So your criticism is based on an appeal to authority?
Do you value medicine based on humors more than the scientific method? They are more ancient and are thoroughly argued.
Do you value medicine based on humors more than the scientific method? They are more ancient and are thoroughly argued.
Because having been raised in churches and studying under university trained apologists I've only encountered weak arguments. All relying on appeals to authority or unfalsifiable claims. Even the premise of a god strikes me as impossible and/or irrelevant given it must also exist outside the bounds of our experience.
Which is not to say that the conversation is over, or that the theologians are correct. But that an informed argument would be to address the (ancient) refutations to the naive attacks, rather than to simply restate the naive attacks as if they are insightful.
The points he raises in that book aren't going to be novel to pretty much anyone. Most believers will recognize them from their own minds. Probably no modern person is a "pure" believer: we are all exposed to and familiar with the mechanisms and logic of unbelief. Believers experience belief more as an inconsistent state, or an active effort or choice, than a simple delusion they are unable to perceive. There's a very interesting conversation there that dawkins wasn't willing or maybe able to have.
Charles Taylor's "a secular age" is one place where you could pick up the conversation our society has been having with itself for centuries about the mechanisms, role & effects of belief, delusion, religion & faith if you were interested in it as a practical or philosophical question and not as a battlefield for self aggrandizement as dawkins clearly was.
Could you provide a couple of examples?
You're welcome to contribute to the debate if you have a specific example in mind to defend their argument.
Personally, I'm sceptical than any of Aquinas' arguments actually work. Maybe, if you accept his philosophical assumptions (about the nature of causation, etc), they succeed – but that leaves us with the equally difficult task of proving those assumptions. So, I think Dawkins may well be right in his conclusion, that Aquinas' arguments fail – but the reasoning he uses to reach that conclusion shows he has zero idea what he is talking about.
To make an analogy – imagine an anti-creationist book written by someone with a very poor knowledge of the science of evolution, and their understanding of it is riddled with errors and misunderstandings, and Dawkins was asked to review it – while he'd of course agree with the book's conclusion, he'd find its contents an embarrassment – much of The God Delusion is the same thing.
Compare Dawkins to someone like the Australian philosopher of religion Graham Oppy. Oppy is, like Dawkins, an atheist. Unlike Dawkins, when he criticises theists' arguments, he actually knows what he is talking about, and doesn't make the kind of juvenile mistakes that Dawkins makes. Unlike Dawkins, he's read all the secondary literature on the topic, and has made significant contributions to that literature. Due to this, many theist philosophers of religion actually have a lot of respect for Oppy, even though they (of course) disagree with his conclusions–among philosophers of religion (whether theist or atheist), Dawkins is mostly viewed as an example of what happens when an expert in one field decides to write a book in a completely unrelated one, and their valuable contributions to the former field are no guarantee their attempt to contribute to the later will be of any value at all.
A small quibble, unrelated to your explanation, is that if this particular theological argument is not respected even among theologians, it does not constitute an example of arguments that "were effectively fended off hundreds or in some cases thousands of years ago by theology and apologetics".
Well, to give a different example - in the midst of discussing Aquinas' proofs, he advances the claim that omniscience and omnipotence are logically incompatible. There is a long history in Jewish, Christian and Islamic philosophy of debating closely related questions. The 10th century Rabbi Saadia Gaon, the 12th century Islamic philosopher Ibn Rushd (Averroes), and Aquinas himself all discussed paradoxes of omnipotence (the classic "can God create a stone heavier than he can lift?") – the resolution of which generally turns on precisely how "omnipotence" is defined. There is similarly a long history in all three religions of intellectual debate over the relationship between divine omniscience, the nature of time and God's relationship to it, and human free will (if God perfectly knows the future, does that mean the future is predetermined? if the future is predetermined, how can humans have free will?) – topics discussed by ancient Christian philosophers and theologians such as Boethius (6th century) and Augustine (5th century), the Jewish philosopher Maimonides (aka Rambam, 12th/13th century), the 7th–10th century disputes in Islamic theology over predestination (qadr) versus free will.
Obviously this lengthy history of debate, stretching back many centuries, even 1500 years, has a lot of relevance to Dawkins' claim of a contradiction – and, as usual, Dawkins appears utterly ignorant of all of it. His argument seems to be basically that he knows what "omnipotent" and "omniscient" mean (he may have consulted a dictionary), and obviously by his definitions they contradict each other – zero interest in whether his definitions of them agree with those of philosophers and theologians who've examined these issues before – and then he cites a poem which expresses the same view. So I think that is a good example of what you are looking for in your quibble – although the plural in "thousands of years ago" is possibly somewhat of an exaggeration. I'm not sure if anyone ever answered Dawkins precise objection (although I wouldn't rule it out), but closely related objections have been discussed many times before.
I don't think theologians prove or debunk things, personally. I'm pointing out that the problems dawkins poses are ones theologians have answered. And then the answers have been questioned, and then the theologians have answered those, back and forth for a good long while now.
I'm pointing out that to bring these up as if religions have no answer to them is foolish or disingenuous. I'm not volunteering to cross-reference the book to 1700 years of christian thought for you though. Neither qualified nor motivated for that.
I also disliked Dawkins’ book and found my path to atheism elsewhere.
However, the problem of evil has a persuasive answer only for those already within the system, to speak.
Christian apologetics is nearly exclusively a field of interest for those Christians who want to be more prepared to deal with conversations with non-believers.
The problem should be obvious already.
If you became a Christian before being exposed to the ‘rational’ arguments for being a Christian, then what exactly caused you to become a Christian?
Given the extraordinary amount of effort poured into the field of apologetics with very little outcome in terms of new converts, it seems to me that the primary purpose of Christian apologetics is to help those suffering a bout of cognitive dissonance to stuff it back down.
*edited to fix typo