No Thanks

Bigoted Scientists We Can Do Without

Anything that gets one chuckling over the cornflakes in the morning is a welcome tonic.  On Saturday morning last we moved beyond chuckling to belly laughter.  Richard Dawkins, has put forth a call to the New Zealand government to allow elite scientists in the Anglo world to migrate to New Zealand.  The recent election of Trump has been a step too far.

He wrote in Scientific American:

Dear New Zealand,

The two largest nations in the English-speaking world have just suffered catastrophes at the hands of voters—in both cases the uneducated, anti-intellectual portion of voters. Science in both countries will be hit extremely hard: In the one case, by the xenophobically inspired severing of painstakingly built-up relationships with European partners; in the other case by the election of an unqualified, narcissistic, misogynistic sick joke as president. In neither case is the disaster going to be short-lived: in America because of the nonretirement rule of the Supreme Court; in Britain because Brexit is irreversible.

There are top scientists in America and Britain—talented, creative people, desperate to escape the redneck bigotry of their home countries. Dear New Zealand, you are a deeply civilized small nation, with a low population in a pair of beautiful, spacious islands. You care about climate change, the future of the planet and other scientifically important issues. Why not write to all the Nobel Prize winners in Britain and America, write to the Fields medalists, Kyoto and Crafoord Prize and International Cosmos Prize winners, the Fellows of the Royal Society, the elite scientists in the National Academy of Sciences, the Fellows of the British Academy and similar bodies in America. Offer them citizenship. The contribution that creative intellectuals can make to the prosperity and cultural life of a nation is out of all proportion to their numbers. You could make New Zealand the Athens of the modern world.

Yes, dear New Zealand, I know it’s an unrealistic, surreal pipe dream. But on the day after U.S. election day, in the year of Brexit, the distinction between the surreal and the awfulness of the real seems to merge in a bad trip from which a pipe dream is the only refuge.

Yours,
Richard Dawkins, founder and board chairman, Richard Dawkins Foundation

Mmmm.  Catastrophes at the hands of voters, eh?  One gets the distinct impression that Richard Dawkins is a secret Platonist, believing that society should be governed by the intelligent and enlightened philosopher-kings--that is, folk like himself.   Where to begin?

Selling Out Our Souls

Confused Mess of Pottage

The modern scientific academy appears to be populated by the self-deluded.  On the one hand, particularly when it comes to the human species, there are a series of propositions about human beings which represent professional hypotheses and claims.  Then, on the other hand, there are truths which the scientists actually believe.  All too often the two never meet.

Take, for example, that doyen of evolutionism, Richard Dawkins.  Professor Dawkins "discovered" a previously unknown human gene--which, he titled the Selfish Gene.  It was such a neat idea, it took the world by a hurricane.

When it was first published, Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene took the intellectual world by storm.  Conversion experiences among young men were widely reported.  They still are.  The idea that we are all "lumbering robots" designed by natural selection to advance the interests of our genes has become one of those things widely believed because widely believed.  [David Berlinski, The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions (New York: Basic Books, 2009),  p.176.]

OK.  So what's the big deal?  Who could be opposed to such a great idea?  Well, it seems that everyone who espouses the idea is also opposed to it.

Bang, Bang. You're Dead.

False Allegiances and Irrelevance

We have often observed that the materialistic atheists amongst us are often the most strident moralisers in the market place.  They are always telling us what they deem to be right and wrong, moral and immoral, evil and good.  Islam, insists Richard Dawkins, is a perverse, wicked thing.  Christianity is so morally bankrupt that any parent who attempts to teach its basic doctrines to her or her child, should suffer their children to be removed from their care.  Morally bankrupt?

Christopher Hitchens, whilst alive, thundered like a Titan against totalitarianism, communism, and any authoritarian standard within his line of sight. He thought abortion was OK, but grabbing someone off the street and torturing them was very bad form.  All of which was and is entertaining but hardly relevant to materialism or atheism, let alone their conjoint.

There is an instructive video entitled Collision in which Christopher Hitchens debates Douglas Wilson.

Mass Murder and the Totalitarian Embrace

Why Atheism Has Produced Mass Murder

The celebs amongst the secular atheist crowd are known for drawing long bows between the monsters of the twentieth century (Mao Tse Tung, Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot, and the Nazis) and religion.  The intent is to portray as many as possible of the monsters as having religious belief of one kind or another.  After all, the object is to prosecute a Donald Trumpian type of argument whereby religion is evil, evil, evil and does all kinds of evil things.

