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Category Archives: Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins’ Oh God moment
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The Richard Dawkins family slave business
Richard Dawkins’ ancestors were slave owners it seems and some of his inherited wealth came from them.
From here:
He has railed against the evils of religion, and lectured the world on the virtues of atheism.
Now Richard Dawkins, the secularist campaigner against “intolerance and suffering”, must face an awkward revelation: he is descended from slave owners and his family estate was bought with a fortune partly created by forced labour.
One of his direct ancestors, Henry Dawkins, amassed such wealth that his family owned 1,013 slaves in Jamaica by the time of his death in 1744.
The Dawkins family estate, consisting of 400 acres near Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire, was bought at least in part with wealth amassed through sugar plantation and slave ownership.
Over Norton Park, inherited by Richard Dawkins’s father, remains in the family, with the campaigner as a shareholder and director of the associated business.
Dawkins is a bit upset about this revelation and this was part of his exchange with the journalist who wrote the Telegraph article:
“Darwinian natural selection has a lot to do with genes, do you agree?” Of course I agreed. “Well, some people might suggest that you could have inherited a gene for supporting slavery from Henry Dawkins.”
“You obviously need a genetics lesson,” I replied. Henry Dawkins was my great great great great great grandfather, so approximately one in 128 of my genes are inherited from him (that’s the correct figure; in the heat of the moment on the phone, I got it wrong by a couple of powers of two).
Setting aside his scientific illiteracy and his frankly defamatory insinuation that I might condone slavery, the point about powers of two is interesting enough to warrant a digression.
Much as I enjoy witnessing any discomforting of Dawkins, this particular exercise seems rather silly, since with sufficient digging we would probably find that Mother Teresa had slaver ancestors and Christopher Hitchens was remotely related to Thomas Aquinas.
Nevertheless, Dawkins’ indignation is instructive since he obviously thinks his moral credentials have been called into question – yet he believes in no morality other than that derived from genetic accident. He has no way of proving that not owning slaves is morally “better” than owning them: by his lights, if a society is more likely to survive because of a thriving slave industry, it is a “better” society than one which perishes because of a lack of slaves. For Dawkins, survival is the only “good” there is.
Richard Dawkins believes that a gay gene exists even though there is no scientific evidence for it. Why could there not also be a slaver gene even though no scientific evidence exists for it? And why would Dawkins be upset to find he possessed it – after all, it’s only a gene?
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Rowan Williams to debate Richard Dawkins at the Sheldonian
Richard Dawkins forgets the full title of 'The Origin Of Species'
Richard Dawkins is becoming an increasing embarrassment to his less strident atheist comrades. For my part, I am glad to see him doing his bit in inadvertently exposing the threadbare reasons for disbelieving in God’s existence.
It is purely speculation, of course, but I suspect that Richard Dawkins is now driving more people towards Christianity than Rowan Williams is away from it, so congratulations are in order.
From here:
Richard Dawkins has been labelled an “embarrassment to atheism” after clashing with a priest in a debate on BBC Radio 4.
The author of the God Delusion could not recall the full title of Charles Darwin’s ‘The Origin Of Species’ during a discussion with Giles Fraser, Former Canon Chancellor of St Paul’s Cathedral, over a poll conducted for the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science (UK) which found that self-identified Christians didn’t go to Church, or read the bible.
Dawkins said an “astonishing number couldn’t identify the first book in the New Testament.” But his claim that this indicated self-identified Christians were “not really Christian at all” was challenged by Fraser, who said the poll asked “silly little questions” to “trip” people up.
Giles Fraser: Richard, if I said to you what is the full title of ‘The Origin Of Species’, I’m sure you could tell me that.
Richard Dawkins: Yes I could
Giles Fraser: Go on then.
Richard Dawkins: On The Origin Of Species.. Uh. With, Oh God. On The Origin Of Species. There is a sub title with respect to the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life.
Giles Fraser: You’re the high pope of Darwinism… If you asked people who believed in evolution that question and you came back and said 2% got it right, it would be terribly easy for me to go ‘they don’t believe it after all.’ It’s just not fair to ask people these questions. They self-identify as Christians and I think you should respect that.
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Richard Dawkins announces that he is a Cultural Anglican
From here:
Merry Christmas! I mean it. All that “Happy Holiday Season” stuff, with “holiday” cards and “holiday” presents, is a tiresome import from the US, where it has long been fostered more by rival religions than by atheists. A cultural Anglican (whose family has been part of the Chipping Norton Set since 1727, as you’ll see if you look around you in the parish church), I recoil from secular carols such as “White Christmas”, “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and the loathsome “Jingle Bells”, but I’m happy to sing real carols, and in the unlikely event that anyone wants me to read a lesson I’ll gladly oblige – only from the King James Version, of course.
Clearly, Dawkins is making a bid for the job of Archbishop of Canterbury when it falls vacant on Rowan’s retirement next year. It should be a good fit after he grows the requisite whiskers.
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Richard Dawkins is an incompetent atheist
According to Peter Mullen here:
Richard Dawkins says that David Cameron is “not really a Christian”. The fact is that it is only God to whom all hearts be open, all desires known and from whom no secrets are hid. So Dawkins has no means of telling whether Cameron is a genuine Christian or not.
We can, however, know that Dawkins is not a proper atheist – that is an intelligent atheist – from his own puerile writing and pathetic attempts at philosophical theology. For example, he writes: “Either God exists or he doesn’t. It is a scientific question. The existence of God is a scientific question, like any other.”
This is idiotic. Science investigates material phenomena, observable entities in the universe. No competent theologians or philosophers – not even the atheist ones – have ever declared that God (if he exists) is an object in his own universe. Perhaps there is no God, and intelligent Christians readily admit that there may be some legitimate doubt. But if the Judaeo-Christian God exists, then he is the maker of the universe and not an entity within it.
That is why science can make legitimate pronouncements on whether bigfoot, fairies, flying spaghetti monsters – and even Greek gods who were believed to be a part of the natural universe – exist, but not God the Creator, whose actuality is independent of his creation.
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Richard Dawkins illustrates the atheist’s moral dilemma
In this audio clip, Dawkins is cornered into admitting that, without God, morality is arbitrary. Dawkins’ reluctance is born of that fact that, just like everybody else, he really doesn’t believe that morality is arbitrary. If he were as reasonable as he would like us to think, he should acknowledge that humanity’s innate belief in non-arbitrary morality is evidence for God’s existence.
But he’s not that reasonable.
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Richard Dawkins expounds on the beauty of his religion
Questions like “why do I exist?”, “does my life have purpose?” are religious or philosophical questions that science doesn’t claim to answer. But Richard Dawkins seems to think that science does answer the questions of purpose and meaning.
However one views this, it is odd and can only mean that either Dawkins’ quest for purpose is microscopically shallow or that science has become his religion – or, as I suspect is the case, a combination of both.
The complete video from which this version of scientism’s answer to an Alpha invitation – delivered with all the bright-eyed fervour Dawkins can muster – is extracted can be found here.
At the end of the interview, it sounds as if the interviewer says: “Bishop Dawkins, thank you very much”? Obviously a Freudian slip.