In Dawkins’s view, there is a battle taking place in Britain between the forces of reason and religious fundamentalism and it is far from won. He is one of its most famous and prolific combatants – but the question might be whether he is among its most effective. The The God Delusion’s stated aim was to “convert” readers to atheism – but he admits that as a proselytising tool it has broadly failed….
Like most rationalists, Dawkins tends to invoke people’s innate intelligence, and attribute their flawed ways of thinking to ignorance rather than stupidity. “But I don’t have any evidence,” he concedes. “I could be wrong. It’s a kind of ideal. It’s a sort of bending over backwards.” People might just be stupid, I suggest. “They might be, yes,” he cautiously agrees. “But at least my saying that ignorance is no crime is my defence against the charge of arrogance. Because if you tell people they’re stupid, that certainly isn’t the way to win friends and influence people.”
Dawkins once described the British Airways employee dismissed for wearing a gold cross to work as having “the stupidest face”. Did he regret saying it?
A slightly naughty smile flickers over his face.
“Well … well … yes, I do really. Yes. That was an unguarded moment. Although I think I said stupid-looking. Did you see the photograph of her? I think if you look up the story, and they’ve got the photograph … ” He checks himself, and stops. “But this is unkind.”
The reality is that most people, including Richard Dawkins, are idiots. They cannot be educated out of their idiocy and as a result they are doomed to repeat the mistakes of their historical antecedents over and over again. And everyone is observably irrational a significant portion of the time, so attempting to build a society on science and reason is not only a tried, tested, and failed concept, it is an inherently idiotic and irrational idea from the start. It’s not actually science that is losing to religion anyhow, it is merely the radical secularists who have falsely claimed that science is intrinsically on their side who find themselves in a bewildered retreat.
The fact that most people are idiots, however, does not excuse one who makes a habit of going out of his way, indeed, has downright made it a career, to baselessly assert that the great majority of the human race are idiots or ignoramuses solely because they do not share his disbelief in God. If Dawkins was not, like so many atheists, socially autistic, he would know that one must always convert the heart before one can begin to convert the mind. This can be done through love, it can be done through example, and it can be done through fear, but it cannot be done through a withering and completely unwarranted contempt.
People believe or don’t believe in the existence of God for a wide variety of reasons, but anyone who has read much of Richard Dawkins’s work will recognize that Dawkins doesn’t believe there is almost certainly no God due to either science or reason. Science has very little to say on that score, while I and many othere have pointed out the numerous flaws in Dawkins’s reason. And yet, he still clings stubbornly to his atheism. The inescapable conclusion is that Richard Dawkins doesn’t believe in God because of his own individual shortcomings, many of which fall in the area of his character.
