In speaking of the King James Bible, Richard Dawkins makes the extraordinary claim that “religion must not be allowed to hijack this cultural resource”.
Evidently it hasn’t occurred to him that he is the one doing the hijacking.
To rob the Bible of “religion” is to expunge its meaning and make it merely aesthetic. Someone should tell Richard that he is too late: this has already been tried by the Anglican Church.
h/t Damian Thompson
Richard Dawkins, has made buckets of money saying things like “The universe we observe has … no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference”. Yet, when it suits him, this champion of reason has no qualms in using the concepts – good and evil – that he claims don’t exist:
What major institution most deserves the title of greatest force for evil in the world? In a field of stiff competition, the Roman Catholic Church is surely up there among the leaders. The Anglican church has at least a few shreds of decency, traces of kindness and humanity with which Jesus himself might have connected, however tenuously: a generosity of spirit, of respect for women, and of Christ-like compassion for the less fortunate. The Anglican church does not cleave to the dotty idea that a priest, by blessing bread and wine, can transform it literally into a cannibal feast; nor to the nastier idea that possession of testicles is an essential qualification to perform the rite. It does not send its missionaries out to tell deliberate lies to AIDS-weakened Africans, about the alleged ineffectiveness of condoms in protecting against HIV. Whether one agrees with him or not, there is a saintly quality in the Archbishop of Canterbury, a benignity of countenance, a well-meaning sincerity. How does Pope Ratzinger measure up? The comparison is almost embarrassing.
In a bleak Dawkins universe of “blind pitiless indifference” the above ravings don’t have to make sense: they are merely the random firing of neurons in Dawkins’ fevered – I was going to say imagination, but in a materialist universe, that doesn’t exist – brain. In the real universe where good and evil do exist, a brief search of Catholic charities is all that is needed to see what a fool Dawkins makes of himself when he pontificates outside of his field.
The most disturbing part of this incoherence is the fact that Dawkins thinks Rowan is saintly. It’s hard to know what Dawkins means by that since a saint is a Christian – a person whom Dawkins enjoys hurling inane schoolboy insults at; whatever he means, Rowan Williams doesn’t need a friend like Richard Dawkins.
Richard Dawkins frequently posits that the mechanism of evolution has made a world that presents the “illusion of design” and is “dripping with apparent design”. He does it here.
But there is no scientific evidence from which one can deduce that the appearance of design is an illusion created by natural selection – as if it were imbued with the purpose to deceive. It follows from the assumption that there is no God. The (unstated) reasoning is:
God does not exist;
the universe and especially life, presents the appearance of design by an intelligence – God;
since God does not exist the appearance of design is an illusion.
Yet Dawkins stoutly asserts that evolution removes all likelihood of the existence of God (the idea of God “goes out the window”): circular reasoning, since, in declaring the appearance of design a trick of natural selection, he as already made the assumption that God does not exist.
It is no more or less scientific to make the obverse case: God did indeed design life, but he used evolution to create the illusion – for the gullibly obstinate atheist – that life spontaneously developed without any assistance outside of the mechanism of natural selection. And people like Dawkins have fallen for it. Would God do such a seemingly absurd thing? Perhaps, since for those that wish to see, the evidence for his existence permeates the universe; he does allow those who wish to do without him to have their way, though and – Dawkins and his acolytes are having theirs.
English eccentricity is a time-honoured and necessary part of what used to make Britain such a likeable culture. Patrick Moore, whose TV programme The Sky at Night I enjoyed many years ago, is a typical eccentric: he is an astronomer who was a member of the Flat Earth Society.
This impulse for self-mocking comes from a gentler time when people who held strong opinions (Patrick Moore doesn’t believe the earth is flat) still had a sense of humour. Oh that Dawkins and his ilk were as civilised. Here is a typical Dawkinism:
It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that).
Now the assertions of young-earth Creationism may have the appearance of being scientifically untenable – and I don’t subscribe to them – but Dawkins consistently lumps anyone who questions evolution’s dogma into one category, that of mindless folly.
Dawkins enthusiasts take their cue from their master:
By the way, the reason biologists ridicule and insult creationists is because they are too lazy to learn anything, and too bloody stupid to understand anything.
That’s funny that a believer in magical creation would call the basic facts of evolution “pseudo-scientific nonsense”. You obviously don’t know what you’re talking about.
Humourless, arrogant, unreasonable, tedious and bigoted.
