Wednesday, March 05, 2008

Simon Barnes....again

For the past six weeks or so I've been reading Simon Barnes' book, How to be Wild. The following quote comes from section 63.

Science cannot replace religion, still less. God. That is not the job of science, despite all the fuss made by Dawkins, the proselytising atheist. But science can at least address the God Questions; and give us a deeper and more vivid understanding of life. And as I read about life, and as I walk along my own entagnled bank, I can feel very deeply that there is grandeur in the deep, puzzling, buzzling, complex nature of life that these great books have shown me.

The reason I'm taking so long to read the book is that it's very much one that you pick up in an odd moment and put down again after a couple of its short chapters, unlike The Prestige, which I devoured in a few days. (More on that book in a later post.) So I've just got Barnes' book out of the library for the third time, and hopefully will finish it on this round.

And speaking of Dawkins, I came across this quote about him and other atheistic popularizers in a blog I read most days, The Website of Unknowing. Carl McColman's referring to a book by Becky Garrison, called:
The New Atheist Crusaders and their Unholy Grail: The Misguided Quest to Destroy Your Faith.

He writes:
Basically mimicking the fetish for intolerance that has come to characterize religious conservatives in our day, the new atheists have made it fashionable to dismiss religion as not only “untrue,” but unworthy of even the right to exist.

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