Lash blows up Dawkins

From Joseph Bottum in First Things, an excerpt of a review of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion-- by English theologian Nicholas Lash-- as reviewed by Lucy Beckett in the Times Literary Supplement.

Here's Beckett on Lash (on Dawkins):

“Only in the English-speaking world do we speak of ‘science’ in the singular,” Lash notes....When the singular form of the word science is used, says Lash, “to support sweeping assertions to the effect that here, and here alone, is truth to be obtained, then one is in the presence neither of science, nor of history, but ideology.”

Dawkins is also, one is not surprised to learn, besotted by his substitute god, that empty demiurge called Progress, which prompts this tart observation from Lash: In the light of the horrors of the twentieth century and the global dangers and injustices of the twenty-first, “[it is] hard to understand how a man as intelligent as Richard Dawkins can sustain such a smug and counterfactual Whiggery.”