Tag Archives: Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins deserves a Darwin Award

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There aren’t many men daft enough to publicly attack feminists, but Richard Dawkins has gone where male angels fear to tread and done just that.

I nominate Dawkins for a Darwin Award: his genes have just been deselected.

Read it all here, where you will find Dawkins described as the worst villain a person can be in class warfare – a “wealthy old heterosexual white man”.

What will Dawkins do to exonerate himself?: Have a gay fling? Take sensitivity awareness training for atheists? Give all his money to an atheist charity – even though there aren’t any? Have a sex change along with skin pigmentation enhancements?

One thing he won’t do is apologise, because being an atheist means you never have to say you’re sorry: after all, atheists rely on science so they are always right.

Richard Dawkins is troubled by the fine tuning of the universe

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From here:

Outspoken evangelical geneticist Francis Collins revealed that combative atheist Richard Dawkins admitted to him during a conversation that the most troubling argument for nonbelievers to counter is the fine-tuning of the universe.

“If they (constants in the universe) were set at a value that was just a tiny bit different, one part in a billion, the whole thing wouldn’t work anymore,” said Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, during the 31st Annual Christian Scholars’ Conference at Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif.

These constants regarding the behavior of matter and energy – such as strong and weak nuclear forces, gravity, and the speed of light – have to be precisely right during the Big Bang for life as we know it to exist.

“To get our universe, with all of its potential for complexities or any kind of potential for any kind of life form, everything has to be precisely defined on this knife edge of improbability,” said the world renowned scientist.

“That forces a conclusion. If you are an atheist, either it is just a lucky break and the odds are so remote, or you have to go to this multiverse hypothesis, which says that there must be almost an infinite number of parallel universes that have different values of those constants,” explained Collins to Christian scholars of various disciplines in the audience. “And of course we are here and so we must have won the lottery, we must be in the one where everything worked.”

Ironically, employing the multiverse theory to explain the fine tuning of the universe requires more blind faith than belief in a Creator; yet it’s a faith that eminent scientists like Dawkins and Hawking are willing to embrace in their eagerness to avoid acknowledging that there really is a God.  The fact that the multiverse theory lacks empirical testability and is unfalsifiable, places it in the same category as  belief in fairies, a belief which Dawkins compares to religious faith and frequently enjoys deriding: such is the measure of his desperation to flee from God.

In other atheist news, Polly Toynbee will go where Dawkins fears to tread: into a debate with William Lane Craig. Toynbee doesn’t possess the intellectual equipment to avoid being trounced; it should be fun.

From here:

The President of the British Humanist Association (BHA), Polly Toynbee, is to debate the existence of God with eminent Christian philosopher William Lane Craig, when he visits the UK for a tour of speaking engagements in October.

Leading British atheists Richard Dawkins and A C Grayling have both declined the invitation to debate with Craig.

Richard Dawkins thinks religion is 'hijacking' the Bible

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From here:

Religion should not be allowed to “hijack” the great cultural resource of the Bible, according to the atheist scientist Professor Richard Dawkins.

Asked by the Labour MP Frank Field, chairman of the King James Bible Trust, what the Bible meant to him, he said: “I think it is important to make the case that the Bible is part of our heritage and it doesn’t have to be tied to religion.

“It’s of historic interest, it’s of literary interest, and it’s important that religion should not be allowed to hijack this cultural resource.

“You can’t appreciate English literature unless you know something about the Greek gods. You can’t appreciate Wagner unless you know something about the Norse gods. You can’t appreciate English literature unless you are to some extent at least steeped in the King James Bible.”

This is extraordinarily absurd, even for Richard Dawkins. Without Christianity, which he so despises, there would have been no Bible; without the Church, which he so loathes, the Bible would not have been preserved and without faithful Christians, who Dawkins keeps calling idiots, no-one would have bothered to read the Bible.

Dawkins wants Christendom without Christianity, Western civilisation without the bedrock on which it was founded and morality without God. Well, he can’t have them.

If anyone is trying to hijack the Bible, it is Dawkins and his coterie of cockamamie atheists.

Who’s a cowardy custard?

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Richard Dawkins is because he won’t debate William Lane Craig.

From here:

Richard Dawkins has made his name as the scourge of organised religion who branded the Roman Catholic Church “evil” and once called the Pope “a leering old villain in a frock”.

But he now stands accused of “cowardice” after refusing four invitations to debate the existence of God with a renowned Christian philosopher.

A war of words has broken out between the best selling author of The God Delusion, and his critics, who see his refusal to take on the American academic, William Lane Craig, as a “glaring” failure and a sign that he may be losing his nerve.

Prof Dawkins maintains that Prof Craig is not a figure worthy of his attention and has reportedly said that such a contest would “look good” on his opponent’s CV but not on his own.

