Professor Dawkins met a class of children, some of them indoctrinated by that crazily literal minority who think the world began 6,000 years ago on a divine drawing board. Instead of explaining natural selection and letting them work out that maybe the Creator works in more mysterious ways than the Genesis myth, he offered them a choice as stark as any bonkers tin-hut preacher from the Quivering Brethren shouting: “Repent or burn!”
Evolution or God – take your choice, kid! The moment one of them found an ammonite on the beach, Professor Dawkins demanded instant atheism. OK, he is provoked, as we all are, by nutters. But most believers are not creationists. Some are scientists. They reckon that an omnipotent being capable of giving humans free will is equally capable of setting a cosmic ball rolling – Big Bang, abiogenesis, all that – and letting it proceed through eons of evolution, selection and struggle. One of the oddest aspects of Dawkins’s TV programme, rich in antelope-mauling and gobbly snakes, was his emotional implication that, gee, Nature is too cruel to have been invented by God! A wet, mawkish, bunny-hugging argument.
I cannot pinpoint exactly where Dawkins when off the rails in his career. While I rarely agreed with him, the stuff he wrote about earlier in his career was really quite insightful and interesting and was not nearly as black and white as his latest writings seem to be.
He’s almost fallen into the mindset of “If you are not for me, you’re against me” logic, which seems to me to be the very fundamentalist logic he is trying to debunk.
I have the same memory of Dawkins. He used to be an interesting scientist. Now he’s become a person trying to draw metaphysical conclusions from science. Which is very bad science.
I am not, however, terribly happy with this columnist’s alternative to Dawkins, which she claims to have learned from Roman Catholic nuns:
No, actually, a God who only intervenes in Creation at its very beginning (a Watchmaker) is Deism. Christians, by contrast, believe that God has been directly and supernaturally involved in the world since the Big Bang: to name a few examples, at the very least in the Incarnation, the Resurrection, the miracle at Cana, etc. It wasn’t a cosmic accident that He ended up with humans — that was a very intentional plan.
People who don’t know anything about Christianity, reading this article, would think that Catholic teaching is consistent with evolution as long as God only acted in the world 15 billion years ago. And I doubt that this would make her nun science teacher from her childhood very happy — definitely not the lesson she wanted to impart.
[blockquote]He’s almost fallen into the mindset of “If you are not for me, you’re against me†logic, which seems to me to be the very fundamentalist logic he is trying to debunk. [/blockquote]
Actually, it seems to me that this kind of funamentalism is quite common among revisionists and other liberals. Freedom of speech and thought is far more at risk from these groups than from conservatives.
I read a review of Dawkins’ latest book, written by a long-time fan of his. She was thoroughly disappointed in it, saying it was filled with little more than condescension, name-calling and unproven assertions.
I’ve just finished watching the final episode of Dawkin’s Channel 4 series which Libby Purves was writing about (missed the other three). Jeffersonian’s comment about ‘condescension, name-calling and unproven assertions’ is just about right.
He also treated Archbishop Rowan abominably – asking him pointed, loaded questions, then using his editorial privilege to fade Rowan’s answer out half-way through with a voice-over of his own comment. Bad.
“No, actually, a God who only intervenes in Creation at its very beginning (a Watchmaker) is Deism. Christians, by contrast, believe that God has been directly and supernaturally involved in the world since the Big Bang: to name a few examples, at the very least in the Incarnation, the Resurrection, the miracle at Cana, etc. It wasn’t a cosmic accident that He ended up with humans—that was a very intentional plan.”
I once heard John Polkinghorne expound his idea that the universe was ‘programmed’ to organize or ‘create’ itself (or something similar) – it sounded fairly deistic to me: the unfolding of a given order.