One of the reactions to Professor Dawkins' latest book, "The God Delusion", beyond all the standard liberal huffing and sighing, has been the accusation that Dawkins is unqualified to discuss religion to the length of a book. The criticism goes "he doesn't know much about theology, so he ought to stick to biology, which he seems to know best". (Of course, this is usually coming from a journalist who, as Bierce puts it, "guesses his way to the truth and dispels it with a tempest of words"). One such critic has been the "literary theorist" (see Bierce's definition of a reporter and double it), Terry Eagleton. One of his main criticisms of Dawkins is that he is not well-versed in the ins and outs of theology. 
Having spent the last two years in university studying philosophy and religion (mostly Christian religion), I have to say that Dawkins has not missed very much at all. In his latest tome, he writes of Arianism - the heretical belief that Christ was not consubstantial with God: "What on earth could that possibly mean, you are probably asking? Substance? What 'substance'? What exactly do you mean by 'essence'? 'Very little' seems the only reasonable reply. Yet the controversy split Christendom down the middle for a century, and the Emperor Constantine ordered that all copies of Arius's book should be burned. Splitting Christendom by splitting hairs - such has ever been the way of theology" (p. 33).
If Dawkins wishes to study theology, I invite him down to London for a day, and I will show him a whole library full of equally unintelligible nonsense (my favourite section of the library has to be the small collection of books written by people who believe themselves to be God). Though I'm not disposed to Marxist theorising, one could almost see that there is a negative disincentive to be lucid in theology, just as there is in other "theory" disciplines - when people see the storm that theologians are brewing inside the religious teacup, only fancy words can save them from the inevitable humour of the whole situation.
Dawkins' reaction to the theology of, say, St. Gregory (on p. 34) seems to be applicable to all forms of religious fluff, whatever the brand. And it definitely applies to modern day religious fluff - such as Scientology. If I were to tell you that you have inside you an immortal and God-like spirit which you can access to make the lives of both yourself and others better by revealing to me your hidden psychological traumas hidden inside your 75 million year old spirit which lives inside a volcano which had been blown up with a hydrogen bomb (I apologise if I've got one of the details wrong - though I'm pretty sure it's not possible to make it sound any more insane than it actually is), you'd surely look at me a little askance. The question has to be: if the belief I just explained to you is reality-deprived, why are the beliefs about monotheism any less reality-deprived? You don't have to read the whole canon of L. Ron Hubbard's nutty beliefs about alien spirits and pop psychology to dismiss them as obviously false. The argument that Dawkins needs to read all these esoteric,, waffly theologians in order to point out the falsity of their beliefs is, in my mind, no different (although L. Ron Hubbard's Scientology writings are probably lowest on the "comprehensibility" rank of religious texts).
It is standard operating procedure among all the theologians I know to dismiss Dawkins - usually in the same huffy tone as Dawkins' liberal critics have (often peppered with the frequent pejorative use of the word "reductionist"). And that is because Dawkins is infuriatingly correct in his criticisms of religion.
The fact is that science and religion are not compatible. Both make claims about reality - but if you line up the results of the predictions made by the two, you'll find that science is consistently adapting it's beliefs to the results that reality provides it with, meanwhile religion is always trying to adapt reality to it's beliefs - and then, under the duress of well-reasoned laughter, eliminating the more ridiculous beliefs they hold (and the many libraries of theology are testament to this effort).
Those who claim that religion and science are compatible are either missing the point or engaging in a theological sophistry. The theologian and physicist, Ian G. Barbour describes a four-layer approach to the interaction of science and religion: conflict, independence, dialogue and integration. Upon closer investigation of the "dialogue" and "integration" models, they are either false (natural theology or Gould's "Nonoverlapping Magisteria" model where religion confines itself to questions of morality, ethics and 'meaning') or true but uncontroversially obvious (ie. that religious language, following Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, serves a different function to scientific language). Alternatively, you get bizarre claims that God acts "through the laws of nature". How exactly? How is the law of gravity different with the added God factor to the law of gravity sans God? No doubt theologians will disagree, and cite some meaningless line of Scripture to 'prove' the contrary, but the answer is simple: if God works through the law of nature, God is then unnecessary.
