The Creation vs Evolution Controversy

The Dawkins delusion Science writer displays small mind in ‘Potter’ put-down
Washington Times Daily, p. B1
November 7, 2008

Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist and “God Delusion” polemicist, recently offered a frightening glimpse of what might be called the reverse-fundamentalist worldview. Mr. Dawkins mused to a British television network that fairy tales and supernatural-themed books such as the “Harry Potter” series are “anti-scientific.”

“Whether that has a pernicious effect, I don’t know,” the 67year-old British writer said. “Looking back to my own childhood, the fact that so many of the stories I read allowed the possibility of frogs turning into princes, whether that has a sort of insidious effect on rationality, I’m not sure. Perhaps it’s something for research.”

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‘Darwin? That’s just the party line’
by Wayne Eyre
National Post (Canada), p. A17
October 31, 2008

We’re all familiar with Queen Gertrude’s dry observation in Act III of Hamlet that the Player Queen “doth protest too much.” Gertrude’s point, of course, is that the Player Queen’s over-insistence of her love for her husband makes her declarations highly suspect.

I often think of Gertrude’s line when I see how vehemently many A-list scientists and fellow-travelling literati lash out at anyone who does not embrace their insistence that no deity is behind either the creation of our universe or plant and animal origins on Earth.

For example, Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, says that anyone who doesn’t believe in evolution “is ignorant, stupid or insane.” Oxford professor Peter Atkins, another ardent atheist, recently denounced theology, poetry and philosophy and concluded that “scientists are at the summit of knowledge, beacons of rationality and intellectually honest.”

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Dawkins’s warning on fairy tales to children
by Martin Beckford and Urmee Khan
The Daily Telegraph (UK), p. 2
October 25, 2008

Professor Richard Dawkins, the prominent atheist, is to write a book aimed at children in which he will warn them against believing in fairy tales as well as God.

The evolutionary biologist is stepping down from his post at Oxford University and will instead research whether “anti-scientific” novels about spells and wizards such as the Harry Potter series have a “pernicious effect” on young minds.

Prof Dawkins, the author of best-selling The God Delusion who this week agreed to fund a series of atheist adverts on London buses, said his new book would also set out to demolish the “Judeo-Christian myth”.

“The book I write next year will be a children’s book on how to think about the world — science thinking contrasted with mythical thinking,” he told Channel 4.

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Missing from the news item below, is that the money raised is being funneled through the British Humanist Association!

cp

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Thank heaven for a British faith in bet-hedging
by Jemima Lewis
Sunday Telegraph (UK), p. 28
October 26, 2008

It must be lonely, sometimes, being an ardent believer in nothing. Where do atheists go to meet their fellow irreligionists? How does one feel a part of something that has no meeting house, no rituals and no shared faith except in the absence of anything to have faith in?

So thank something – a random series of atomic events leading to the creation of human intelligence, perhaps – for the internet. This is where like-minded folk of a nullifidian bent come together, as demonstrated by the extraordinary success of a campaign to raise money for Britain’s first atheist advertisements.

The idea was first mooted by Ariane Sherine, a 28-yearold television scriptwriter, on a website. Having had her atheist sensibilities offended by an advertisement on a London bus bearing a quotation from the Gospel of St Luke, Sherine decided the time had come for nonbelievers to fight back. She asked readers to donate towards the £23,000 cost of launching a bus advert with the slogan: “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”

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