Post by turoldus on Jul 31, 2009 13:35:50 GMT
Fern Elsdon-Baker has a book challenging Dawkins not only on religion, but on evolution as well. She sets out some of her arguments here. The Economist (which was one the few mainstream outlets to praise The God Delusion without reserve) is not convinced. The first paragraph hits a new low in both hero-worship and character assassination:
So it's now clear: anyone daring to challenge Darwin's self-appointed representant on Earth is necessarily trying to sell books. And Dawkins' stubborn refusal to compromise, which would be seen and criticized as "absolutism" was it to serve another cause, is worthy of praise:
IN THE year of Charles Darwin’s double anniversary—200 years since his birth and 150 since the publication of his masterwork, “On the Origin of Species”—taking a potshot in print at Richard Dawkins must have looked like an irresistible idea. Darwin’s champion in his lifetime, Thomas Huxley, was known to many as his bulldog. Mr Dawkins, his modern champion, has been dubbed his rottweiler, a reflection of his uncompromising defence of both evolutionary theory and the atheism he thinks is a necessary consequence of it. What better way to sell a few books, then, than to attack the man whom many see as Darwin’s representative on earth?
So it's now clear: anyone daring to challenge Darwin's self-appointed representant on Earth is necessarily trying to sell books. And Dawkins' stubborn refusal to compromise, which would be seen and criticized as "absolutism" was it to serve another cause, is worthy of praise:
What is left, once these attacks are dismissed, is a critique of Mr Dawkins’s proselytising atheism. It is true this wins him few converts, when a collaboration with religious moderates against the creationists might bear weightier fruit. But if his intellectual rigour forbids him making common cause with people he thinks are wrong, that perhaps only shows he is indeed the rottweiler of legend.