The bow gets pretty long, but you have to admire a trier.  Did not Stalin train in a Russian Orthodox seminary?  Did not Hitler reflect in certain ways his Catholic upbringing?  Sure, it's hard to find a religious connection in the case of Mao Tse Tung.  But Pol Pot--well, Cambodia was a French colony, so we should assume the Jesuits had some influence over PP.

But one thing we can be definitive about, we are told, is that the atheism they all shared in common to one degree or another was in no way connected with their mass murders of multitudes of human beings.  As David Berlinski writes:

New Atheism's Pre-occupations

Weird

New Age atheists like to champion the Enlightenment.  They want to see it dominant.  Away with all mysticism and superstition and priestcraft.  Let the benefice of pure reason be established on the highest.

Why the hostility towards religion?  Well, there is the old chestnut that it represents superstition on steroids.  After all, you can't put God in a test-tube.  And what you can't put in a test-tube just ain't so.
But there is something else even more weird.  With a kind of Freudian overlay, New Age atheists connect religion with sexual repression.  David Berlinski points out that  Christopher Hitchens has made this extraordinary assertion:

. . . Christopher Hitchens claims that (religion) is dangerous because it is "the cause of dangerous sexual repression."  Short of gender insensitivity, what could be more dangerous than dangerous sexual repression?  [David Berlinski, The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions (New York: Basic Books, 2009), p 18.]

We suppose that Hitchens is making an oblique reference to the fact that Christians believe sex must be exclusively restricted to consenting adults bound in a holy oath of mutually exclusive fidelity.  Yup. That's dangerous sexual repression.  Presumably Hitchens wants us to join him in thinking that sexual libertinism is safe, upbuilding, and mutually supportive, particularly for the children being conceived and, if allowed to live, brought up in its serendipitous embrace.  Not dangerous at all.

In this high faluting sentiment, Hitchens is joined by fellow idealogue, Richard Dawkins.

Among the commandments that Richard Dawkins proposes as replacement for the original ten, the first encourages men and women "to enjoy [their] own sex lives so long as it damages nobody else."  [Ibid.]

Well, silly old Richie Rich.  Of course it is damaging--this libertine sexuality--if it represses people into a binary gender prison of having to be either male or female.  Get with the programme.  Shed that Oxford priggery.

Yup, Christianity and its commandments are positively dangerous for the human race.  You know the chorus: more evil has been done in the name of religion than any other name.  We atheists are the good guys.  We are of the Enlightenment Party--our creed is simple.  Men and women (oops, sorry) ought to be allowed to regulate their own conduct, guided solely by reason and experience.  What a glorious society that would be.

Glorious, it would seem, only if you like seeing blood flow.

Children of the Enlightenment do not, of course, dwell overly on the dreadful acts undertaken in its name when the Enlightenment first became a living historical force in France:

all perished, all--
Friends, enemies, of all parties, ages, ranks,
Head after head, and never heads enough
For those that bade them fall.

[Berlinski, ibid.]

The Messiah of our Age

Richard Dawkins as Apostle and Prophet

by Ken Ham

Can the idea of a Creator God be easily dismissed in just five steps? Well, atheist and anti-theist Richard Dawkins certainly thinks so!

Is Atheism a Religion?

He recently appeared on a Norwegian-Swedish television show called Skavlan where he quickly dismissed the idea of God by ticking off on his fingers five arguments for God.

Dawkins starts by equating God with fairies, and then says that “the onus is not upon an atheist to say why there is not something, the onus is on a theist to say why there is.” Well, Dr. Richard Dawkins, the onus will actually be on each person on judgment day when he stands before God. And no excuses will be enough when we stand before Him. In the end, every person will bow before Christ and acknowledge Him as Lord (Philippians 2:10–11). You can either do so voluntarily now or by compulsion later.

Dawkins then says that “there simply are no reasons for the existence of a God.” But, of course, this doesn’t mean there actually aren’t any reasons for God’s existence. It simply shows his anti-God bias. He then mentions a few of the common arguments used to demonstrate that there is a God.

Professing Wisdom, Manifesting Childishness

The Absurdity of Materialistic Atheism

David Berlinski writes:

Ever since the great scientific revolution was set in motion by Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, and Isaac Newton, it has been a commonplace of commentary that the more that science teaches us about the natural world, the less important a role human beings play in the grand scheme of things.  "Astronomical observations continue to demonstrate," Victor Stenger affirms, "that the earth is no more significant than a single grain of sand on a vast beach."  What astronomical observations may, in fact, have demonstrated is that the earth is no more numerous than a single grain of sand on a vast beach. Significance is, of course, otherwise.   Nonetheless, the inference is plain: What holds for the earth holds as well for human beings.  They hardly count, and scientists like Stenger are not disposed to count them at all.  It is, as science writer Tom Bethell notes, "an article of our secular faith that thee is nothing exceptional about human life." . . . .

