Richard Dawkins on TEDTalks
Richard Dawkins is Oxford University's "Professor for the Public Understanding of Science." Author of the landmark 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, he's a brilliant (and trenchant) evangelist for Darwin's ideas. In this talk, titled, "Queerer Than We Suppose: The strangeness of science," he suggests that the true nature of the universe eludes us, because the human mind evolved to understand the "middle-sized" world we can observe. (Recorded July 2005 in Oxford, UK. Duration: 22:42)
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Calling Dawkins an evangelist does not do him justice. He advocates critical thinking and open mindedness not blindly accepting what you are told. He is an excellent speaker who tries to inform people about evolution and the scientific method which are both often misunderstood.
Posted by: philthepile | 15 March 2007 at 10:36 AM
The following blog:
beyondevolutionistheregodafterdawkins.blogspot.com
refutes Dawkins point for point. It includes all the findings he uses but reinterprets them from a spiritual perspective. Fascinating.
Posted by: MissTickle | 05 June 2007 at 10:58 AM
"Our engagement with the idea of god is our continuing attempt to hold ourselves accountable to our possibilities; that of each of us, individually, and together."
(This is true for all engagements, for or against or skirting it.)
Dawkins' attempt is to help free us from imitating our constructs blindly and to focus on the real task at hand: the achievement of our possibilities.
Posted by: Reality is only a suggestion | 23 August 2007 at 05:05 PM
Am not a religious person but Dawkins seems unable to let go of his childhood understanding and resentment of religious institutions and ideology. For someone so vociferously condemning of a particular subject, he seems to have no practical exposure to his subject matter nor does he seem willing to entertain any data that would refute his position. Sort of like the world getting behind Jane Goodall as the ultimate authority on chimps but having never been to Gombi or left her London home. His points of attack are truly weak (evolution, something that has been adopted by all major religions as fact.) and ridiculously hangs his hat on thing like that because science and our ability to understand our environment and existence in enormously complex detail is proof positive of the non-existence of God. This guy seems to have taken his philosophy from Star Trek (using the planets and beyond as refutation of a long dated and not really in-play middle ages anthro-centrist perspective. ) For most in the modern age, this is more a starting point in the evolution of their understanding of God and well incorporated by the aggregate. Like many in academia, Dawkins seems entranced and arrogantly lulled by a long refuted premise of aggregate understanding and likely guilty of chauvinistic ignorance of the great unwashed, and that his own reasoning is above reproach, motive or bias. You really have to call condemnation without investigation what it is, bigotry. The fact that much of what he says has an appeal is proof positive that he is wrong in his assumptions ie. that religious institutions are much more secularized (in doctrine and in practice)than he asserts, that this has come through in its pedagogy over the generations from which he is now reaping the rewards in a back handed fashion. He owes his reasoning, sensibility and perception ironically to the "divine", even in it's most basic definition, and laughably uses it to refute it's existence. Sort of like a goldfish swimming to the other side of the bowl to condemn the water on the other side as unfit and unsafe. He is swimming in the thing he purports to not exist.
Posted by: Wealer | 03 September 2007 at 11:26 AM