Richard Dawkins branded 'secularist bigot' by veteran philosopher

[Incognito]

Richard Dawkins branded 'secularist bigot' by veteran philosopher

By Martin Beckford, Religious Affairs Correspondent

Last Updated: 9:01pm BST 02/08/2008

The prominent scientist Richard Dawkins has been denounced as a "secularist bigot" by a philosopher who was himself once renowned for being an atheist.

He is accused by Prof Antony Flew of being more interested in promoting his personal views than finding the truth, in the latest controversy over his best-selling book The God Delusion.

Prof Dawkins, professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, is also said to have "scandalously" selected particular quotes from Einstein to back up his claims that God does not exist and that people who believe in a divine creator despite an abundance of contradictory evidence are delusional.

However, the author has been left unshaken by this latest attack on his work, telling The Daily Telegraph that Prof Flew, now 85, has lost the ability to read a book, let alone write one.

Prof Flew, a former Reading University philosophy professor, was known as "the world's most notorious atheist" before he became convinced of the existence of a "divine intelligence" in 2004.

In an article for the Christian website Bethinking.org, he writes: "The fault of Dawkins as an academic was his scandalous and apparently deliberate refusal to present the doctrine which he appears to think he has refuted in its strongest form."

He says there are five references to Einstein in the index to The God Delusion, but no mention of his belief that the complexity of physics led him to conclude that there must be a divine intelligence behind it.

"An academic attacking some ideological position which he believes to be mistaken must of course attack that position in its strongest form. This Dawkins does not do in the case of Einstein and his failure is the crucial index of his insincerity of academic purpose and therefore warrants me in charging him with having become, what he has probably believed to be an impossibility, a secularist bigot."

He went on: "The whole enterprise of The God Delusion was not, as it at least pretended to be, an attempt to discover and spread knowledge of the existence or non-existence of God but rather an attempt - an extremely successful one - to spread the author's own convictions in this area."

Prof Dawkins replied: "Antony Flew, having lost the ability to write a book, was persuaded by a Christian ghost writer, Roy Varghese, to let him write it instead. It is one thing for a footballer or a supermodel to use a ghost writer, but there is something absurd about a philosopher using a ghost writer.

"Flew has now apparently lost the ability to read a book, too, for his 'review' of The God Delusion turns out to be a review of its index and nothing but its index. He only needed to read Chapter 1, in order to see the absurdity of his claims about my treatment of Einstein."

He added that an Einstein letter he tried to buy at auction this year proved that the physicist considered religions "childish superstitions".

Richard Dawkins branded 'secularist bigot' by veteran philosopher - Telegraph

[Grimmlok]

Ahh that guy.. the 85 year old that suddenly 'saw the light' rather conveniently in his advanced age.. uhhuh

[twitchy]

He's gone senile and people are just using him.

"In August, I visited Flew in Reading. His house, sparsely furnished, sits on a small plot on a busy street, hard against its neighbors. It could belong to a retired government clerk or to a career military man who at last has resettled in the mother country. Inside, it seems very English, with the worn, muted colors of a BBC production from the 1970s. The house may lack an Internet connection, but it does have one very friendly cat, who sat beside me on the sofa. I visited on two consecutive days, and each day Annis, Flew’s wife of 55 years, served me a glass of water and left me in the sitting room to ask her husband a series of tough, indeed rather cruel, questions.

In “There Is a God,” Flew quotes extensively from a conversation he had with Leftow, a professor at Oxford. So I asked Flew, “Do you know Brian Leftow?”

“No,” he said. “I don’t think I do.”

“Do you know the work of the philosopher John Leslie?” Leslie is discussed extensively in the book.

Flew paused, seeming unsure. “I think he’s quite good.” But he said he did not remember the specifics of Leslie’s work.

“Have you ever run across the philosopher Paul Davies?” In his book, Flew calls Paul Davies “arguably the most influential contemporary expositor of modern science.”

“I’m afraid this is a spectacle of my not remembering!”

He said this with a laugh. When we began the interview, he warned me, with merry self-deprecation, that he suffers from “nominal aphasia,” or the inability to reproduce names. But he forgot more than names. He didn’t remember talking with Paul Kurtz about his introduction to “God and Philosophy” just two years ago. There were words in his book, like “abiogenesis,” that now he could not define. When I asked about Gary Habermas, who told me that he and Flew had been friends for 22 years and exchanged “dozens” of letters, Flew said, “He and I met at a debate, I think.” I pointed out to him that in his earlier philosophical work he argued that the mere concept of God was incoherent, so if he was now a theist, he must reject huge chunks of his old philosophy. “Yes, maybe there’s a major inconsistency there,” he said, seeming grateful for my insight. And he seemed generally uninterested in the content of his book — he spent far more time talking about the dangers of unchecked Muslim immigration and his embrace of the anti-E.U. United Kingdom Independence Party.

As he himself conceded, he had not written his book.

“This is really Roy’s doing,” he said, before I had even figured out a polite way to ask. “He showed it to me, and I said O.K. I’m too old for this kind of work!”

When I asked Varghese, he freely admitted that the book was his idea and that he had done all the original writing for it. But he made the book sound like more of a joint effort — slightly more, anyway. “There was stuff he had written before, and some of that was adapted to this,” Varghese said.

“There is stuff he’d written to me in correspondence, and I organized a lot of it. And I had interviews with him. So those three elements went into it. Oh, and I exposed him to certain authors and got his views on them. We pulled it together. And then to make it more reader-friendly, HarperCollins had a more popular author go through it.”"

from: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/ma...pagewanted=all

[Grimmlok]

surprise.

[LynnieD]

I thought this was about Richard DAWSON, the Family Feud dude......

For only a few seconds I swear.

[buttmunch]

I used to LOVE Richard Dawson!

Ahh that guy.. the 85 year old that suddenly 'saw the light' rather conveniently in his advanced age.. uhhuh

yeah, my mum did that. Left the church at 30 and on her death bed suddenly started saying she wished she had gone to church more. Quite frankly, church won't do dick. Live your life well and you haven't much to worry about, no matter what the 'real truth' is after death. As far as I remember, religious types shouldn't be wealthy or living well, yet many people follow and get religious guidance from wealthy guys in increasingly silly hats. If you want to believe, you can believe in an outhouse. The big girl upstairs won't judge you.

Oh, and I LOVE the God Delusion. Such a great book.

[tee-ha-ha]

Richard Dawkins is bigoted against the religious. It's pretty obvious from his books/interviews/television programs.

However, so what?

[katerpillar]

Dawkins is a dick.

He's just as bigoted, intolerant, pushy and bloody-minded as the religions and their believers that he criticises for acting the same way. He's a hypocrite, with the debating ability of a self-righteous 12-year-old.

[tipofthehat]

Dawkins is a dick.

He's just as bigoted, intolerant, pushy and bloody-minded as the religions and their believers that he criticises for acting the same way. He's a hypocrite, with the debating ability of a self-righteous 12-year-old.

He wouldn't be "a dick" if religious freaks weren't such...freaks and didn't force their religious prattle down peoples throats is if it's hard fact.

[buttmunch]

Ahh that guy.. the 85 year old that suddenly 'saw the light' rather conveniently in his advanced age.. uhhuh

Yeah, I've noticed that happens to people when they're nearing the 'other side'. Suddenly they regret all those non-church going years. I say stick to your guns. If you have behaved honourably in life and if there is a god, you're going to be fine, particularly since people shouldn't be building shrines anyway, according to the 'Good Book'. By the way, EVERYONE should read teh Dawkins book. It's not only well-written but funny as hell, in parts.