Neither scientific credibility nor sound good sense is at issue in any of these declarations.  They are absurd; they are understood to  be absurd; and what is more, assent is demanded just because they are absurd.  "We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs,"  the geneticists Richard Lewontin remarked equably in The New York Review of Books, "in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories." [Author's emphasis. David Berlinski, The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions (New York: Basic Books, 2009), p. 8f.]

It is truly baffling how those secularists who, by profession scientists, can proceed in such a confused, irrational, illogical, and absurd manner.

What Is a Dawkins?

An Appearance of Atheism

Douglas Wilson
Blog&Mablog

I saw on Facebook that Richard Dawkins had summarily dispatched the God of the Bible. Not only so, but he did it in under three minutes. I found out about this feat of legerdemain because Ken Ham’s answer to this elegant business showed up in my feed, and so then I went and checked it all out. Now I must admit that watching this kind of thing does make me want to have a go at it myself, but nothing here should be interpreted as finding fault with Ham’s response. It was a good sturdy response to Dawkins, albeit somewhat solemn.



So I rise to contest the first thirty seconds or so of Dawkins’ homily.

First, Dawkins announced that the burden of proof is not on the atheist, but rather on the theist. Actually, the burden of demonstration lies with whoever makes a dogmatic claim — and this is not really dependent upon whether the claim is positive or negative. If I state dogmatically that there is gold in Alaska, I may, without being insulted, be asked for my reasons. If a man goes in the other direction, and insists that there is no gold in Alaska, the same thing is going to happen to him. There will be a Q & A.

And in such a time, an interlocutor might go so far as to mention to our no-gold-in-Alaska dogmatist that proofs of universal negative claims are a bit harder to come by. A positive claim might be vindicated by the first venture of panning in the first brook you came to. But to vindicate a negative claim, one would have to dig up all of Alaska, all the way down.

This is why shrewd nonbelievers, among whom we do not count Richard Dawkins, usually retreat to a form of agnosticism.

No Other Good At All

Fearsome Clown 

David Berlinski writes about the arrogance of the modern secular scientist--at least those who hold to its religious form of atheistic scientism.

Curiously enough, for all that science may be a very good thing, members of the scientific community are often dismayed to discover that, like policemen, they are not better loved.  Indeed, they are widely considered self-righteous, vain, politically immature and arrogant.  This last is considered a special injustice.

"Contrary to what many anti-intellectuals maintain, " the biologist Massimo Pigliucci has written, science is "a much more humble enterprise than any religion or other ideology."  Yet despite the outstanding humility of the scientific community, anti-intellectuals persist in their sullen suspicions. Scientists are hardly helped when one of their own champions immerses himself in the emollient of his own enthusiasm.

Moral Bankruptcy of Utilitarian Calculus

Thank you, Professor Dawkins!

Christian Medical Fellowship
August 26, 2014  
Written by Rick Thomas

Who said nothing ever happens in August! Just as we were looking forward to a quiet bank holiday weekend, up pops Prof Dawkins with a disturbing tweet. Responding to another Twitter posting by a woman admitting she would face a ‘“real ethical dilemma”’ if she became pregnant and found she was carrying a baby with Down’s syndrome, he suggested she should simply abort and try again, and that it would be ‘“immoral”’ to bring into the world a child with Down’s syndrome if you had the choice. He attempted to justify himself further here.

So, there we have it. Knowingly giving life to a child with Down’s syndrome is immoral, terminating its life is commendable. On what grounds would an intelligent person say such a thing, you might ask?
To prevent the child’s suffering – the compassion argument?

Truth is, people with Down’s syndrome don’t ‘suffer’ from their condition, they live with it. And in general the lives they live are more joyous than most.

So might it be the struggles faced by the parents that the professor has in mind?

Letter From Europe (About Complicit Silence)

European “Humanists”: Embarrassment or Silent Sympathy

Dawkins’ attack on disabled persons

Posted on September 5, 2014 

By J.C. von Krempach, J.D.

Turtle Bay and Beyond

Following the world-wide astonishment and outrage over British “humanist” Richard Dawkins’ rant that mothers giving birth to children who have been diagnosed with Down Syndrome are acting “immorally”, we are surprised to find that neither the British Humanist Association (BHA), nor the European Humanist Federation (EHF), nor the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) have found it necessary to clarify whether they agree or disagree with this statement.

