[johnny7]

He was great in 'Hogan's Hero's'...

[Ruy Dias de Bivar]

***some gravitas and intellectual clout***

And like the scarecrow all he needed was a diploma!

[Wings-n-Wind]

Well there's faith....
Which might quite strong...
...Whether based on facts or feelings or foolishness...

And then.....

There's the OBJECT or ENTITY or PHILOSOPHY that is at the center of one's faith...
Either or all of which remain open to scrutiny, examination, critical thinking, and the bringing of independent conclusions that may may or may NOT align with the holder/proclaimer of the faith....

Dawkins is all talk... and angry/militant rhetoric...
He is an atheistic jihadi... all emotion and shrill but faulty arguments...

His buddy Anthony Flew has renounceed militant atheism in favor intellectual honesty -- the pathways of the EVIDENCE... that a Creative Consciousness -- a Designer -- had to be involved... in the complexity of giving life to the elements...

Flew had not made a commitment to believe in (a) God... but he has abandoned Darwinism -- and the mechanics of abiogenesis as satisfactory explanations...

He followed the EVIDENCE -- and was honest enough to say so....

Dawkins.... as a quintessential (Oxford) know-it-all... Methinks is not at all teachable...

[fish hawk]

Here's your hero.

[LiteKeeper]

It is the (surprise) publishing success of the year

And is being slamed, even by left-wing liberal atheists.

It is a ridiculously bad book...illogical, and full of strawmen.

[Felis_irritable]

The Earth has been around about 4 billion years. In those 4 billion years we've evolved to become human, developed self awareness, rational thought that considers downrange consequences, language, and good grief, the iPod.

In that time we've seen people who purport to be prophets of a deity. Many may have been crazy, but some were almost certainly not. Even from a range of 2,000 or more years, and based on limited, carefully culled data, their ideas are at the very least unversal truths. Which truths may have been revealed by a deity.

*This* universe has been around about 14 billion years. There may have been or be others, we don't (yet) know. If humans can come to be what we are in 4 billion years, what might be out there from 14 billion or more?

So when a Dawkins or a Sagan tells me there is no God, I just think "What an arrogant, know-it-all jerk." Life is more complex than we'll ever know, maybe even after we die. It is the height of conceit to be a militant atheist.

[Anti-Bubba182]

The interesting part for me was the part that touched on man's need for belief.

"..Isn’t that the point, I suggest. That with one set of values removed, another will always fill its place? That if you remove religion, there is a gap which will always be filled — and usually by something worse than belief in a deity? Are we ever worse than when we feel ourselves to be unconstrained masters of our domain, answerable to nobody but ourselves?

‘I agree with you that I have not sufficiently explained that. This gap, this absence — it could be a psychological weakness of the human mind. I did have one chapter at the end, but I think I didn’t do it justice, from your point of view. If I were to, then I wouldn’t have any trouble filling it — it might be science, it might be human love. Relationships, something like that.’.."

I do not believe the rule of law or of logic or science would ever be enough to most deeply motivate human behavior or allow us to exist and deal with our own mortality.

[gb63]

I ignore most of Dawkins's writings, but I do recognize his contribution in regards to the concept of a 'meme':

"The term "meme" (IPA: /miːm/, not /mɛm/ or /mimi/, to rhyme with "theme"), coined in 1976 by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, refers to a unit of cultural information transferable from one mind to another.

Dawkins said, Examples of memes are tunes, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. A meme propagates itself as a unit of cultural evolution and diffusion — analogous in many ways to the behavior of the gene (the unit of genetic information). Often memes propagate as more-or-less integrated cooperative sets or groups, referred to as memeplexes or meme-complexes.

The idea of memes has proved a successful meme in its own right, achieving a degree of penetration into popular culture rare for a scientific theory.

Proponents of memes suggest that memes evolve via natural selection — in a way very similar to Charles Darwin's ideas concerning biological evolution — on the premise that variation, mutation, competition, and "inheritance" influence their replicative success. For example, while one idea may become extinct, other ideas will survive, spread and mutate — for better or for worse — through modification.

Meme-theorists contend that memes most beneficial to their hosts will not necessarily survive; rather, those memes which replicate the most effectively spread best; which allows for the possibility that successful memes might prove detrimental to their hosts."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme

Also, for additional info on Dawkins, see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Dawkins

[ViLaLuz]

"Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools ..."

[Old Professer]

All this is fine for as noble as a mere man can hope to be; but a mockery of what others dreams are made must be a perverse comment on what role society plays in the vast scheme of the universe.

[Popman]

Richard Dawkins has a "god complex"

Ironic isn't it?

[M Kehoe]

A book against belief written with the fervour of one who believes utterly in non-belief.

Sounds like a religion to me. Kinda like Islam.

Has Dawkins ever mentioned or discussed his soul? Or does he say he doesn't have a soul?

Methinks the "Spaghetti Man," in the sky is amused at Dawkins twaddle. Then again, maybe not.

5.56mm

[RunningWolf]

Here is more from a source that is not on the deny/link only list.

A man who believes in Darwin as fervently as he hates God

The God Delusion is, like all the best books, riven with beguiling contradictions, full of interesting holes into which one can clamber and find oneself instantly transported to an alternative universe.

It is Dawkins's broadside against God and those who are stupid enough to believe in him, or her, or it. A book against belief written with the fervour of one who believes utterly in non-belief.

A book which insists that science must be a humble undertaking but which — driven by the logic of his argument — contains Dawkins's own abbrievated version of the Ten Commandments (for which thanks, mate).

A book that, for a disinterested non-believer, shows a simple and touching faith in the scientific creed of Darwinism — which theory, only 147 years after its inception, is already looking rather flawed and careworn.

And finally, as a neat little irony, a book that will trouser its author an enormous sackload of dosh, not because it is beautifully written and at times exquisitely argued, but because it is about that thing which the author believes must be banished — God.

Which brings me to the difficult stuff — and Darwinism. It is a creed to which Dawkins cleaves with the fervour of the fundamentalist, the true believer. And it is the real chink in his armour.

For example, because Darwin showed us that life forms progress from the simple to the complex over hundreds of thousands of years of gradual modification, it therefore follows (according to Dawkins) that there cannot have been a divine being present before the amoebae swam in those soupy oceans at Earth's toddler stage — because he would have had to be more complex than those organisms which followed him. And that doesn't fit with the theory.

But what if the theory, in its entirety, doesn't hold — as Dawkins concedes might be possible? Even now, a century and a half after Darwin wrote The Origin of Species, the notion of gradual, cumulative change in every case is being challenged (most recently by the evo-devo school, which believes that sudden change can occur within species within a single generation). Like all scientific theories, Darwinism will be amended — perhaps beyond recognition. Perhaps it will be discarded entirely. Either way, disavowing a divine being because it doesn't quite fit in with another here-today-gone-tomorrow theory seems a tad peremptory.

The question Dawkins can never satisfactorily answer is: what if Darwin was wrong? And yet, as a scientist, he must be aware that the likelihood is that Darwin was wrong here or there. In which case, where does that leave his philosophical argument?

[hosepipe]

Dawkins faith that faith is silly is a good syllabus of/for Faith....

[GSlob]

Well, the public understanding of science is infinitesimal, and that's how it should be. The epoch when it was possible for a single person to have encyclopaedic knowledge has ended centuries ago. Now it takes a good part of a lifetime to master even a small parcel, and the number and variety of these parcels is such that en masse the public is ignorant, and will remain so. Thus, his Simonyi chair in "public understanding of science" needs to be abolished.