Difference between revisions of "Richard Dawkins"

Revision as of 12:23, 15 February 2007

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."
2005-04-30 The atheist: "Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins explains why God is a delusion, religion is a virus, and America has slipped back into the Dark Ages."

Videos

"Root of All Evil?" (title listed as The God Delusion, but that's probably just to get more hits; it actually predates TGD): 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

Dawkins said, of the title "Root of All Evil?":

From the start, I didn't like the title. Religion is not the root of all evil, for no one thing is the root of all anything. But I was delighted with the advertisement that Channel Four put in the national newspapers. It was a picture of the Manhattan skyline with the caption "Imagine a world without religion." What was the connection? The twin towers of the World Trade Center were conspicuously present.

from "The God Delusion", page 1

@@ Line 8: / Line 8: @@
 * '''2005-04-30''' [http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2005/04/30/dawkins/ The atheist]: "Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins explains why God is a delusion, religion is a virus, and America has slipped back into the Dark Ages."
-==Reviews==
-* '''2006-10-19''' [http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n20/eagl01_.html Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching]: review by [[wikipedia:Terry Eagleton|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 &ndash; 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==