Several of the traits that Dawkins displays in his campaign against religion are on show here. There is his equation of superiority with cleverness: the visiting aliens are more advanced creatures than humans because they are smarter and know more than humans do. The theory of evolution by natural selection is treated not as a fallible theory—the best account we have so far of how life emerged and developed—but as an unalterable truth, which has been revealed to a single individual of transcendent genius. There cannot be much doubt that Dawkins sees himself as a Darwin-like figure, propagating the revelation that came to the Victorian naturalist.
Among these traits, it is Dawkins’s identification with Darwin that is most incongruous. No two minds could be less alike than those of the great nineteenth-century scientist and the latter-day evangelist for atheism. Hesitant, doubtful, and often painfully perplexed, Darwin understood science as an empirical investigation in which truth is never self-evident and theories are always provisional. If science, for Darwin, was a method of inquiry that enabled him to edge tentatively and humbly toward the truth, for Dawkins, science is an unquestioned view of the world. The Victorians are often mocked for their supposed certainties, when in fact many of them (Darwin not least) were beset by anxieties and uncertainties. Dawkins, by contrast, seems never to doubt for a moment the capacity of the human mind—his own, at any rate—to resolve questions that previous generations have found insoluble.
An atheist lives in a universe where he could, in principle, discover everything that is true. A theist doubts that.
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Does anyone here know more about John Gray? He seems like a professional skeptic but I’d like to know more.
as to this quote from the article:
Which is an interesting comment for the author to make since Dawkins, as a materialistic atheist, denies the reality of his own mind.,,, It is a consequence of materialism that Charles Darwin himself expressed a ‘horrid doubt’ about. And rightly so, since the denial of our own conscious mind, the one thing we can be most sure of existing, and trying to explain the origination and existence of the ‘illusion’ of our mind in materialistic terms, as Plantinga has rigorously shown, leads to the failure of the trustworthness of cognitive faculties. Ironically, even Dawkins himself agrees with this conclusion:
Thus it is ironic that Dawkins should place so much confidence in the convictions of his illusory mind since he himself admits that he cannot trust his senses. But consistency in logic has never been a strong suit for militant atheists. Which is not surprising since logic itself cannot be grounded in the materialistic worlview.
Verse and Music: