Dawkins, Atheism and Personalism

There is certainly an air of atheism about the past few years. Richard Dawkins has started a religion of people who refuse to see the forest for the trees. It seems easy for some of us to agree with Dawkins that "I see no need for God", "God doesn't know me", "I haven't seen any evidence for a god", yet what nobody wants to first deal with is the even more important question of who this 'I' actually is. Christianity is not about providing an answer to those questions. And the problem is confounded by the fact that there are Christians who *are* trying to answer those very questions. Those questions cannot be answered adequately, not in a way that satisfies everyone.

The answer that Christianity provides is to the question 'Who, in actual fact, am I?'. The answer it provides is 'This is who you can be.' - it is the true meaning of *conversion*. Christian conversion is a conversion in identity, to a person who *can* offer rational answers to those questions. It is an experience that leads to a personal conversion. It is akin to the questions of identity that we are faced with when we fall in love, or when we lose a loved one, when we join a community or are with friends, at a sports game or a national event. I think we must first dig deeply into the questions of our identity before we can ask any fundamental questions that contain that word 'I' or 'me'.

The very question of who God is can only be answered *after* such a conversion, in which we come face to face with a being far greater than the 'I' to which I thought I was so well accustomed. Dawkins represents the very worst of this superficial 'I'. But of course there is always hope, there is always room for a new experience to change the hearts of men. Lets hope that experience can be articulated in the entertaining manner in which Professor Dawkins writes.