O’Reilly. Dawkins. Or, what happens when a fathead meets a scholar


Richard Dawkins was ‘interviewed’ by that awful little peabrain, Bill O’Reilly. It was a horrible spectacle, but Dawkins kept his cool. Look at O’Reilly’s arguments:

Hmm, let’s see. O’Reilly claims we don’t know everything, which is entirely true, so somehow this justifies his belief in Jesus. Dawkins had a great answer to that: “It’s a most of extraordinary piece of warped logic to say because science can’t fill in a particular gap you’re going throw in your lot with Christianity.” Another point I like to toss in against that line of nonsense is that science at least has the integrity to say that we don’t know yet what happened in a particular gap (but we may be working on it, and have a more useful strategy than waiting for a holy man to have a vision), while the religious wackaloons will instead fill that gap with pious certainty…a kind of clot of myth that we’re eventually going to have to rip out in the face of great resistance.

Then we got the usual arguments: science provides no moral framework, but Jesus does. If that’s the case, why have Christians always been such a warring, nasty, oppressive lot? They’ve got this ideal of a self-sacrificing man of peace at their center, but Christianity itself seems to drive in the opposite direction. Please explain to me the opulence of the Vatican, the Thirty Years War, and the Prosperity Gospel, just as a preliminary exercise.

O’Reilly is committing a stupid logical fallacy when he trots out the old “there are more Christians than atheists” argument.

And finally, we get the usual O’Reilly tactic of shouting at his guest that he’s a fascist.

It wasn’t a very enlightening interview, except in that it confirms that O’Reilly is a blustering moron while Dawkins is an intelligent gentleman.