Praying for Richard Dawkins

Alister McGrath concludes his devastating critique of "New Atheism" with the following:

"I’d just finished giving a lecture in London early in 2010. A young man came up afterward and asked me to sign a copy of my textbook Christian Theology: An Introduction. I asked him what had led him to study theology. He told me that he’d read Richard Dawkin’s The God Delusion a year or so earlier and in seemed so unfair and one-sided that he felt he needed to hear the other side. So he started going to church. After a while he found he could not sustain his faith in the parody of when confronted with the real thing. He converted to Christianity—joyful and decisively. “Without Dawkins,” he told me, “I would never have given God a second thought.”

As I signed the book, the young man told me he had a theological question for me. Since The God Delusion had been instrumental in his conversion, should he thank God for Richard Dawkins in his prayers?

I’m still thinking about that one.”

[Alister McGrath, Why God Won’t Go Away: Is the New Atheism Running on Empty? (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2010), 147.]