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Richard Dawkins is an academic I very much admire. I’ve always been fascinated by evolutionary biology and although I was always more of a fan of the writing style and philosophy of the late, great Stephen Jay Gould, Dawkins has done some obviously great, if mildly arrogant, work. I’ve seen him speak a few times and he has the confidence that comes from being a super intelligent, if not entirely emotionally connected, genius.
But he’s someone who comes across very badly on Twitter and I wish he’d stop going on there. The least of his sins is his desire to RT his own praise. It’s a tempting thing to do for anyone who creates anything, but is insecure about what people think about them, but with someone as successful as Dawkins (who you presume people are following because they like his stuff) it dents him somewhat, making him look arrogant yet nearly endearingly vulnerable. Sure, mention to your followers that you have a book out and maybe you can be forgiven for not being able to resist RTing the occasional bit of fan mail, but he seemingly RTs it all, and most of the tweets are just about how brilliant he is and how he’s changed people’s lives. When challenged he asserts that everyone RTs their own praise. But they clearly don’t.
But every now and again he gets a honey bee in his bonnet and starts making odd pronouncements, usually about Islam and usually containing some contentious content, which he then tries to defend via logic and rationalism. Today he was going on about the clock boy from America who is now suing his school for $15million. He seems convinced (though the evidence for this is somewhat shady and I’ve seen good evidence to the contrary) that the boy had deliberately made a clock that looked like a bomb and that all this was his own fault. When people challenged why Dawkins was going on about this in this slightly suspect (and some would argue Islamaphobic) manner, laying into a teenage boy, saying that being a child didn’t make him immune from criticism and cited that 10 year old kids have carried out beheadings for ISIS. This, one has to say, is a strange link to make. He then seemed appalled that people were thought this example was somewhat loaded and said he might just as well have chosen the example of James Bulger’s killers. As if that wasn’t horrible and somewhat different from making a clock as well.
His inability to see that this was at best potentially confusing led Limmy to compare him to a robot (he chose Data from Star Trek, though I think that Dawkins has less humanity and empathy than that character) and then in turn I got into a discussion with one of Dawkins’ fans about the subject.
He parroted a lot of the assertions that Dawkins makes about Islam being responsible for terrorism saying you can’t argue that religion is the reason all this stuff is happening. But you can argue that and this is why Dawkins’ position on Islam jars with me, because it is one place where logic and rationality seem to break down. Does one blame Christianity for the work of the IRA and the KKK? Would moderate Christians be called on to distance themselves from pub bombings and lynchings, or would we all assume it was nothing to do with them? Are moderate atheists called upon to distance themselves from the way that the Nazis perverted Darwinism to justify what they were doing?
And on a basic level, even if all terrorists were Muslim (or even religious) then that wouldn’t make all Muslims terrorists. Plenty of terrorists have been anarchists or nihilists so clearly logically it is not religion alone that is to blame for terrorism (even if the fanatical elements of a religion can be used to drive people to commit terrible acts).
As with the bomb boy, Dawkins and some of his acolytes attitude to Islam isn’t scientific. It focuses in on certain bits of confirmative evidence and ignores the other stuff. Reza Aslan is brilliant on the argument that Islam is violent and oppressive, because by saying that you’re ignoring the majority of Muslim countries that aren’t.
I am no fan of religion and less so of religious fundamentalism, but Russell Brand once said a wise thing (I know) by pointing out that if there was no religion people would find other excuses for their terrible behaviour.
Anyway, this is too complex a subject to get into in a blog and I kind of wish I hadn’t started as I don’t have time to explore this in the detail that is required.
I suppose I am just saying how it’s interesting how Dawkins presents himself on social media. And how maybe it would be good for him if he stopped using it.
In a last ditch attempt to persuade the public to back my reasonable, yet audacious plan to raise £1million for self-playing snooker I recorded frame 68 of Me1 vs Me2 Snooker whilst my wife was out for the evening. And if listening to that doesn’t make you pledge £5000 then nothing can. It was tricky for Commentator 1 to do his usual allusions to current world events, but bless him, he gave it a go.
And hopefully tomorrow I will get the perfect 13th birthday present for Warming Up, as it enters its difficult teen years - one MILLION pounds. I still believe.
