Daniel C. Dennett has stepped up the pressure with an Open Letter to H. Allen Orr. I hope Orr responds. I also hope this is more than two egos with scores to settle. I’m enjoying the debate.
My own feeling is that many of the reviewers are right, and that Dawkins’ coverage of philosophical arguments was superficial. His misreading, for example, of Aquinas’s Fifth Argument, I found all too predictable. (What’s fascinating is that Dawkins often makes the same error that Intelligent Design types make. Aquinas was not talking about Design in his Fifth Argument; he was talking about order.)
But it will be interesting to see how Orr responds to Dennett’s charges.