Mr. Dawkins is not only a well-known evolution biologist, but also pontificates as a promoter of “humanism”, “reason”, and a “scientific world view”. It is for this reason that BHA gave him their ‘Services to Humanism’ award in 2012. In fact, it seems that Mr. Dawkins is getting the same award every other year, given that already 2009 one could read that BHA and IHEU had jointly awarded him a prize for his merits in promoting reason and science across the world.

That's Not What I Meant At All . . .

Vaunted Moral Principles

Poor old Richie Dawkins is getting lots of bad press these days.  Most unfair.  The recent furore is over his general advice to any woman pregnant with a Downs Syndrome child to abort--that is, kill--the child immediately.  How odious for anyone to criticise such a patron saint of evolutionism, our established religion.

The Telegraph summarises the "incident":

Richard Dawkins, the atheist writer, has claimed it is “immoral” to allow unborn babies with Down’s syndrome to live. The Oxford professor posted a message on Twitter saying would-be parents who learn their child has the condition have an ethical responsibility to “abort it and try again”. . . .

Now, of course, Professor Dawkins has always suffered from a grossly enlarged sanctimony gland.  One cannot criticise him for this affliction.  It's the way things roll and who can criticise Nature?

One mindless critical response to his "abort it and try again" gaff suggested that he was making killing a Downs Syndrome victim in-utero a moral equivalent to killing a Downs Syndrome adult.  Not at all, insisted the good professor.  Don't you know that infants when born start to have "feelings" and that makes all the difference. Anything that is "unfeeling" is not a human life; once a Downs Syndrome baby has feelings, then he she or it deserves the protection of the law proscribing infanticide.  Whew.  Glad we got to hear that.

Letter From the UK (About Dawkins's Dogmatism)

Richard Dawkins, what on earth happened to you?

Dawkins in 2014 is a man so convinced that he possesses God-like powers of omniscience that he can’t understand why everyone is angry at him for pointing out the obvious

Eleanor Robertson
The Guardian
30 July 2014

Another day, another tweet from Richard Dawkins proving that if non-conscious material is given enough time, it is capable of evolving into an obstreperous crackpot who should have retired from public speech when he had the chance to bow out before embarrassing himself.

“Date rape is bad. Stranger rape at knifepoint is worse,” huffs Dawkins. Seeming to have anticipated, although not understood, the feminist reaction this kind of sentiment generally evokes, he finishes the tweet: “If you think that’s an endorsement of date rape, go away and learn how to think.”

. . . . Dawkins has been arrogant for years, a man so convinced of his intellectual superiority that he believes the one domain in which he happens to be an expert, science, is the only legitimate way of acquiring or assessing knowledge. All of his outbursts in recent years follow from this belief: he understands the scientific method, a process intended to mitigate the interference of human subjectivity in data collection, as a universally applicable way of understanding not just the physical world but literally everything else as well.

Atheistic Conditioning

Richard Dawkins: Give me the Child and I’ll Give you the Man

Anthony Horvath

Religious leaders are well aware of the vulnerability of the child brain, and the importance of getting the indoctrination in early.  The Jesuit boast, ‘Give me the child for his first seven years, and I’ll give you the man,’ is no less accurate (or sinister) for being hackneyed.

The above quote comes from Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion in the chapter titled “The Roots of Religion.”  I was thinking about that chapter when I heard that Mr. Dawkins was putting out a children’s book.   Has Dawkins decided he needs to get into the ‘indoctrination’ business?

Of course, the word ‘indoctrination’ has taken on a negative air, and is only applied when one disapproves of what is being transmitted—even if one is about the same business.  Dawkins’ real problem is not with the Jesuit’s ‘sinister’ approach.  He admits it is ‘no less accurate.’  His real beef must be with the content the Jesuits presented.

Good!  Then we are all agreed!  ‘Indoctrination’ isn’t ‘sinister.’  Transmitting the beliefs, values, and perceptions of one generation to the next is an important and unavoidable necessity that must take certain definite forms because of the nature of who we are transmitting them too:  children.

Now, we cannot really believe that atheists and secular humanists have every really thought that ‘indoctrination’ was the exclusive domain of the religionists.

Letter From America (About a Dishonest Englishman)

A Response to Richard Dawkins

He and his supporters have a right to their atheism, but not to intellectual dishonesty about it.

By  Dennis Prager 

October 1, 2013 12:00 AM

National Review Online

This past Friday, CNN conducted an interview with Richard Dawkins, the British biologist most widely known for his polemics against religion and on behalf of atheism.  Asked “whether an absence of religion would leave us without a moral compass,” Dawkins responded: “The very idea that we get a moral compass from religion is horrible.”

