Richard Dawkins is someone who likely could never believe in God because he is so thoroughly ensconced in his naturalistic paradigm. Like an extreme fundamentalist in religion who argues that the likes of Dawkins would believe in a God if only he knew the truth as they clearly see it, Dawkins turns historical figures he admires into people who would be atheists just like himself if only they knew what he knows.
So he writes (86): "I have no reason to doubt that Raphael and Michelangelo were Christians - it was pretty much the only option - but the fact is almost incidental... If history had worked out differently, and Michelangelo had been commissioned to paint a ceiling for a giant Museum of Science, mightn't he have produced something at least as inspirational as the Sistine Chapel? How sad that we shall never hear Beethoven's Mesozoic Symphony, or Mozart's opera The expanding Universe. And what a shame that we are deprived of Haydn's Evolution Oratorio."
Note Dawkins's anachronistic logic:
1. Brilliant and creative people want to know truth.
2. I know the truth; viz., that there is no God.
3. Most brilliant and creative people from the past, such as Michelangelo, believed in God.
4. Would they have known what I know, they would of course agree with me and be atheists.
5. Thus I have all past brilliant and creative people standing with me on the side of atheism.
6. And "religion is [not to be] given credit for the Sistine Chapel or Raphael's Anunciation." (86)
Amazing!
With this kind of psychological reasoning what will become of the status of Dawkins's current beliefs in relation to the future? A thousand years from now at least some, and maybe much, of what Dawkins' now believes in as regards "science" will only be studied in a few arcane history of science dissertations.
