Whoa — Richard Dawkins will be on Revelation TV — it looks the the British version of the Trinity Broadcast Network or similar jebus-walloping station — shortly, at 3:30 GMT. It will be streamed live on the net. I’m listening to a bit of their programming now, and it’s ghastly, nauseating stuff.
I’m going to have to miss the interview, since I’ll be teaching at that time. Maybe someone will tell us about it here.
Here is the last of Anthony Horvath’s ghastly morality tales. This one is the easiest to summarize, because there isn’t much to say about it: Richard Dawkins dies, goes to heaven, is judged, and sent to hell. It’s short, only seven pages long, and five of them are spent in loving description of the disintegration of Dawkins. It’s nothing but a horror story for Christians in which the bad guy meets a grisly end.
Richard Dawkins takes a slightly harder line than I do on the case of Gaskell, the astronomer who didn’t get a job because his potential employers objected to his faith-based mangling of evolutionary biology. Dawkins regards that as entirely justifiable, and makes a good case.
A commentator on a website discussing the Gaskell affair went so far as to write, “If Gaskell has produced sound, peer-reviewed literature of high quality then I see no reason for denying him the position, even if he believes Mars is the egg of a giant purple Mongoose”. That commentator probably felt rather pleased with his imagery, but I don’t believe he could seriously defend the point he makes with it and I hope most of my readers would not follow him. There are at least some imaginable circumstances in which most sensible people would practise negative discrimination.
If you disagree, I offer the following argument. Even if a doctor’s belief in the stork theory of reproduction is technically irrelevant to his competence as an eye surgeon, it tells you something about him. It is revealing. It is relevant in a general way to whether we would wish him to treat us or teach us. A patient could reasonably shrink from entrusting her eyes to a doctor whose beliefs (admittedly in the apparently unrelated field of obstetrics) are so cataclysmically disconnected from reality. And a student could reasonably object to being taught geography by a professor who is prepared to take a salary to teach, however brilliantly, what he believes is a lie. I think those are good grounds to impugn his moral character if not his sanity, and a student would be wise to avoid his classes.
That’s all true. We’ve got a new wave of creationists like Wells and Ross who are going through the motions of graduate programs to earn degrees in subjects they intend only to repudiate, who basically lie their way through a program of advanced study, and I wouldn’t want to hire them or even trust them. Marcus Ross, for instance, wrote a whole thesis on Cretaceous paleontology while publicly professing at creationist meetings that the earth is less than 10,000 years old — who in their right mind would hire such a confused and deceptive fellow for a job which involves regularly dealing with geologic ages?
These aren’t minor, scientific disagreements, like hiring a paleontologist who emphasizes punctuated equilibrium or neutral theory in his analysis; those are legitimate scientific issues that will be resolved with evidence. These are people who throw out the evidence in favor of their religious dogma, and they are about as anti-scientific as you can get.
We’re about to re-open a search for a tenure-track position at my university. If Jonathan Wells applied, how far do you think he’d get in the review? We’d examine his application with the same impartial eye we do all the others, but the fact that he has demonstrated his incompetence in biology in his books and public speaking events, and has a known malicious intent to ‘destroy Darwinism’ means it would be round-filed very early in the process—and if you were privy to committee comments during the review, they’d probably involve lots of incredulous expletives. Would that be discrimination? I don’t think so. He’s patently unsuitable for the job.
On the other hand, many of the applicants to our position would likely be Christian with varying degrees of devotion — but if their work, the basis for hiring that person, showed no attempt to shoehorn personal and private ideas that I, for instance, find ridiculous, into their science, then it wouldn’t be an issue. Christians believe in something as absurd as the purple mongoose egg theory, this whole bizarre notion of incarnated gods dying to magically redeem us from a distant ancestor’s dietary error, but good scientists are capable of switching that nonsense off entirely in the lab, and are also aware of the impact on their credibility of espousing folly…if they weren’t, they wouldn’t be good scientists (or they’re Nobel prize winners who know they can get away with it now).
We have to be careful about letting personal disagreements on matters of taste intrude on our decisions; if the person has been circumspect about keeping them from poisoning a body of good work, I’m willing to accommodate them. The alternative is that we start rejecting applicants because we discover that they listen to 70s hair metal bands while they work, are fans of the New York Yankees, or put milk in their teacup before they add the hot water, all irrational and unforgiveable heresies. It’s all fine unless they join a Poison tribute band and start slopping dairy products about with manic abandon.
His father, John Dawkins, has died at the age of 95. He led an interesting life!
There’s a better link here, with pictures.
Some good news: the online ‘debate’ between Dawkins and the religion editors of the Times can be read for free. It’s a terrible format: it’s just a chat window with people throwing questions at Dawkins, which he deftly slices out of the air with a samurai sword of reason. Here’s one of the more coherent questions the pro-faith gummi bears tossed at him, which will give you an idea of the quality of the interrogation.
I just interviewed David Wilkinson, principal of St John’s Durham and astrophysicist, and this is what he said (full interview at my Times blog Articles of Faith):
The science Stephen Hawking uses raises a number of questions which for many opens the door to the possibility of an existence of a creator and for many points to the existence of a creator.‘One would be the the purpose of the universe. Although science might discover the mechanism, we are still left with the question of what is the purpose.
‘Second is where the laws of physics come from. Science subsumes the laws but we are still left with the question of where the laws come from.