This is exactly the point that one needs to make when confronted with the idea of, say, "Augustinian science" (a proposal by Alvin Plantinga to extending science's boundaries to include "what we know as Christians") - that it is absolutely ridiculous. The woman who believes that God has appeared to her in a cheese sandwich (who then subsequently put it up on eBay) is ridiculous to the vast majority of people, and it won't be long until other "divine proofs" come to seem just as silly.
If religion had better evidence for it's central claims, then "dialogue" or "integration" between science and religion wouldn't be so desirable for the theologians who are pushing for it. They'd be content in presenting the evidence and watching the flock come trampling back in to church. The validity of science as a way of knowing is exactly why theologians want to have "dialogue" with it. The 'compatibilists' aren't so eager to have "dialogue" between Christianity and astrology, because the latter is ridiculous.
A lot of the examples which writers like Barbour present to suggest dialogue are actually outside the realm of factual/metaphysical enquiry and are in the realm of aesthetic or ethical thought, or on what can be thought of as "cultural foundationalism" - usually taking the form of a post-hoc justification for Christianity by saying that without it modern science would not have come to be - perhaps, in the next sentence, the compatibilist can argue, as theologians are wont to do, that HIV and AIDS are fine, because they've provided the opportunity for modern science to step up to the plate and invent antiretrovirals (of course, if AIDS didn't exist then HIV deniers' children wouldn't be dying of it).
If the criticism of Dawkins is that he hasn't read enough theology (or rather, he hasn't wittily demonstrated his reading of theology), then why is the same criticism not true of religious authors like Richard Swinburne, Keith Ward, John Hick, Gerald Hughes et al. They have all, like Dawkins, argued in the realm of philosophy of religion. Plumbing the
The God that Swinburne tries to prove is the God that Dawkins argues against. If Dawkins is misconceiving God, so is Swinburne. If, on the basis of this book, Dawkins is not spending enough time reading Aquinas, Karl Rahner or Duns Scotus, then Swinburne is as guilty.
The existence of theological 'tools' like the Wesleyan Quadrilateral - whereby Scripture is viewed through tradition, reason and experience to form theological ethics - proves Dawkins' point when he objects to the use of Scripture for moral guidance ("if we have independent criteria for choosing among religious moralities, why not cut out the middle man and go straigt for the moral choice without the religion?" - p. 57). Isn't the point that Outler is making in summing up Wesley's view as being Scripture viewed through the lens of the other three components of the Quadrilateral exactly the point that Dawkins is making?
The theology which sits in libraries like the one at my university is ridiculous but harmless - it sits there nicely, occasionally disturbed by a trainee priest who picked out the wrong book, but it is, to use a phrase from Adams, mostly harmless. Whether it's this musty, unread fluff or the mind-numbing idea from Swinburne that human suffering exists so that humans can prove their courage can only have one response - laughter. To say that the sort of religion that Dawkins writes about doesn't exist is to make a mockery of the lives of the people who died on September the 11th or whose bodies were forcibly cremated in the tube trains the July before last. If only the nutcases with bombs believed in the same God as the guilt-inhabited guys in dog-collars.
With the exception of some of the material derived from modern evolutionary theory, there is little new in Dawkins' volume. One can find similar thoughts in thinkers like Bertrand Russell when he writes about how creeds, the Church and personal moral codes are all necessary in the makeup of a religious belief - and that "a purely personal religion, so long as it is content to avoid assertions which science can disprove, may survive undisturbed in the most scientific age" (Religion and Science, p. 9). In this, there is also the condemnation of charlatanism hidden beneath it - religion without creeds is not really religion at all (which is, of course, why the postmodern theological crowd that inhabit all but the most evangelical of theology departments, rather like it).
Dawkins is repeating old themes. But they need repeating more than ever. Russell's little book on religion and science also includes this description of a BBC broadcast on Science and Religion on the radio in 1930: "Outspoken ponents of religion were, of course, not included, since (to mention no other argument) they would have pained the more orthodox among the listeners". What we see when Eagleton et al. respond to Dawkins is a true intellectual pomposity - whereby one throws out all the intellectual toys one has in order to put people off the scent of actually thinking about the topic in hand. God is what theologians and theorists think about - not something that ordinary people can discuss and debate and voraciously disagree with one another, you know. In this stale climate, Dawkins' book is an extremely well-written critique. And it's doing it's best to rile up exactly the people who deserve it.
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