Whats your opinion of Richard Dawkins?

Rubbish. This is a misrepresentation of Dawkin views, and they're a dime-a-dozen.

Dawkins relationship with the "Unknown" is that he treats it as unknown; whereas the religious pull an Known out of Nowhere.

No misrepresentation. I have read TGD, I know what is in it. I have listed to the debates, analysed the issues, thought through the philosophy. I am not a church goer, I don't read the Bible, I am not a member of a Christian congregation, so I am don't have a personal ax to grind. I just think he is wrong, in the same way that people are wrong about economic theory, history, or politics.

Well, he argues that God could not exist, because if he did, he must be more complex than anything that he has created, therefore he must be immensely complex. Now as the main aim of the book is to show that belief in God is a delusion, it would behove him to be working with a notion of God that is at least represented somewhere in the history of Theology, even if he thinks that theology does not have a subject matter. However, in fact, God is nowhere described as complex, anywhere in theology. He is invariably described as 'simple', i.e. not composed of parts, and incorporeal.

So it is quite possible that what Dawkins depicts, understands and criticizes throughout his book bears no relationship to the traditional understanding of what he is criticizing.

Therefore what is he talking about?

Dawkins holds that the existence or non-existence of God is a scientific hypothesis which is open to rational demonstration. Christianity teaches that to claim that there is a God must be reasonable, but that this is not at all the same thing as faith. Believing in God, whatever Dawkins might think, is not like concluding that aliens or the tooth fairy exist. God is not a celestial super-object or divine UFO, about whose existence we must remain agnostic until all the evidence is in. Theologians do not believe that he is either inside or outside the universe, as Dawkins thinks they do. His transcendence and invisibility are part of what he is, which is not the case with the Loch Ness monster. This is not to say that religious people believe in a black hole, because they also consider that God has revealed himself: not, as Dawkins thinks, in the guise of a cosmic manufacturer even smarter than Dawkins himself (the New Testament has next to nothing to say about God as Creator), but for Christians at least, in the form of a reviled and murdered political criminal. The Jews of the so-called Old Testament had faith in God, but this does not mean that after debating the matter at a number of international conferences they decided to endorse the scientific hypothesis that there existed a supreme architect of the universe – even though, as Genesis reveals, they were of this opinion. They had faith in God in the sense that I have faith in you. They may well have been mistaken in their view; but they were not mistaken because their scientific hypothesis was unsound.

Dawkins speaks scoffingly of a personal God, as though it were entirely obvious exactly what this might mean. He seems to imagine God, if not exactly with a white beard, then at least as some kind of chap, however supersized. He asks how this chap can speak to billions of people simultaneously, which is rather like wondering why, if Tony Blair is an octopus, he has only two arms. For Judeo-Christianity, God is not a person in the sense that Al Gore arguably is. Nor is he a principle, an entity, or ‘existent’: in one sense of that word it would be perfectly coherent for religious types to claim that God does not in fact exist. He is, rather, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever, including ourselves. He is the answer to why there is something rather than nothing. God and the universe do not add up to two, any more than my envy and my left foot constitute a pair of objects.

Here is part of Terry Eagleton's 2006 review

Quote:

Believing in God, whatever Dawkins might think, is not like concluding that aliens or the tooth fairy exist. God is not a celestial super-object or divine UFO, about whose existence we must remain agnostic until all the evidence is in.

That's an opinion. It has no basis in fact. I think it's wrong, and I imagine Dawkins does too.
If a god (this author seems to have a specific one in mind) exists in some form scattered evenly throughout the universe, then it's existence must be detectable in some form, like the background radiation "wrinkles in time". For example, if people pray for a good outcome, then the effects can be tested and measured. If said god influences animals and matter then that too is testable.

These things can and have been tested, and guess what...?

If a god (this author seems to have a specific one in min) exists in some form scattered evenly throughout the universe, then it's existence must be detectable in some form, like the background radiation "wrinkles in time". For example, if people pray for a good outcome, then the effects can be tested and measured. If said god influences animals and matter then that too is testable.

Where is your healed amputee?

God' - and I use the square quotes intentionally - is not anything.

"God, in the true sense, is indefinable. Since the Unconditional precedes our minds and precedes all created things, God cannot be confined by the mind or by words. Tillich sees God as Being-Itself, or the "Ground of all Being." For this reason there cannot be "a" God. There cannot even be a "highest God," for even that concept is limiting. We cannot make an object out of God. And the moment we say he is the highest God or anything else, we have made him an object. Thus, beyond the God of the Christian or the God of the Jews, there is the "God beyond God." This God cannot be said to exist or not to exist in the sense that we "exist".