I have written previously about Professor Richard Dawkins after a trip to Cambridge University and the publication of his book “The God Delusion.” See the “Two differing professors”. Professor Dawkins is Professor of Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. He believes that an understanding of evolution will lead to atheism. His aim is to convert his hearers to atheism. He is the author of “The Selfish Gene” (1976) and “The God Delusion” (2006).
Richard Dawkins was born in 1941. He was educated at Oxford University and has taught zoology at the universities of California and Oxford. His books about evolution and science include The Selfish Gene, The Extended Phenotype, The Blind Watchmaker, River Out of Eden, Climbing Mount Improbable, and most recently, Unweaving the Rainbow.
Dawkins first came to prominence with his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, which popularised the gene-centred view of evolution and introduced the term meme into the lexicon. Dawkins is an outspoken atheist, secular humanist, and sceptic.
Dawkins describes his childhood as “a normal Anglican upbringing” in Malawi, but reveals that he began doubting the existence of God when he was about nine years old. When he better understood evolution, at the age of sixteen, his religious position again changed because he felt that evolution could account for the complexity of life in purely material terms, and thus that a designer was not necessary.
He married in 1967 but divorced in 1984. He remarried in 1984, had a daughter, and subsequently divorced again. He married for a third time in 1992. He studied zoology at Balliol College, Oxford, and gained a BA degree in zoology in 1962, followed by MA and DPhil degrees in 1966, and a DSc in 1989. He is a fellow of New College, Oxford since 1970. He has delivered a number of inaugural and other notable lectures. He has also been called the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, the late British philosopher, logician, and mathematician.
Dawkins was the main guest at an international Atheist Convention held in Melbourne. He was more than disappointing. 2500 hardcore believers in the absence of religion packed into the Global Atheists’ Convention in Melbourne last weekend to give a hero’s welcome to their high priest of belief in unbelief, Richard Dawkins.
He was also on ABC’s Q&A, and in both appearances he was snobbish, rude to others, and claiming too much. He regarded sainthood for Mary MacKillop as being like something out of Monty Python and referred to the Pope as a Nazi. He went on to ridicule the Family First federal senator Steve Fielding, describing him as ‘more stupid than an earthworm’.
As Melanie Phillips pointed out in the Australian, with Dawkins’s claim that religion is responsible for the ills of the world, he forgot that the worst horrors in human history – the French revolution, Nazism, communism, Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, to name a few – have all been atheistic ideologies. And although terrible things indeed have been done in the name of religion, the fact remains that Judeo Christian belief forms the foundation stone of Western civilisation and its great cause of human equality and freedom, she reminds us.
Dawkins says everything in the universe has a materialist explanation and must answer to the rules of empirical scientific evidence; to believe anything else is irrational. Books assessing his arguments using scientific reason have been recently published by a number of scientists and philosophers, including mathematicians David Berlinski and John Lennox, biochemist Alister McGrath, (under whom I sat in Cambridge), geneticist Francis Collins, and philosopher and the ex-atheist Anthony Flew. These authors have revealed Dawkins’s many mistakes, sloppy thinking, contradictions, and lack of logic.
He seems to believe that everyone who believes in God is stupid or evil, and that people who oppose him can be treated with scorn. Why is Dawkins so adamant in his rejection of religion? There are many religious scientists who can testify that science and religion are not at all incompatible. Dawkins is a calamity. Atheists must feel very let down by his visit and Christians must feel strengthened.
Reference: Dawkins preaches to the deluded against the divine, Melanie Phillips, The Australian, March 16 2010.
Rev the Hon. Dr Gordon Moyes AC MLC