But we’ve been saying that for months. In fact, we think that reasonable atheists should clamour for him to retire in favour of someone who is up to it. A champ who can defend his title and doesn’t need media sycophants.
Chopra (who published a book with Hawking’s collaborator Mlodinow, plus lots of vids) Here.
But Dawkins is on a mission to prove that all spirituality is the field of fools and knaves. Now, in a new book that is essentially a primer for young atheists, Dawkins continues to ignore his critics, and the result is shameless propaganda disguised as helpful, even avuncular popular science. In many places it flirts with intellectual dishonesty.
The Magic of Reality is a sunny title for a young adult book that suggests its real agenda in the subtitle: “How We Know What’s Really True.” The giveaway is “really,” because it implies that there are ways of knowing the truth that might seem valid but aren’t. For the good of our children’s minds, these false ways must be extirpated. In the book’s didactic introduction the reader is informed that reality consists of “everything that exists,” which is unarguable. To discover what is real, we use our five senses, Dawkins writes, and when things get too big or far away (distant galaxies) or too small (bacteria), our senses are augmented with devices like telescopes and microscopes.
One anticipates that Dawkins will add a caveat that the five senses aren’t always reliable, as when our eyes tell us that the sun rises in the sky at morning and sets at twilight. But no such caveat is offered; the reader is already being guided incorrectly. Quantum mechanics and Einstein’s theory of relativity posed revolutionary challenges to what the five senses tell us, but Dawkins doesn’t mention them, even in passing. Perhaps this is forgivable in a book for young readers, but it falls short of the promise to tell us how we know what is really true. (Huffington Post, 10/10/11)
Well, in Dawkins’ world, we don’t know how it is really true. except for what Darwinism and similar court-ordered “sciences” tell us.
And this closes our religion coverage for the week.
Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose