It’s no surprise when devout believers from different religions or sects bash one another on matters of faith or doctrine, but it’s definitely more instructive about the nature of belief systems when agnostics and atheists themselves bash one another on matters of their disbelief.
This is certainly the case with the conflict between two outspoken British academicians and thinkers—Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist and atheist who argues that humanity would be better off without religion or belief in God; and John Gray, a political philosopher and agnostic who nevertheless argues that religion is a way of knowing that yields truths inaccessible to science, and that with its built-in limitations in pursuing the ultimate truth, science couldn’t possibly be used to remake the world the way that religion can.
Gray again threw the gauntlet on Dawkins when, in a recent review of the latter’s 2013 autobiography,
An Appetite for Wonder: The Makings of a Scientist (Ecco, 320 pages), he labelled Dawkins’ brand of atheism as “its own kind of narrow religion.” In “The Closed Mind of Richard Dawkins,” which came out in the October 2, 2014 issue of
The New Republic, Gray further denigrates Dawkins with the assertion that “the figure who emerges from
An Appetite for Wonder is in many ways decidedly old-fashioned” and “a monument to unthinking certitude.”
RICHARD DAWKINS, JOHN GRAY
Gray, a retired professor of European Thought from the London School of Economics and Political Science and himself the author of several books on philosophy and religion, contends in his review of
An Appetite for Wonder: “Dawkins knows practically nothing of the philosophy of science, still less about theology or the history of religion. From his point of view, he has no need to know. He can deduce everything he wants to say from first principles. Religion is a type of supernatural belief, which is irrational, and we will all be better off without it: for all its paraphernalia of evolution and memes, this is the sum total of Dawkins’s argument for atheism. His attack on religion has a crudity that would make a militant Victorian unbeliever such as T.H. Huxley—described by his contemporaries as ‘Darwin’s bulldog’ because he was so fierce in his defense of evolution—blush scarlet with embarrassment.”
Gray makes this scathing denunciation of Dawkins, an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, and formerly the University of Oxford’s Professor for Public Understanding of Science, for the latter’s gene-centred view of evolution in his 1976 book
The Selfish Gene and subsequent contention in his 2006 book
The God Delusion that a supernatural creator almost certainly does not exist. Dawkins is also an outspoken critic of creationism and intelligent design, arguing in his 1986 book
The Blind Watchmaker that the complexity of living organisms is itself a powerful argument against the existence of a supernatural creator.
Read John Gray’s “The Closed Mind of Richard Dawkins” in The New Republic now!Read Anthony McCarthy’s “The Shallow Nihilism of John Gray,” a recent review of The Silence of Animals, in Spiked-Online.com now!COMPANION FEATURE:The opposing positions of Richard Dawkins and John Gray on the matter religious belief can be better understood through the following video presentations that can be viewed on YouTube:
Richard Dawkins on The God Delusion (The Root of All Evil?)John Gray on The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern MythsINTERESTING RELATED READINGS:“How to Think—and Talk—About Islam” By Fareed Zakaria,
Washington Post Writers Group“Richard Dawkins is Wrong: Religion is Not Inherently Violent"
A review of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion By Laura Miller
