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. God is not outside nature but within it, the material world is his body so to speak. The whole point of Thomas Aquinas's five ways, so deeply misunderstood by Dawkins, is to show that God is to be identified with Aristotle's first cause, the first link within the causal chain of being. "God is within the universe, and that innermostly", Aquinas wrote.
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