He never seems to learn to engage brain before opening mouth – like the time he claimed (oh, but it was off the cuff, of course!) that a religious upbringing was worse for a child than being sexually abused. It struck me as just another example of how disconnected he is; he seems to have no empathy at all, no idea what effect his words may have on people. There’s a nasty element of the bully in him, too – witness his behaviour to very soft targets on some of his programmes.

I completely agree with your comments on linking atheism with evolution. Libby Purves made a similar observation in The Times some years ago. Insisting that to accept the theory of evolution inevitably leads to atheism is simply mirroring the attitude of creationists. How is that helpful to either of his espoused causes? It’s only going to drive people away. But I think he’s far more of a polemicist than a scientist, these days. I’m afraid I have very little respect for him. No, take that back: I have none.

If he’d stick to his field of science, fine. But he spends so much time abusing people simply for thinking differently (an illiberal atheist; Jacobin indeed. Robespierre would be proud) or makes claims about Christianity as if it were solely represented by a sort of combination Southern Baptist-Christian Brothers c. 1950 mindset: fundamentalist, creationist, entirely fixated on the Old Testament and automatically racist, sexist and homophobic. Well, sadly there are too many branches like that (Africa and America have a serious dose of it) but there are also a great many intelligent, educated Christians who disavow all the OT proof-text nonsense and know perfectly well it is a collection of morality tales written for its time, not for all time; who embrace science as showing the wonders of God’s creation. I’ve even seen a minister’s website which referred to creationism as blasphemous, because it denies the wonders of Earth’s billions of years’ existence.

But does Dawkins acknowledge any of this? No, he does not … it might weaken his base if he did. And how unscientific is that, ignoring facts that upset his theory? But as you mention, he does it in his science, so it’s no wonder he does it in his ideological frothings, too. Sadly, he shows every sign of being just as fanatical and bigoted as his mirror opposites. I would not want to live in a world ruled by his style of reductionist, mechanistic atheism, any more than I would want to live under the rule of Christian fundamentalists. (I’m not a follower of any religion, btw.)

Perhaps I went into it expecting something worse, but I found him to be quite well-mannered throughout most of the interview. The only place I took offense was when he mentioned the “ghastly tents the Muslims wear,” which just seemed unnecessary and mean.

His awkward pauses and question-dodging seemed more like the responses of a nervous man, trying to give a good interview and not fully understanding the intention of the questions.

I’m all for calling people out on their wrongdoings, but there doesn’t seem to be anything significant.

“Dawkins is brittle and prickly at his best, and when he doesn’t like the way things are going, he can be positively obtuse and testy.”

It’s a damned good thing he wasn’t born with a vagina or else no amount of brilliance would apologize for his personality flaws. Only men get to act like that and get called “brilliant” and “the essence of scientific reason.”

Sorry, crabby moment over …

I thought you (and Kirsty above) have had nailed the essence — or irrationalism — of Dawkinsism pretty much on the target!

Whereas from my own critical reading of Dawkins, especially regarding your last goodwill wish, I think it will never be fulfilled — as the Dawkinsian meteor rise to the fad/bad science writing popularity is unparallel in the English literature since Darwin and the Enlightenment in Europe in history and it would be very hard for Dawkins to introspect and acknowledge that he has had been indeed standing on his clay-feet of his irrationalism in science and Darwinism and religion or humanism as a whole!

Not only has Dawkinsism had parasitically privileged on Darwinism and science, his “evolutionist” rise to the public pseudoscience literary stardom was primarily based on his continued, neo-Darwinism reductionist, polemic and rhetoric writings, as I retrospectively observed here: My brain is no bigger than a caveman’s — RE: Dawkinsism is not a “misstep” — It’s a self-denigrating pseudoscience “meme” or scientism par excellence of the 20th century, emanating from Oxford since the 1970s!? (TheMermaid’sTaleUSA; September 23); and more specifically here: Matthew Cobb reviews two evolution books — RE: Revisiting Darwin’s “tree of life” sketch-hypothesis!? (WhyEvolusionIsTrueUSA; December 5) — culminating in more of his nowadays very unscientific and uncritical writings on the mechanisms of evolution and Darwinism; and in his unemphatically belittling of the inadequacy in science of the creationists; as well as his science-philosophy critics, etc for their incomprehension and unscientifically refutation of his reductionist fallacies of the “selfish gene” and “hopping meme” — and now his “New Atheism”!?

As such, not only has had Dawkins done a great disservice to his otherwise intelligent readers and fans since the 1970s; he would continue to proselytize his own scientism — as neo-Darwinism as the evolutionary orthodoxy and as neo-atheism without conscience as the anti-theism polemic — just as usual, so as to keep his anti-religious popularity up in the UK; as well as in the world!?

Best wishes, Mong 12/26/9usct3:59p; practical science-philosophy critic; author “Decoding Scientism” and “Consciousness & the Subconscious” (works in progress since July 2007), Gods, Genes, Conscience (iUniverse; 2006) and Gods, Genes, Conscience: Global Dialogues Now (blogging avidly since 2006).

Finally, I have repeatedly been asked what I think of South Park and of Ted Haggard’s downfall. I won’t say much about either. Schadenfreude is not an appealing emotion so, on Haggard, I’ll say only that if it wasn’t for people of his religious persuasion, people of his sexual persuasion would be free to do what they like without shame and without fear of exposure. I share neither his religious nor his sexual persuasion (that’s an understatement), and I’m buggered if I like being portrayed as a cartoon character buggering a bald transvestite. I wouldn’t have minded so much if only it had been in the service of some serious point, but if there was a serious point in there I couldn’t discern it. And then there’s the matter of the accent they gave me. Now, if only I could be offered a cameo role in The Simpsons, I could show that actor how to do a real British accent.