This is the crux of the issue for Dawkins and other anti-religion activists — that not only do we not need religion or God for morality but that we would have a considerably more moral world without them.  This argument is so wrong — both rationally and empirically — that its appeal can be explained only by (a) a desire to believe it and (b) an ignorance of history.

First, the rational argument.

If there is no God, the labels “good” and “evil” are merely opinions.

Atheists and Your Children, Part I

No Rhetorical  Devices Here

It is no surprise to learn that militant atheists hate the Christian faith.  And hate is not too strong a word.  What else can be made of the assertions by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens that the act of parents teaching their own children about God and the Christ and the redemption of the world and the judgment to come is an act of child abuse?

Maybe, one wonders, this indictment should be regarded as rhetorical flourish or vivid hyperbole.  Dawkins, however, is firmly insistent that his words on this subject are neither hyperbolic nor a literary device in general.  He means them in a literal sense.  Here is Dawkins's gloss on his indictment of parents who teach their children the Christian faith:

Hollow Men

Blind Faith and Vicious Circles

Myopic new atheism reasons something like this:  science and Unbelief is reasonable because it is evidence based, which then becomes subject to human reason.  Religion has no evidence, and employs no reason.  Believing something for which there is no evidence is childish at best, madly delusional at worst. 

Poor old Sam Harris jumps into the trap showing that he has not considered the fatal weakness of his own position:

We have names for people who have many beliefs for which there is no rational justification.  When their beliefs are extremely common we call them "religious"; otherwise, they are likely to be called "mad", "psychotic", or "delusional".  [Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (New York: W.W.Norton & Company, 2004), p. 72.]

Hold on a minute there, Sam.  Just a mild challenge: without presupposing the authority of reason, and without employing it, please establish and warrant its authority and veracity.  You cannot?  No.  So your arguments are merrily swirling around in a vicious circle?  Now, let's just revisit the meaning of "mad", "psychotic" and "delusional" again, shall we.

Vapid Dogmatism

Spurious Claims of the Age of Reason

Materialism is not a fact of experience or a deduction of logic; it is a metaphysical prejudice, nothing more, and one that is arguably more irrational than almost any other.  In general, the unalterably convinced materialist is a kind of childishly complacent fundamentalist, so fervently, unreflectively, and rapturously committed to the materialist vision of reality that if he or she should encounter any problem--logical or experiential--that might call its premises into question, or even merely encounter a limit beyond which those premises lose their explanatory power, he or she is simply unable to recognize it.

Richard Dawkins is a perfect example: he does not hesitate, for instance, to claim that "natural selection is the ultimate explanation for our existence."  But this is a silly assertion and merely reveals that Dawkins does not understand the words he is using.

Sloppy, Vacuous Darwinists

Uneasy Atheists

The following article appeared in the New Statesman.  The primer reads:  "To hardline atheists, it is now unreasonable and “dramatically peculiar” to argue that religion is not altogether evil. How did such intolerance become acceptable to rational minds?"  How indeed?

Bryan Appelyard reflects upon the strange Islamic-like fundamentalism of the neo-atheists, whom he charges with having all the behaviours of a tyrannical sect.  [For our part, we love these militant neo-atheists.  They are perfect poster-boys for what happens when men deny God and try to mean it. They are thus "useful idiots", to employ Lenin's phrase, because they offer many teaching moments.

Militant Atheism and Nietzsche

Intellectual Gadflies

David Bentley Hart has an engaging piece on modern militant atheists (whom he dubs "fashionable enemies") describing them as "gadflies".

He laments the good old days when the enemies of the Christian faith in the West had intellectual muscle.  He is impatient with the mental laziness and sloppiness on display with folk like Hitchens and Harris and the like. 

My own impatience with (their) remarks, I should confess, would probably be far smaller if I did not suffer from a melancholy sense that, among Christianity's most fervent detractors, there has been a considerable decline in standards in recent years. . . . (A)t the end of Europe's Christian centuries, the church could still boast antagonists of real stature.  In the eighteenth century, David Hume was unrivaled in his power to sow doubt where certainty once had flourished.  And while the diatribes of Voltaire, Denis Diderot, and other Enlightenment philosophes were, on the whole, insubstantial, there were at least marked by a certain fierce elegance and occasional moral acuity.  Edward Gibbon, for all the temporal parochialism and frequent inaccuracy of his account of Christianity's rise, was nevertheless a scholar and writer of positively titanic gifts . . . (D. B. Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009], p.5f.)

In the nineteenth century we come to the greatest and the fiercest critic of Christianity--one with an intellectual rigour and emotional force that still leaves one breathless today.  Nietzsche's hatred of Christianity and Christians had about it an intellectual rigour and consistency and compelling force that is completely absent from effete gadflies such as Richard Dawkins.