I wondered if indeed you would post on this, but was suprised at the largely negative and dare I say polemical response.

Why no mention of his entreaty to religous believers to “respect atheists” and agnostics and to treat them with “deep esteem”?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7390941.stm

And lets not forget the implicit mea culpa in his comments that quite possibly some of the adverse reaction to religion in this country is the fault of religion and religious believers…. it seems to me this is rather an important statement.

Your comments were interesting and I will deal with just a couple.

You suggest that there is a contradiction in saying that theology is coherent and yet God is unknowable?
But there is no contradiction. One may argue quite feasibly that in terms of material evidence for a spiritual entity there is no evidence.
But despite Dawkins (as a common example) insistence that lack of evidence renders the proposition meaningless, this is as Wittgenstein would point out not a solution to the question but a dissolution.
It is like me asking “can you see that invisible man over there?” and berating you as a liar if you say “yes I can see” or stupid if you say “no I cant see”.

However it is possible to advance to an utterance by analogy. And much philosophical speculation on the existence of God(s) etc. originates in analogical thought. Divine watchmakers, the author of destiny and so on.
Analogous reasoning is of course an entirely different type of reasoning than empiricism.

Ah, but, you might say an analogous God does not equate to a real God… this indeed may be true, but I would propose that the more coherent response would be to say that the attributes of an analogous God may not correspond to a real divinity. By which of course I mean such attributes as goodness, knowledge, absolute power etc.

The via negativa a theology of negation that I have mentioned plenty of times before of course doesnt posit positive attributes to a divinity – hence of course the gist of the Augustine quote.

But we are missing out one key factor here that essentially muddy’s the water and makes the argument difficult. If theological statements about God were purely analogous then one could take it or leave it with absolute ease. But as an example Christianity does not claim to be solely analogous, it claims that along with the ineffable approach of analogous reasoning it also bases its belief on positivistic statements which they call “revelation”.

This claim to revelation then is used to systematically shore up analogous reasoning and the two tanatalisingly dance around the other providing the other (particularly in the mind of the believer) with necessary balance.

Dawkins comments his extreme dislike of this “I believe because I believe” reasoning but ignores the fact that those who believe attribute some sort of truth-claim to the revelatory aspect of their religious belief. And that as time goes on can be very hard to undermine.

“Implicit atheism” in babies.
This seems to be a particularly weak conjecture, do you have any evidence about what it is that babies in particular believe if anything?
I could perhaps sympathise with you a little more if you were to ascribe implicit atheism to mean a neutral statement of belief – a state of affairs where ignorance is the de facto position.
If this is how you mean it then implicit atheism is not a belief system in any sense of the term. And why simply pick out theological opinions as a paradigm case for infantile belief systems? I dare say that babies are also implicit nihilists, implicitly asexual, implicitly non-nationalistic, implicitly self-centred etc.

“The burden of proof is not on atheists to proof unbelief” Why get yourself caught up in fly-bottle like this? Belief or unbelief is a psycho-cognitive state of affairs not an epistemic one.
The burden of proof belongs to an entirely different language game than the psycho-cognitive one. Proof only enters into the matter if and when one chooses to attempt a correlation between belief in something and observable or verifiable statements about something.
And of course a “lack of proof” does not equally also mean the absence of proof, but all scientists should be aware of this state of affairs.

Now in terms of “if God exists where does the burden of proof lay” then if I am a theist and wish to convince you that God exists beyond the merely psycho-cognitive proposition that you ought to because I do, then yes indeed the burden of proof, or rather the burden to provide an epistemic framework with which to test any such hypotheses rests with me the theist.
But similarly the same burden to provide an epistemic framework is placed upon the evangelical atheist who wishes to demonstrate to his God-believing contemporaries that there is no God.

And the trouble with this “burden” is as I have already intimated before muddied by the fact that belief-systems often dance around a mixture of psycho-cognitive-like and epistemic-like statements.

To cut an already very long story short, a convinced theist and a convinced atheist have about as much chance of convincing the other about the rectitude of their point of view as the Wimbledon Tennis Tournament has of being won by virtue of a checkmate.

Although I agree with your comments on the anti-pomo views, I would point out that he isn’t expressing a particularly modernist viewpoint either. The key issue of respect and tolerance that was completely absent from your analysis are principles of a decidedly pluralistic and postmodernist understanding of the human condition.

And as for his comment on private belief versus public expressions of that belief I am firmly of the opinion that a pluralistic society should encourage that form of life.

And finally your point about the fusion of religion with rationality and science, and your demand that if they wish to play rational then they should play by the rules…

well you probably know what I have to say!

There is no objective rulebook and the internal logic of each language game is defined by its users.

*(Btw this post was originally intended as a comment but for some reason it would not – or at present is not posting – needless to say conspiracy theories abound!)