Dawkins has said that although he believes Christianity is nonsense he nevertheless considers himself a "cultural Christian" inasmuch as he enjoys the cultural benefits Christianity has conferred and because it's a far better option than Islam, which he utterly deplores.
Dembski writes:
Critics have been quick to jump on the irony here since Dawkins, as the leading voice for atheism in the English speaking world, if not in the world as a whole, has helped bring about this waning of Christian faith. But let’s be careful not to give Dawkins too much credit. Christians, through their own ineffectiveness in Christian education, have been complicit in helping Dawkins’s crusade against the Christian faith.But there's more. Dawkins seems to realize that if you're going to dispense with Christianity you not only must forfeit Christmas carols and humanitarian institutions like orphanages and hospitals but also "reason, truth, merit, free speech, critical thinking and respect for science in the academy and wider culture." Dembski might also have added objective moral obligations and human rights to the list.
In any case, here is Dawkins the newly minted cultural Christian:
The current Dawkins is one who has mellowed with age. He no longer seems to be the stark, tough-minded Dawkins that made his reputation. This Dawkins would write in River Out of Eden: “The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.”
Or consider how he characterized the God of the Old Testament in The God Delusion: “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”
....the tough-minded Dawkins of the past was not a cultural Christian. He had no use for religion, period.
Religious faith.... was a pernicious virus that needed to be eradicated. Certainly, he has played his part in helping to undermine religious faith, and Christianity in particular, in Europe and North America.
In other words, [Dawkins] laments the turn from modernity to postmodernity, from truth-based inquiry to make-it-up-as-you-go inquiry, from sober, rigorous habits of mind to minds at home in an insane asylum. And yet he’s probably done more than any other current figure to bring about this shift.Dembski fleshes all of this out in his article at the link. It'd be a very good thing if more people recognized that ideas have consequences and that atheism of the sort that Dawkins and his fellow materialists have purveyed for over three decades has consequences that can only be described as pernicious and calamitous for Western civilization.
Dawkins is these days attempting to stand against the woke subversion of the academy, and of science in particular. Increasingly, Dawkins is casting himself as a defender of traditional academic virtues (reason, merit, free discourse, etc.).
And yet, a compelling case can be made that precisely because of the materialist ideology that he has promoted in the name of science all these years, he has helped bring about the state of affairs in the academy that he is now lamenting — in which woke ideology subverts all that he deems precious in the academy and science (and, as we’ve seen, also in cultural Christianity).
Dawkins has been marvelously successful at advancing scientific materialism, the view that science (especially Darwinian evolution) functions to advance materialism, with Darwin being this atheistic ideology’s principal prophet. And yet, this very scientific materialism is the Pandora’s box that has opened our culture to all the evils that he now laments. What Dawkins seems not to have realized — or perhaps now is realizing too late — is that scientific materialism is the suicide of reason, even undermining science as reason’s most compelling expression.
Scientific materialism attempts to use science as a club to enforce materialism. Yet instead, scientific materialism is a snake that eats its own tail and in the end consumes itself. It destroys itself, collapsing of internal contradiction, and thereby ruining science, as we now see happening in real time.
Hopefully, Dawkins, at least, is beginning to recognize what a catastrophe he has helped to unleash.
