Richard Dawkins, Entertainer

Richard Dawkins ought to be on the stage as a solo comedy act. Seriously, I am so grateful to him for his entertainment value. Take a recent two-page interview in The Times, for example (Saturday January 30 2016). It was headlined with what was no doubt deemed to be his most provocative statement ('It's time feeble feminists started to condemn the misogyny in Islam') but contained some pure Dawkins gems.The best of these, in my opinion, was the summation of his brief disussion on how everything, including evolution, is a 'continuum': "If you go back, take your great great great grandfather and add a couple of hundred greats you've got a fish." Did his two interviewers keep a straight face? I laughed out loud as I was reading this in a public place. Earlier in the piece, the dear Professor trashed Adam and Eve as one of the 'idiotic non-facts' allegedly taught to children in faith schools. Well, the story of Adam and Eve makes complete sense in terms of understanding the fissures of the human predicament, whereas a seemless line to a fish ancestry really, you know, does not. What makes the story of the Fish more probable that the story of the Fall? It does have the advantage of not requiring us to grapple with the awkward question of why we human beings are beautiful and complex yet so false and vile, I suppose. Another Dawkins gem is his lament for the decline of Christianity and Christian education in Britain - very proper, well done - almost in the same breath as his fierce denunciation of Christian education as something 'wicked'. His dogmatic insistence on the completeness of science is also comic. Why does no one call him up on this when he spends so much energy denouncing dogmatism elsewhere? Why does no one also point out that, by the way, he's wrong? Science cannot explain everything. Even where it does a good job at addressing 'how' it cannot explain 'why'. This Dawkins is blind to: "It's staggering that we can understand why life exists, why we have plants and animals, carnivores and herbivores", he says. It would be staggering indeed if it were true, but it isn't. Dawkins fudges this issue so he can express his sense of wonder at the marvel of Creation without having to refer to a Creator, let alone bow to Him. Moreover he complains that children - those alleged victims of faith schools - are denied this wonder by not being taught the absoluteness of evolution. Leaving aside that Dawkins's view of what gets taught in schools seems more supposition than reality, Christianity (and Judaism) are precisely the go-to educations to foster wonder at the world, and therefore poetry, music etc, which he himself ackowledges as influences for good in his life. Yet another Dawkins gem is his assumption that children should learn things dispassionately, scientifically, multi-laterally, and then make up their own minds about what they want to believe. On the one hand, that is simply not how children learn. Their minds feed on values. They will have values of one sort or another, they must have them, they ascribe value to everything that goes on around them, whether they're consciously aware of it or not at the time. That is the rationale for teaching them those values we think are good, and proven by long usage to be good (like Christian ones). Later on, of course they can choose for themselves, and indeed they will - as Dawkins himself did. To think they are not taught how to think, while they are being encouraged as to what to think, is nonsense. After all, did religious education blight Dawkins's mind? He is still praising it , even though he wants to deprive others of the same advantage. On the other hand, is the dear Professor himself dispassionate and scientific? Not a bit of it! Especiallly not when engaged in his war against religion. Altogether, I'd say that Dawkins's sloppiness in language and intent makes him the most unscientific of prominent scientists. But he is funny.