why scientific critiques of religion miss the point

Richard Dawkins, author of The Blind Watchmaker, spoke yesterday at Swarthmore. I didn't attend the lecture, but read of it through the linked article in Swarthmore's Daily Gazette.

I don't know much about Dawkins's scientific work, so I won't speak to that. But this passage (assuming it accurately describes Dawkin's presentation) betrays a fundamental misunderstanding on the part of Dawkins as to the role played by religion in people's lives.

In discussing tradition, Dawkins pointed out that religion always runs in families. "It's fascinating how whatever religion you're brought up in turns out to be the right one!" he joked. He then showed a newspaper clipping of three children in a Christmas pageant. The caption listed them as a Sikh, a Muslim, and a Christian. "It is grotesque to label four year olds with the religion of their parents," he claimed. To prove this point, he put up another copy of the picture, with the captain changed to "a Keynesian, a monetarist, and a Marxist." While this seems absurd, claimed Dawkins, it is seen as normal and right to put religious labels on children.

There's a fundamental difference between, for example, Islam and monetarism. That difference, as Dawkins himself states, is tradition. Monetarism is based on a set of economic beliefs. While Islam is based on a set of religious beliefs, it also has cultural practices and traditions associated with it. To bring in the case I'm most familiar with... I know several people who strongly identify as Jewish without believing in God. There's no contradiction here, since there's more to being Jewish than accepting the existence of a single God who created the world in six days, spoke to Abraham, etc. For many people, Judaism is about food. For many people, Judaism is about prayers that they enjoy singing, regardless of their meaning. For many people, Judaism is about what you do on various holidays (two fun examples: dressing up in costumes and getting roaring drunk on Purim, going out for Chinese food and a movie on Christmas). The point is that you can be Jewish without believing all the tenets of the Jewish faith. That's where Dawkin's critique of this newspaper caption breaks down.

To restrict religion to its theological underpinnings is to strip it of the cultural richness that people identify with.