Look, I'll trust you on that one, because from the very beginning of Dawkins starting to write anything about the humanities, he became a sort of perpetual annoyance, because students would bring him up and colleagues would just have to go, with varying degrees of being diplomatic about it, "Guys. You're talking about a dude that has, at this point, read less than you all have about the subject and doesn't have the introspection to understand that. He needs a 101 course. It's that bad.
"He's an arrogant idiot who maybe has the cred in his own field--maybe, because we're not the same kind of arrogant idiot, and we're not going to assume his field is giving him credit for nothing--but in our field, you are not to treat anything he is writing as anything other than a particularly bad, if eloquent, student essay."
It's been how long, twenty years since The God Delusion? That's how long people in the humanities and social sciences have had to deal with undoing Dawkins' outsized influence; and how long I personally have been wondering if something like this would pop up eventually, or if Dawkins would luck out and get to die before winding up at the logical endpoint of his philosophies.
With that said, I fully agree on the rationalists, and generally on the "lots of people who are really good at thinking about one thing". People have clowned a lot on physicists being the poster children for this, but this happens in every single field. E.g., I don't think the humanities or social sciences are exempt from this, to the contrary--even in relatively closely related fields. Historians can't do contemporary fact checking to save their lives; anthropologists think they can do deep work in wildly different cultures without knowing languages; sociologists don't know the historical context and reinvent the wheel every single damn time, et cetera. (And the less mention of how badly we all do when we venture further out, the better. It's stupid.)
As a general phenomenon, this makes me about as melancholy as the inevitability of death. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that will guarantee avoiding this specific trap. Trying to avoid it explicitly makes you more likely to fall into it, and the numbers of people who are just never famous enough that we learn about them doing the same thing openly are staggering.
But I would be lying if I said it weren't personally satisfying to see a wider recognition of Dawkins not being an authority in the area of religion, but rather a primary source for colleagues specializing in that area. It's twenty years past time, and I'm looking forward to the conference papers about it.
