God's Revenge on Darwin? Dick Dawkins!

Basil Poledouris~ Theology & Civilization
From the soundtrack to "Conan the Barbarian"

Obviously both these guys firmly support Darwinism and even THEY see what a DICK Dawkins is. Bwaha!

See Also:

UK TV Review: Dick Dawkins: Evangelical Darwinist

Dawkins and The Seven Deadlies

Charlton Heston visits the Ministry of Science

Richard Dawkins, Atheist Evangelist: "What’s to prevent us from saying Hitler wasn’t right?"

Is Dawkins God's revenge on Darwin?

Next year is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin. For a person who was never a member of the Groucho Club and never owned a production company, Darwin has been responsible for an enormous amount of television: nature programmes, police and medical dramas, reality shows. It will also be the 150th anniversary of his reluctant publication of The Origin of Species, a book that not only changed the world, but also explained it. Television likes an anniversary, and this is a particularly auspicious one, for our greatest scientist and arguably Britain’s pre- eminent original thinker.

Unlike the ideas of Newton or Hobbes or Adam Smith, natural selection is clearly understandable and explainable. And the path that led to The Origin of Species is properly exciting. In fact, it is probably one of the few significant scientific discoveries of the past two centuries that is accessible to everyone, as well as affecting everyone. So, Darwin deserves a landmark, flog-it-round-the-world showcase series. And, just as obviously, the natural selection for a presenter should be David Attenborough.

In survival of the fittest, there is no second best: there are just winners and lunch. Richard Dawkins is lunch. In fairness, Darwin is his thing, his fundamental belief; he has been a devoted acolyte of the great bearded ape all his life. His day job is Oxford professor of science PR, so being asked to make the defining series on his hero was a big opportunity that he grasped with both hands — then dropped.

Maybe it was nerves, perhaps he’s just too emotionally involved, but the first episode of The Genius of Charles Darwin (Monday, C4) left Dawkins blinking in the headlights.

It also revealed a sorry truth. He is much happier, and much more accomplished at, knocking things down than building them. He’d rather be against something than for it. Confronting a class of quiet, respectful, eager and religious schoolchildren, he became tongue-tied and muddled about selling evolution. He was much happier attacking religion. His anger and bombast stand in stark contrast to Darwin’s quiet, inquisitive humility. Darwin was a gentle man who thought deeply and went out of his way to avoid confrontation or to incommode others. Tellingly, he managed to live his entire life with a devout Christian.

This was a great opportunity for a lush, life-affirming, invigorating series, but what we got was a confused liturgical spat. Much of the blame must fall to the producer, who really should have made sure there was a far more rigorous and inspiring script. In the end, the wisest and most memorable observation came from the mouth of a schoolboy. After a day on the Jurassic coast, discovering ammonites, he said that yes, he believed in evolution, then paused and, with a faint smile, added: “But I’ll still say my prayers.”


And then there's this:


An Atheist Plays God’s Advocate

God is omnipresent. If not in the universe, then certainly, these days, in the work of Richard Dawkins. On Monday the author of the atheist diatribe The God Delusion presented a documentary about evolution, The Genius of Charles Darwin (Channel 4). It was meant as a paean to Darwin, but somehow God kept managing to elbow His way into it.

Evolution “is one reason I don’t believe in God”, announced Dawkins at the start. Darwin “made it possible no longer to feel the necessity to believe in anything supernatural”, he added later. “It’s not God at work here in all this squalor and suffering,” he sighed while visiting a Nairobi slum. It was like listening to a teenage boy who professes disdain for the most popular girl in class, yet can’t stop talking about her.

I’m not convinced that all this anti-God stuff needed to be there, because evolution in itself isn’t proof that God doesn’t exist. Proof that the Bible is inaccurate in numerous places, yes. But it doesn’t rule out the possibility that billions of years ago, God – or a god, or gods – created the world and populated it with bacteria capable of evolving. I too am an atheist, yet Dawkins is so fanatical that I find myself playing devil’s advocate, or in this case God’s.Otherwise it was a good documentary. Lucid and enthusiastic, Dawkins is more likeable on screen than in his finger-jabbing prose.

He appears slightly ill at ease around children, though. He visited a school to spread the word about Darwin. Before he entered the classroom there was a puzzling shot, which lasted several seconds, of Dawkins peering through the window in the door at the oblivious pupils, as if they were some mysterious new species.When he did get around to addressing them, he was either stiffly earnest or unconvincingly pally, like some brilliant but remote uncle you might find in a Narnia book. Although, of course, you couldn’t put Dawkins in a Narnia book or he’d be forever lecturing the Pevensie children about the non-existence of Aslan.