Like I said, I wasn't really interested in debating god vs no god(s) so I didn't post in the religion forum. But in the spirit of my new atheism and humanism I will never shut down debate and questioning of my ideas and conclusions. I would, though, like to return to the topic of seeing if there are others in BB who have felt enlightened by Dawkins' book.

AliB are you a member of the RDF forum? I am Roryrory there too

Bath and Flowerchild its interesting what you said about the lack of "meaning" being a stumbling block - I am very near the end of the book now and Dawkins is very much a scientist in that he doesn't very well address the "feeling" side of life. But he does make the point that the fact that faith is good and makes people feel their life has meaning and direction doesn't make a god any more or less real. (Bath I think this is why faith is held in such scorn by him) In the same way, believing and wanting your wife to be alive doesn't make her so if she has just died of cancer, for example. I would be really interested in reading some atheistic writing by someone with more flair for the emotional side of writing. That said, it is probably why I am going to read more on humanism generally.

I think science itself is a faith that involves a belief system - forming hypthoseses about things that you believe to be true, but cannot prove.
Bon one of the fundamentals of science is testing hypotheses. If they are disproven then they are discarded. The question of how much proof is needed to prove a hypothesis is a matter of degree, and atheists would say that there is more evidence that there is no god or gods than there is not.

I don't really see how saying Einstein believed in a god makes it any more true (aside from that there is eqaully a lot of evidence that Einstein did not believe in god - you can read much of his stuff either way). One of the most liberating things I found about the book was that it encourages critical thought regardless of who is saying the thing. So just because your parents have raised you to believe a thing, doesn't make it so. Children in Ancient Greece were raised to worship Apollo, Demeter, etc while Incan kids were sacrificed on the altar of the Sun God (ie: a ball of hydrogen). Just because person X says it is so doesn't make it so. Evidence makes it so.

Bath I suspect Dawkins has been radicalised and pushed into his fury with religion by circumstance. In his previous books he has tried to be neutral and not point out his atheism and his own words have been seized by religious people as "proof" (in the same way Einsteins words have been??) So I think every word in his book was deliberately written to protect against this happening. Not saying it makes it right, just that I think that is where it is coming from.