The typical atheist is a pseudo intellectual. The type of person who reads a couple of books on quantum physics and then lectures me abut the subject, even though I am a computer modeller who regularly reads scientific papers about quantum mechanical software models of molecules. Or who reads the Holy Blood and the Holy Grail and fancies himself an expert on early church history.
Dawkins is a cut above. He does actually hold a professorial chair at a leading university.
No doubt he’s an ornament to it. Nevertheless, such laurels are not transferrable. Dawkins could hold every honour that his chosen field–biology–has to offer, but he’d still have no more standing in a philosophical or theological arena than many posters on this forum, and a good deal less than some. In those latter fields, the man is
precisely like the dabblers that you give as counterexamples. It’s entirely possible to be an honourable intellectual in one field, but to be no better than a pseudointellectual in another–happens all the time.
Dawkins is absolutely right that creationists are, in philosophical terms, an irrelevance, but in political terms either a threat or a nuisance. The problem is that he has got the idea into his head that biblical literalism is real or normative Christianity, and though he knows that the Pope believes in evolution, he thinks it is some sort of sophisticated game to reconcile scinece with incompatible religious beliefs.
I don’t hold with creationism, but neither do I care to dismiss its partisans so cavalierly. As Stephen Carter once pointed out, many creationists are impeccably scientific and far from irrelevant in their method: they simply differ with the likes of Dawkins on what counts as authoritative evidence. And contra the prevailing wisdom, it was Darwin’s successors who first decided that evolutionism and faith were incompatible at the very root, and it’s the likes of Dawkins today who posit an essentially closed choice between materialism and a semiliterate Biblical literalism. Given that choice, I’ll take my stand with the yokels any day. In fact, I’ll offer my own unfairly closed choice: which, in the long run, would be the greater “political threat or nuisance”–a nation run by the average creationist or one run by Richard Dawkins? I’ll not press you for an response, but suggest that the answer’s not immediately obvious by any means.
Dawkins is genuinely interested in getting to the truth. There is no reason to be scared. However poor and uneducated people, who don’t have much chance of seeing their children attend Oxford University, would do well to be wary of his values. They are not consciously intended to exclude them - I think Dawkins himself fancies himself as a bit of a leftie - but inevitably class interests win out.
I won’t presume to say what Dawkins’s motivations are, but if he’s “genuinely interested in getting to the truth” in matters religious, you could have fooled me: for such a dedicated seeker, his incuriosity and easy conclusions about religious people and their motivations is striking (cf. his conclusions on the Pope above). Regardless, sincerity is no guarantee of rigorous thinking, or of benign conclusions.
