My problem with Richard Dawkins is not that he is an atheist. I admire that. It's that he's a Protestant atheist. Religion, many think, has been slain by the experimental method of science. Beginning with Galileo's experiments on free fall, science has succeeded because it is value-free, objective and proves its points not by nebulous belief but by rigorous logic and verified proof. This is a complete misunderstanding.

The history of the experimental method shows us that, far from being value-free, it was deeply enmeshed with a Protestant myth, as in its post-Protestant phase it continues to be. At fundamental issue in the Reformation was the Catholic idea of nature as a sacrament. In the Catholic view nature is a single organic being with a soul[...]

To the [Protestant] reformers this was the grossest idolatry. To them, God was quite other. They would show, by science, that the universe is a collection of machines, testifying to the wisdom of their manufacturer by their most marvellous ingenuity[...]

Dawkins's understanding of Catholic theology seems to be nil. He thinks that religion teaches that God constructed the world like a watch, science has shown it is able to construct itself, therefore there is no God. How Protestant is that? The intelligibility of God is so bright, according to the great Catholic mystics, it overwhelms our minds with darkness, and can only be penetrated by the will. Science is beginning to suggest that reality might perhaps be like that. Quantum physics is bewilderingly irrationally rational.