Verdidebatt: Har Dawkins en blind tro?

Dagens innlegg som gjesteskribent på Verdidebatt har tittelen Er det Dawkins som har en blind tro?

Jeg tar her utgangspunkt i en nyutgitt bok av matematikeren og vitenskapsfilosofen John Lennox, også han Oxford-professor: Gunning for God: Why the new atheists are missing the target.

Dette knytter også tilbake til mitt tidligere innlegg på Verdidebatt om Dawkins – positiv og problematisk.

For øvrig så har The Independent idag en meget kritisk anmeldelse av Dawkins nye bok The Magic of Reality. Begynnelsen slår an tonen…:

Richard Dawkins has no sense of irony. He rails endlessly against fundamentalists yet he defends old-fashioned, Thomas Gradgrind-style materialism as zealously as the Mid-West Creationists defend the literal truth of Genesis. He accuses others of misrepresentation yet he seriously misrepresents religion. Also, which is irony writ large, he misrepresents science, in whose name he is assumed to speak. He condemns the Catholics for filling the heads of children with a particular view of life before they have had a chance to think for themselves – and now, in The Magic of Reality, written for readers as young as nine, he has done precisely that. As somebody said of Miss Jean Brodie, it’s time he was put a stop to.

Thus he tells us that «reality is everything that exists» – and «exists», he makes clear, means whatever we can see or stub our toes on, albeit with   the aid of telescopes and seismographs. Everything else – including things we might think exist, like jealousy and love – derive from that material base and are to a large extent illusory. This, he implies, is what emerges from science, and science is true.

Perhaps nine-year-olds are too young to be told that this is only one of many possible views …

Jeg henviser ellers til Dekodets utmerkede blogginnlegg om denne nye boka.

———–

English: My role as a guest writer this and next week at www.Verdidebatt.no continues, this time with a piece on whether it is Richard Dawkins who has a blind faith. I refer here to a new book by John Lennox on the new atheists (see above).