Why?
I found the tone of The God Delusion to be so self-congratulatory I had to stop reading it. Made it about 100 pages into it. What has resparked my dislike for him is an interview I watched yesterday where he spoke to a doctor who was championing the idea that controlled drug trials should not be considered absolutely reliable when it comes to predicting how a patient would respond to a drug, and instead he felt that the person's state of mind and other such factors should be taken into account, i.e. the parts of the person that cannot be gleaned by measuring the extent of their illness. Dawkins thought that this was an absolute affront to science and that he was effectively dealing with a homeopath. He would not entertain for a moment that there might other non strictly medical factors at work in whether or not a person would respond to a drug and was very dismissive of any of the doctor's points.
The show was called Enemies of Reason, so from the outset, Dawkins was assuming he was correct in all of his views. It was far from a debate and more of a Louis Theroux documentary where he meets an idiot and treats him like one. Dawkins kept returning to the title of the doctor's brand of medicine, which included the word quantum. When he was failing with a point, he'd return to the fact that the doctor had stolen the word quantum from 'real science' and branded his own faux-science with it. Also the way it was cut meant that Dawkins was given a chance to think about every question before he asked it, perhaps consulting with experts behind the scenes, while the doctor was having to answer questions as they were aimed at him.
Anyway the interview is here, so you can make up your own mind about it, but it just further added to my dislike for the man, who sees things in the colours of absolute atheism and everything else, when I think this is certainly not the case. Sure organised religion is bollocks, but that doesn't mean that everything that has not been revealed by science yet, and possibly those things that will never be revealed by science due to the limits of the human brain is to be dismissed as all part of the same crap sandwich.
Fair enough, although I think the fact that he has become the spokesman for non-belief in a world of believers affords him a bit of slack. Obviously he's not the first atheist/agnostic in the history, but I admire him for making a point of saying what the rest of us are thinking. Like him or not, I think he's a force for good. Until someone else steps up, he'll do as far as I'm concerned.
a sort of messiah for those that lack imagination and a sense of place but love strict rules and somebody being in charge?