Richard Dawkins, Theologian

Carson Holloway's criticism could apply to many, many arrogant scientists who believe that because they have explained one thing to their satisfaction they have explained everything by extension:

Here, again, Dawkins fails, dogmatically asserting as truth things that his science cannot confirm, things that science properly understood does not even claim to address. “Presumably,” he opines, “there is indeed no purpose in the ultimate fate of the universe.” On the basis of what evidence does Dawkins ground this momentous presumption? As a result of what scientific reasoning does he make this grandiose claim about the nature of all things? He has no such basis, and there is none available to him. It is true that pre-modern science sought to explain the purposefulness of the cosmos, while modern science has abandoned that project in favor of what is perhaps easier and more immediately useful: figuring out how nature works and how it can be manipulated. Nevertheless, it is clear that science’s turning away from questions of ultimate meaning is not equivalent to a denial of their importance, nor to a denial that they can be answered, let alone a claim to have answered them. Sober scientists — those who respect the limits of their method and avoid amateur philosophic extrapolations from it — understand this.

If it is not science that leads Dawkins to deny the purposefulness of the universe, then what is it? The answer to this question will be obvious to anyone familiar with his usual public pronouncements. Dawkins’s denial of the meaningfulness of the cosmos arises not from any evidence that science reveals to him, but instead from a simple dogmatic hostility to those who see purpose in the universe itself, or, put more simply, an animus against religion. Consider, for example, a recent interview in which he claims never to have met an intelligent religious believer who came to belief apart from childhood indoctrination, and that he cannot think of a single good thing that religion has contributed to the world.

These are not the opinions of a moderate and reasonable man, and his doctrinaire disdain for religion is equally on display in his new introduction. Those tempted to despair by his soulless and godless account of the universe, Dawkins advises, should seek meaning in the good things of ordinary life. “Our lives are ruled,” he notes, not by the meaning of the universe itself but by “all sorts of closer, warmer, human ambitions and perceptions.” Do “any of us really tie our life’s hopes to the ultimate fate of the cosmos,” he asks. His answer: “Of course we don’t; not if we are sane.” There you have Dawkins’s perspective in a nutshell: on the one hand, his account of things; on the other hand, madness. He is undeterred in this judgment by the fact that the views he regards as insane are held by countless millions of his fellow beings and have shaped the human story for millennia. It would be difficult to invent a more perfect caricature of the intellectually intolerant ideologue.

Dawkins' genes, of course, would have a greater chance of being passed on if he would learn to keep a civil tongue in his head. That he does not seems to poke holes through his theory.