‘Third is the intelligibility of the universe. It strikes me as interesting that Stephen Hawking can make it intelligible. Albert Einstein once said that the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible. For many of us who are struck by the intelligibility of the physical laws, the explanation is that the creator is the force of rationality both for the universe and for our minds.
To summarize Dawkins’ three answers: Why even propose a cosmic purpose? That question isn’t answered by postulating a mysterious intelligent being, either. Why assume a godless universe would have to be unintelligible?
Stupid questions do not warrant our concern or need to answer. Questions that do not bring us closer to understanding are nothing but the posturings of people who substitute noise for reason.
The long-awaited review of Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini’s anti-evolution book by Jerry Coyne is now online in The Nation. It’s a double-review of both the bad philosophy book and the good science book by Dawkins. Settle in for a nice read.
I’m feeling a bit light-headed, and wondering if I’m still asleep. Or if it’s April Fools’ Day. Ruse actually concedes some ground to Dawkins in the religion wars. Of course, it’s in the HuffPo, so it could be some perverse nonsense, anyway.
Recently, the New Atheists’ most prominent representative, Richard Dawkins, wrote a highly emotive piece for the Washington Post, in which he derided the present pope and expressed glee and satisfaction that such a person was now leading the Catholic Church. In Dawkins’s judgment, not only was this no less than the Church deserved, but such leadership could only hasten the Church’s demise. I thought at the time that Dawkins was over the top and wrong. I now think that he was right and that it was I who was wrong. Let me say at once that, unlike Dawkins, I don’t necessarily want to see this as the end of religion or even of the Catholic Church in some form. I stress that although I cannot share the beliefs of Christians, I respect them and applaud the good that is done in the name of their founder. But I do now think that as presently constituted, the Catholic Church is corrupt and should be eradicated.
…
Dawkins is right. The moral mess gets worse and worse. Hope of change is illusory. Götterdämmerung beckons. Although we have different motives and undoubtedly hope for different outcomes, I join Dawkins in welcoming the prospect.
He also points out that one of the most damning things about the church’s problems is that they are responding by digging in and resisting change. He’s not alone in noting that Ratzinger’s papacy has been bad news for Catholicism.
However, just a note of reality, though: this is what the Catholic Church has always done. They have never been a bastion of liberal thought, and what they’ve always done in response to problems is recover by retrenchment — and it doesn’t hurt them. Those who revel in arcane dogma will not be deterred by the material aberration of wicked priests engaging in buggery.
Seriously — Catholicism survived the Reformation and the Thirty Years’ War, blatantly political and corrupt popes, schisms and violence. The current events are trivial in comparison.
The church is going to exist for a long, long time to come. What we should expect, though, is that as the more liberal membership boils off to join progressive churches or to abandon religion altogether, as the elements lobbying for change give up and go elsewhere, what will be left behind is exactly what we’re seeing: a hard kernel of very conservative Catholicness that will become increasingly crazy and detached from reality. It will become much worse…but it will still exist, and will be populated by the devout ranks of the truly fervent, the Bill Donohues and the Father Coughlins, and they aren’t going to be dissuaded at all by us weird atheists or those wishy-washy Anglicans. Don’t expect demise, just a diminishment and a hardening.
The comment that has stirred up the most condemnation from the press is Richard Dawkins’ mention of “Pope…Nazi,” which everyone assumes was about the current Pope. Wrong. Everyone knows the current Pope is most properly addressed as “Pope Palpatine”. No, Pope Palpatine is not currently up for canonization (at least, I hope not), but there is another pope who is, and this thorough discussion explains who Dawkins was actually talking about.
Blatantly evident in this clip, Richard Dawkins uses “Pope Nazi” as a shorthand descriptive phrase for “that Pope whose name I’ve forgotten (Pope Pius XII)â—âwho’s also up for canonisation and was aiding and abetting the Nazis during the war”.
And here’s the clip.
Oh, and Pope Pius XII really was a sniveling rat bastard who should have been held accountable for contributing to the evil perpetrated against the Jews.
Whoa. Richard Dawkins appeared on the Hugh Hewitt show. Hewitt, in case you didn’t know, is one of those far right radio wingnuts, a lawyer with a blog who defended George W. Bush, the Iraq war, and always sides with religious conservatives in the culture wars.
It’s a fairly long interview, and you can see Hewitt trying to make lawyerly probes to lead Dawkins away from the book, and he’s also good at making lawyerly innuendo for his already anti-Dawkins audience — he’s constantly trying to cast doubt on the evidence for evolution, for instance — and you can tell that Richard is getting increasingly exasperated with the silly line of interrogation…until he finally snaps.
RD: Okay, do you believe Jesus turned water into wine?
HH: Yes./p>
RD: You seriously do?
HH: Yes.
RD: You actually think that Jesus got water, and made all those molecules turn into wine?
HH: Yes.
RD: My God.
HH: Yes. My God, actually, not yours. But let me…
RD: I’ve realized the kind of person I’m dealing with now.
I’m sure he’s overwhelmed right now with his book tour, but somebody needs to warn him about exactly what he’s walking into before he gets in front of a microphone. Hewitt is a ridiculous puffed-up blowhard of very little brain, and a remarkably calm, polite discussion while he ducks and dodges and blows a dog-whistle for his crazy listeners doesn’t work very well.
If Dawkins is going on the Glenn Beck show, though, I want to know about it.
(via Instaputz)
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.
