The Dawkins Letters

The Dawkins Letters: Challenging Atheist Myths
David Robertson
Christian Focus Publications 2007

I borrowed a copy of this short book from the local library. It is actually a series of open letters from David Robertson (a minister of the Free Church of Scotland in Dundee) to Richard Dawkins about Dawkins' book The God Delusion.

It is amazing how reviews of this book and others like it - and Dawkins' own book to be fair - on places like Amazon are almost all sharply divided down Christian/Atheist lines. Perhaps that should not surprise me, but it does. Basically, atheists seem to love Dawkins' book and hate Robertson's book. And vice versa for Christians.

Well as a Christian, I liked Robertson's book. I thought in the ten letters he succeeded in the most important point, which is pointing out that atheism is primarily a philosophical and not a scientific position. Dawkins' position is in the end consistent with science but not derived from science. Yet I would say the same can be said for many theistic views.

In fact, Dawkins' worldview at times relies on "the science of the gaps" (a phrase I loved that Robertson uses a few times) in theories that sound as much science fiction as science and therefore are as much faith based as Christian doctrines - parallel universes and alien implantation of life on earth and so forth.

In the final analysis, I think theists and atheists tend to bring presuppositions to the table before looking at the evidence. The same evidence leads one man to say "there is no god" and another to say "the heavens are telling the glory of God."

No one book, whether Dawkins' or Robertson's, is going to lay the knock-out blow to the opposing view. But Robertson's book certainly shows that atheist presuppositions and arguments are open to serious criticism, all too often of precisely the same criticisms that are used by atheists against Christianity.