Dangerous Ignorance Religion has tormented or brainwashed sincere people into believing lies. By Richard Dawkins

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Finding God in Random Chance
The author of "The Metaphysical Club" on Darwin's first readersThe extremity of Dawkins's statement represents yet another indication that the debate between natural and supernatural explanations for existence is carried out at the level of nasty caricature. Science figures denounce the doubters of evolution as ignorant rubes or Elmer Gantrys; evangelicals denounce biologists as sinister brainwashers whose secret agenda is the destruction of faith. What ought to be a fascinating discourse--What made us? How? Why?--instead too often becomes an occasion for childish name-calling on both sides. Isn't there some way we can discuss God versus Darwin in civil tones?

Yes, but first a few words on who Dawkins is. A zoologist by training, he has become to recent decades what Thomas Huxley was to the late decades of the 19th century, the most forceful public proponent of Darwin. Dawkins's 1986 small masterpiece "The Blind Watchmaker" spells out in detail the reasons why even something as astonishingly complex as the six-billion-point strand of human DNA could have gradually self-assembled without guidance. (A 1996 volume, "Climbing Mount Improbable," revisits the same argument adding details of recent research.) His 1976 book "The Selfish Gene" supposes that living things exist to support their genes, rather than vice versa. His most recent book, "Unweaving the Rainbow," argues that even if you believe there's no God, you can still look on creation with awe.

Roughly since the mid-1970s, Dawkins has staked out hard-line positions against faith, belief in higher powers, and objections to natural selection theory. He devotes great energy to refuting claims of faults in evolutionary thinking, and especially to refuting creationism. Dawkins has declared existence to be "lacking all purpose," and the world "neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous." He says "the universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but pointless indifference." (The universe I observe pretty clearly contains both good and evil, but maybe Dawkins travels in different circles.) He has called religion "very boring and not worth talking about," but talks about it constantly, for instance in a 1992 speech titled "A Scientist's Case Against God."

Impressed by Dawkins's ardor against creationism, the American software billionaire Charles Simonyi endowed a chair for him at Oxford in "public understanding of science." From his chair Dawkins regularly expounds against belief as "a scientist," though technically he's a professor of science, not a working scientist. One of the first things Dawkins did from his tenured position was lead a crusade against Cambridge University's plan to endow a chair in theology. Theology is all ridiculous superstition, Dawkins said, and unworthy of being dignified by study.