http://emilypothast.wordpress.com/2008/11/08/richard-dawkins-proves-poem-false/

for a similar take on this topic.

Dawkins was a huge influence on me personally; reading “The Selfish Gene” after growing up in a fundamentalist Christian household gave me a new perspective on life and consciousness. The scientific revolution has contributed much knowledge, understanding, and helpful technology to the world through the simple, powerful admission: “I don’t know”. The humility to admit that you don’t know the answer — to reject your biases and seek out knowledge, accepting whatever your investigation shows you without ideological blinders — is perhaps the most powerful tool of the modern age. But science has also shown us that magical thinking is a part of the human brain’s hardware, creating narratives and filling in the inevitable gaps of one’s personal understanding. Scientific thinking is hard, and it’s counterintuitive. My beef with Dawkins is that he’s not particularly effective at explaining the religious phenomena he rails against (cf: Enemies of Reason, The God Delusion); he spends lots of time ridiculing religionists, and not much time actually engaging in scientific investigation to understand why it is that people think and behave this way, even in the face of all the evidence that it’s not literally true — on that point, he seems to have made up his mind a long time ago, and has spent his time in childish confrontations with people (cf Ted Haggard, Neil Spencer), trying to prove them false rather than understanding that these religious narratives aren’t speaking to the logical mind at all. Superstitions and religions aren’t rooted out by being disproven. They simply don’t work that way. By accepting that religion is supposed to be either literally true or useless, he has tacitly agreed to fight a losing battle.

As you’ve said, children brought up with tales of magic, spells and witchcraft don’t necessarily grow up thinking the universe actually works that way. I’d love to see him write a non-confrontational book or do a documentary that seeks to understand mythical thinking as a feature of the human mind, and explain its origins in evolutionary terms, without focusing on “debunking” any of the specific claims that are made, as he has up to this point. The mythical mind is a hydra; as soon as you squash one tradition or system of thinking, another one grows in its place. Even if he were to succeed in forever destroying the Judeo-Christian myth, new myths will continue to be formed, including pseudo-scientific ideologies that build myths out of fragments of half-understood scientific ideas.

The proper approach that I wish to advocate is seeing that myths are not to be understood literally, but rather, as poetic metaphors for the human experience. The dying-resurrecting god-man (personified in Osiris, Jesus, Odin, Tammuz, and Adonis, among others) is a powerful symbol; understanding its ubiquity in the faith traditions of mankind and its particular resonance has much greater power, I believe, to gently transform fundamentalist faith than refutations of historical fact. Mythical thinking is close to art and music, and should be embraced and understood in its proper role.

‘Prof Dawkins said he wanted to look at the effects of “bringing children up to believe in spells and wizards”. “I think it is anti-scientific – whether that has a pernicious effect, I don’t know,” he told More4 News.’

Are those the words of an us-vs-them fanatic? If you bring up enough children with tales of magic, spells and witchcraft, do you risk some of them growing up thinking the universe might actually work that way? I grew up with fairytales and I don’t think the universe works that way, and I think a sense of fantasy is a good thing. As Dawkins says, “Perhaps it’s something for research.”

Of course if can suggest that he is an us-vs-them fanatic you can make his argument seem less valid without the inconvenience of dealing with what he actually says.

Dawkins’ fallacy is simply that he believes that the religious impulse in human beings can be driven out or eradicated through the application of reason. While no fundamentalist religions and unscientific thinking no doubt pose grave threats to our world, atheism itself is susceptible to the same pitfalls, when it’s undertaken with the sort of fanaticism and “us-vs-them” dualities that I see in Dawkins’ recent work (his latest crusade against Harry Potter is a great example). By misunderstanding the roots of mythological thinking in the human unconscious, he confuses mythological thinking with a defective form of rationality, when actually, mythological thinking is fundamentally different and must be addressed thoughtfully and with humility in order to be diffused. See Dr. Stephen Larsen’s “The Fundamentalist Mind” for an excellent discussion of this dynamic.

In case I wasn’t clear, it is widespread belief in invisible dictatorial superbeings that is the type of religion I consider to be a real problem. I agree with you that the abstract, allegorical approach has been the whole point of it for many people and many religions throughout human history (Karen Armstrong’s “In Search Of God” covers this in detail), and the literalists may have always represented the naive view. However if you teach a sophisticated allegory to enough people, there will always be a danger that some of them will get the wrong end of the stick and start trying to blow up unbelievers and ban Darwinism as a result. Dawkins has always been perfectly clear about this, and I’m not sure what fallacy you think you have uncovered. There are a lot of people who want to see Dawkins debunked and a lot of rubbish talked as a result. Try googling for “Dawkins fallacy” and think about whether you want to be on their side.

Keep fighting the good fight.