a breath of fresh air

Douglas Murray writes:

Atheists vs Dawkins
My fellow atheists, it’s time we admitted that religion has some points in its favour

Sometimes a perfectly good argument can be stretched too far. I heard the resulting snapping noise last week in Cambridge during a debate with Richard Dawkins. We were meant to be on the same side at the Union. But over some months the motion hardened and eventually became ‘This House believes religion should have no place in the 21st century.’ While an atheist myself, it seems to me that claiming that religion should disappear is not just an overstatement but a seismic mistake. So I joined Rowan Williams and my close enemy Tariq Ramadan in trying to explain to Dawkins and co where they might have gone wrong.

The argument gets developed carefully and clearly.  He's a brave man: there's a huge amount of naive dogmatism around atheism right now, which sees "faith" as irredeemable, and the ensuing comment section has attracted a whole lot of knee-jerk nonsense. But he goes on:

In the same way that many of the religious refuse to admit what their arguments miss, for fear the whole edifice will crumble, so it is that many atheists fear any similar concession for fear that their line will break and the religious flood through the breach. But I think we should be frank. There are things which atheists miss.

I don't think he's going to fit into Brian Mountford's category of Christian Atheists any time soon, but the article is definitely worth a read.