Richard Dawkins

Overview

Richard Dawkins is a prominent English scientist and atheist. He is the originator of the term meme.

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Links

Reference

• Wikipedia

Interviews

• 2006-10-13 The flying spaghetti monster: "In a heated interview, the famous biologist insists that religion is evil and God might as well be a children's fantasy."

Reviews

• 2006-10-19 Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching: review by Terry Eagleton of The God Delusion
  • Response by Woozle, from personal correspondence:

    Eagleton basically avoids addressing Dawkins's points, trying instead to undermine his credibility with the usual tools (ad hominem, appeal to authority, appeal to snobbery, etc.) for the first 3 paragraphs.

    In the 4th paragraph, he finally starts to close in on the point by beating a bit more closely about the bush: "Dawkins considers that all faith is blind faith, and that Christian and Muslim children are brought up to believe unquestioningly." The former is an arguable point, and the latter is certainly true unless you include the word "all" ("...and that all Christian and Muslim children..."). He then quickly backs away from the point, dismissing those statements by an appeal to common belief ("Not even the dim-witted clerics who knocked me about at grammar school thought that.") and by simply stating the opposite: "For mainstream Christianity, reason, argument and honest doubt have always played an integral role in belief." Right. Got any bridges you're trying to sell?

    Wait, I take that back. It's probably quite arguable that they "played a role"; in fact, that might be the best way to describe the situation: defenders of the faith will regularly trot out reason and logic and manipulate them, like Punch and Judy dolls, to arrive safely back at the Official Truth. "Playing a role" is not what we're looking for; reason, argument, and honest doubt should be *central* to any quest for truth – be that quest spiritual or otherwise.

    The rest of the piece strikes me as more of the same; if you notice what seem to be any actual *points* he makes, please feel free to point them out and I'll have a look at them.

Videos

• "The Root of All Evil" (title given as The God Delusion, but that's probably just to get more hits): BBC documentary, filmed in Colorado Springs and Israel, showing the innate destructiveness of religion and contrasting with science
  • Part 1
  • Part 2: discusses religion as a virus infecting the young