[…..]

“I have no intention of assisting Craig in his relentless drive for self-promotion,” he said.

Self-promotion is a completely alien concept to Dawkins, of course; that’s why his web site is not just a shrine to atheism but to the Great Man himself: richarddawkins.net, the “Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science – a Clear Thinking Oasis”.

Not sufficiently clear thinking to take on William Lane Craig, though.

Darwinism is an antilogy

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From here:

Belief in God is part of human nature – Oxford study.

Humans are naturally predisposed to believe in gods and life after death, according to a major three-year international study.

Led by two academics at Oxford University, the £1.9 million study found that human thought processes were “rooted” to religious concepts……

“We have gathered a body of evidence that suggests that religion is a common fact of human nature across different societies,” he said.

“This suggests that attempts to suppress religion are likely to be short-lived as human thought seems to be rooted to religious concepts, such as the existence of supernatural agents or gods, and the possibility of an afterlife or pre-life.”

This means that if people like Richard Dawkins are correct and natural selection alone has created human nature, it has created something that is inclined to believe in falsehoods and, therefore, cannot be trusted.

So if Richard Dawkins is correct, his thoughts are a product of something that cannot be trusted.

It follows that, whether he is right or wrong, there isn’t much point in listening to Richard Dawkins.

The Templeton Prize

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The Templeton prize is supposed to honour someone who:

has made an exceptional contribution to affirming life’s spiritual dimension, whether through insight, discovery, or practical works.

This year, the winner was Martin Rees, an astrophysicist at Cambridge University who “has no religious beliefs”, but occasionally attends Church of England Sunday worship – where he fits right in.

It might be possible for this to be more mixed up, but so far we have Rees who doesn’t believe in God, but attends an Anglican Church sporadically, winning a prize for making an “exceptional contribution to affirming life’s spiritual dimension”.

But wait, there’s more: real atheists like Richard Dawkins reckon he’s let the side down by “blur[ring] the boundary between science and religion, making a virtue of belief without evidence”. Meanwhile, Dawkins continues to believe, without evidence*, that the excogitations of the grey soup beneath his thinning curly locks are of a weightier substance than Mr Gumby’s flower arranging instructions.

* J. B. S. Haldane: “If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true…. and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms”

Evolutionary Newspeak

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From here:

The anti-ID biologist Richard Dawkins once said, “Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.” Now some ID critics today are so fearful of lending any credence towards intelligent design that they are recommending that biologists stop using the word “design” entirely.

A recent article in the journal Bioessays by its editor Andrew Moore, titled “We need a new language for evolution. . . everywhere,” suggests that biologists should stop using the term “design.” According to Moore, under “Evolution old-speak” we would say, “Structure X is designed to perform…” but under “Evolution new-speak” we must simply say, “Structure X performs Y.”

This means that, since Richard Dawkins’ head isn’t designed to hold his ears six inches apart but merely performs the function of doing so, it is an even less important organ that I first thought.

Richard Dawkins evangelises the great unwashed

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It’s a shame that he chose one of his silliest – and there are a lot to choose from – remarks to do it: “We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”

 

This may appear cute at first glance, but beyond that it makes no sense. Atheism is the belief that no god exists; a person who believes in one god – or God – is not an atheist any more than a person who only eats pork is a vegetarian when it comes to cows.

 

Who created Richard Dawkins' creator?

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Dawkins et al. gibber incessantly that the cosmological argument fails because, once you have concluded that someone must have created the universe and that someone is God, you must answer the question, “who created God?”. The immediate problem with this line of reasoning is the confusion between the categories of what is created and what isn’t. Science tells us the universe is not eternal but was created. By definition, God is eternal and not created: the universe needs a creator, God doesn’t.

John Lennox explains another logical problem with the “who created the creator” view here:

SCIENCE AND religion are not incompatible, but should be seen as complementary fields, a gathering in Dublin heard this weekend. John Lennox, professor of mathematics at the University of Oxford and the author of a number of works on science and religion, told the annual meeting of the Oxford and Cambridge Society of Ireland that the notion that science and religion are inimical is a “myth”.

“Faith is not only a religious concept, it is also a scientific concept . . . Every scientist believes that nature is rationally intelligent. [sic – it should be intelligible]” Describing what he called the “logical incoherence” of atheism, propounded by figures such as Richard Dawkins and Stephen Hawking, he said the question of “who created the creator” could also be applied to atheists. “I have said to Richard Dawkins . . . if you believe the universe created you and is your creator, who created your creator?

“Most of us have got an ultimate fact,” he said, “for atheists it is the universe, for me the ultimate fact is God. It’s not a question of whether there’s the ultimate fact, the real question is which fact is ultimate.”