@jeeprs,
I see what you mean - so they do.
As I have said before somewhere in this thread, I am not one to try and prove the existence of Deity. In my view, Deity is beyond existence, by definition. All I am interested in doing is keeping open to the possibility.
The original question was, Dawkins often says that religious faith consists of the willingness to believe in propositions for which there is no evidence. So I asked 'what would evidence consist of'?
The other day I went and posted on the Dawkins forum again. It produced a small crop of predicatable responses. (i.e. 'We're all protein blobs and nature is as dumb as a bag of anvils'....I really must stop going there, although for me it has a strange attraction, like returning to the scene of a nasty accident.)
I realise that the whole Dawkins movement is really about an attitude to life. Dawkins is interested in hypotheses which unite, and provide explanations for, a diverse range of phenomena. Of course, Darwin's theory combined with genetics is a case in point. It is a relatively simple principle which he feels explains everything about life. He has a quasi-religious belief in this principle.
But he feels that religion is presenting an 'alternative hypothesis', and one for which he can see no evidence, save for what he thinks is the idiotic behaviour of religious people (of which the worst examples are terrorists).
So I can see why he thinks like he does. In his world, his thinking is perfectly sensible.
But I don't think he understands many aspects of religious thinking at all. Certainly, there are some religious people, mainly fundamentalists, who think exactly like he supposes; in fact they're the ones who are likely to argue with him, an as a result, he most resembles them in his attitudes. But as I try (and always fail) to point out on the Dawkins forum there are many other ways of being religious or spiritual. It is not like 'a bad form of science'. It is a different way of being, with its own logic and rules. This is described very clearly in Karen Armstrong's
The Case for God, although Dawkins (and his followers) prejudice is so utterly ingrained that it is literally impossible for them to understand what the book says. They will only hear what they are prepared to listen to.
I am thinking of writing something called 'How [Not] To Think about God' which goes into the limitations of thinking with regards to the nature of deity, and various religious and mystical 'modes of cognition' which are associated with specific states of being.