath of the collapse of the classical and Biblical texts, and a move away from Greek, Latin, and Hebrew toward the so-called modern languages. Literature would be unable to substitute for the transcendental claims of religion, however, and would instead offer scandals, such as the trials of Baudelaire's Fleurs du mal and Flaubert's Madame Bovary.

Gary Paul Gilbert