A New Book on Dawkins ("How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think")

DiscoverMagazine writes:Throughout his remarks, Dawkins could barely suppress the contempt he feels for mystical religion. “What I can’t understand is why we are expected to show respect for good scientists, even great scientists, who at the same time believe in a god who does things like listen to our prayers, forgive our sins, perform cheap miracles,” he said, prompting a burst of nervous laughter to ripple through the audience, “which go against, presumably, everything that the god of the physicist, the divine cosmologist, set up when he set up his great laws of nature. So I don’t understand a scientist who says, ”I am a Roman Catholic’ or ”I am a Baptist.’ ”As even (Dawkins) friend Patrick Bateson conceded, “Personally, I think he’s gone a bit over the top on that, attributing all the evils of the world to religion. . . . I am not a believer, but I know some of my colleagues have been very offended by his brief on this.” “I wish he wouldn’t do it,” said David Barker flatly. “It creates huge negative feelings in some people.”(...)But even as Dawkins waved the banner of evolution in New York, he engaged in a little friendly fire, attacking a fellow officer in Darwin’s latter-day army”Ken Miller, the Brown University professor, who sat at the other end of the table.Miller is in many ways as staunch a defender of Darwin as Dawkins, and, from a practical standpoint, perhaps an even more important one. He has tirelessly traveled to Georgia, Pennsylvania, and other redoubts of creationism, to school board meetings and to courtrooms, to debate and refute those seeking to undermine the importance of evolution in modern school curricula. But Miller is also a walking paradox to people like Dawkins. As he confessed in his book Finding Darwin’s God, Miller is a practicing Catholic, and as he pointed out to Dawkins, “I will persist in saying that religion for me, and for many other people, answers questions that are beyond the realm of science.” Indeed, he complained that scientists often trafficked in a caricature of religion. And then, nodding toward Dawkins and Ann Druyan, he suggested that “atheists and agnostics are a whole lot more evangelical than religious people are.” The observation may have started out as a joke, but it landed at Dawkins’s end of the table like a spear.Dawkins and Druyan proceeded to gang up on Miller. These arguments invariably devolve into snippy exchanges about the Genesis version of creation and unfold in a rhetorical no-man’s-land somewhere between King James and Watson and Crick. “I regard Genesis as the spiritual truth,” Miller said. “And I also think that Genesis was written in a language that would explain God that was relevant to the people living at the time. I cannot imagine”cannot imagine”Moses coming down from the Mount and talking about DNA, RNA, punctuated equilibrium. I don’t think he would have gotten very far.” Nonetheless, he reiterated his belief that the biblical stories of the world’s creation “are true in the spiritual sense and that they are written by human beings in the language of the time.”Dawkins, at the far end of the table, almost levitated out of his seat with indignation. “But what does that mean?” he demanded, voice rising. The audience rewarded his indignation with combustive applause. “Is it a caricature for me to ask you, since you are a Roman Catholic, do you believe Jesus had an earthly father?”“Ah, this is the famous Richard Dawkins question,” Miller replied, sounding a little defensive.“No, don’t ridicule it!” Dawkins shouted, relentless.“If I can just get a fragment of the body of Jesus,” Miller continued, “I could do DNA fingerprinting! I could figure out who gave Mary that Y chromosome!”“That’s a facetious answer!” Dawkins cried out, his face flushed with conviction, shaking his finger at Miller. “That’s a facetious answer!” The heat was so palpable that, as Margaret Wertheim, the moderator, said later, “At least now we know that Richard actually believes this. Before, I wasn’t sure if it was just a performance.”

Ah, but what a dull, boring world it would be without people like him

Sir Richard

Sir Richard

I think it would do the world a lot of good if people like him were more open-minded....

DogToDolphin writes:I think it would do the world a lot of good if people like him were more open-minded, and not get furious because some fellows don't agree with his philosophy.

Phat writes:Sir Richard...

Would you care to give us a list of open minded "true religions".

Perhaps it is a meme.

Anyway just to tell you that I don't think Dawkins has all the information necessary to get angry at people with faith in God.

Now, I understand you say and Dawkins view Christianity as closed-minded