I'm actually pretty excited about The God Delusion now. I don't know how to deal with what Dawkins probably would say is his most significant claim -- the objective reality that there is no God -- other than to say that that isn't my reality, that I've experienced a reality that corresponds to what I read in the Bible about God, and that that's true to me in an essential way. I understand that Dawkins hasn't experienced such a reality, but I believe this stems from a worldview that I would see as limited even if I didn't believe in anything supernatural.
The thing is, though, that the God he is articulating and then dismissing, not just as a delusion, but as a pernicious one (31) -- that God does exist as an idea in our culture. It sometimes seems to me that it is our culture's dominant idea of God. It, or He, is not my God; it's a caricature of the God in which I believe, the God I experience. But Dawkins isn't the one who came up with it.
In Chapter 2, Dawkins ridicules the arguments of Christology and the trinity (see his brief "treatment" of the arguments over the nature of the Trinity on pages 32-33). But the arguments he holds up as asinine are not things he made up, and he's not the only one preoccupied with them. And his claim that there's absolutely no way of knowing details about the exact nature of God's relationship to Christ seems fairly legitimate to me; moreover, he could make this point about a lot of discussions within theology. I think it's important for theologians, and more importantly, for the conferences of various denominations and the congregations of individual churches to maintain perspective about where these sort of details fit into the experience of Christianity and our collective expressions of faith.
The thing Dawkins misses (so far), of course, is that most everyday Christians (and probably most people of most faiths) don't live or die by the nuances of their denominations creed and dogma. In reality, most people who claim to be Christian don't know very much about the Bible, let alone the various debates that frame the way we view it. This is another kind of problem, since it often leads to the sort of unexamined faith that takes for granted that the Bible condemns gay marriage and abortion per se and that salvation is about going to Heaven when you die. But to the degree that my faith is at risk of becoming a matter of working out nuanced new dogmas and defining as Christian only those who adhere to them, and as "saved" only those who are Christian, Dawkins' work could be a useful corrective.
He's really under no obligation to get Christianity right -- though I think he'd make a stronger case if he looked at a wider range of sources when he criticized it. But it should be important to me that I get it right, in the sense that believing a bunch of truth claims about Jesus is not actually the point of Christianity. I don't think Christ's claim that "no man comes unto the Father but by me", for example, can necessarily be taken to mean that thinking the correct thoughts about Jesus determines salvation.
As Borg points out in Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, to make it a condition of salvation that one "believes", in the sense of accepting, specific truth claims about God and Christ, is to make salvation conditional. Borg and Wright both seem to take the position that the redemptive work of the cross is done and is being done all the time, but not by us; so thinking the right things about Jesus doesn't make a person more or less saved.
This understanding of Christianity seems to me to be quite different from the one Dawkins is describing. It also seems to call into question the pretty central claim of most contemporary churches that you have to "believe in Jesus" -- that is, to agree that Jesus was God -- in order to be saved. I'm unconvinced that this is what the Gospel means by believe, and I think the theologies of salvation put forth by Wright and Borg may be more credible.
If nothing else, Dawkin's efforts to attack Christianity on multiple fronts does highlight elements of the "faith" as it is commonly practiced and perceived that may be pretty vulnerable to criticism, even by believers, separating these aspects of religion from those about which I feel more sure, such as the reality of God and the divinity of Christ.
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