New York Times Pans Dawkins: "An Intellectually Frustrating Experience"

A review of The God Delusion is here. The reviewer observes what I have seen in Dawkins' writing for a very long time- bad logic all around. In my opinion, one could argue surprisingly bad logic.

The book fairly crackles with brio. Yet reading it can feel a little like watching a Michael Moore movie. There is lots of good, hard-hitting stuff about the imbecilities of religious fanatics and frauds of all stripes, but the tone is smug and the logic occasionally sloppy.

The reviewer made one comment that I had noticed in his interview on the Colbert Report- Dawkins' amazing confidence that the answer is so obvious. Any one who thinks the proof of God's non-existence is so obvious, obviously is not a very thoughtful, or open-minded, person:

Despite the many flashes of brilliance in this book, Dawkins’s failure to appreciate just how hard philosophical questions about religion can be makes reading it an intellectually frustrating experience.

This is further confirmation that Dawkins is a fundamentalist in his own special way.

The review also includes this interesting quote:

Dawkins asserts that “the presence or absence of a creative super-intelligence is unequivocally a scientific question.”

Of course, Judge Jones ignored people like Dawkins in his Dover ruling, and, by so doing, gave them a free pass. It appears that proving that God does not exist is a scientific question. But examining the evidence of design in biology is a religious issue, even if it only has religious implications. Aren't double standards convenient?

Regarding whether the no God hypothesis is falsifiable:

Nor is it obvious what sort of event might unsettle an atheist’s conviction to the contrary. [Bertrand] Russell, when asked about this by a Look magazine interviewer in 1953, said he might be convinced there was a God “if I heard a voice from the sky predicting all that was going to happen to me during the next 24 hours.”

Fair standard?