Goodbye, Mr. Dawkins, part I

Richard Dawkins, the virulent Darwinist from the University of Oxford, UK, is on the warpath again. And as usual he is mustering all his intellectual powers in the merciless fight to eradicate superstition from the face of the earth.

This week I learned that the licence-funded Norwegian broadcasting company, the NRK, is just about to put on a series of programmes featuring this notorious atheist, as he confronts believers and their beliefs at every turn. And make no mistake: this biologist is on serious business. He's isn't very likely going to condone your particular faith either, even if it means faith in Christ and not some dubious spirit-figure inhabiting trees or shrubs. To Mr. Dawkins religious beliefs are equally irrational no matter how simplistic or sophisticated they may be perceived to be.

All is matter, and nothing but matter

Matter is all there is, Mr. Dawkins and his fellow crusaders (sorry, Mr. Dawkins) consistently claim. So therefore this anomaly, this cancerous growth, called faith must be exposed for what it is: the detrimental remains from a time when men's minds were on hold, and fanatics lorded it over them by tossing half-baked explanations and promises in their faces for people to consume blindly and hungrily. Religion, was, and is, Mr. Dawkins alleges, just a tool (and a figment of your imagination to boot) utilized by unscrupulous power-grabbers to ensure that you remain a fool, unable to see the light coming from the wonderful world of scientific thought. And it's much easier to rule a fool than a sceptic. See?

So armed with this heavy load of bias and prejudice, Mr. Dawkins is set to liberate us from the cords of religious deception. Which must mean that this professor really thinks that we're going to be, oh, so much better off without God? Well, that's partly the trouble with people like him. They have no alternative vision to offer, no life-sustaining hope, in place of that which they - with their ususal air of superiority - threaten to take away from us.

Spin-doctors from the land of Scientism

And what's more; these supposedly intellectually (vastly) superior thinkers are just about as much de facto spin-doctors as their imagined chief enemies, the clergy, are portrayed to be. By presenting believers as having flawed minds and producing nothing but sub-standard thinking, Richard Dawkins makes himself partly guilty of gross misrepresentation:

We're not all drooling, demented zealots playing a lengthy game of 'Follow the leader', Professor. We have minds of our own, and we proudly claim that a belief in a divine being is every bit as rational as you claim your (own religion of) Scientism is.

More on this to come in part two.