A propos Darwin
by Alexander Boot:
The other day, I questioned Richard Dawkins’s intellectual credentials as related to the issue of God. Not only is he ignorant of basic philosophy, but he can’t even think logically, routinely relying instead on the full complement of rhetorical fallacies.
One of them is argumentum ad populum: because many people believe something to be true, it is. Thus Dawkins never tires of citing “the overwhelming preponderance of atheists” among top scientists.
This betokens his belief that truth is democratic, like Western politics. A simple show of hands is sufficient to determine what’s true and what’s false. That’s nonsensical even in politics, and even more so in philosophy or indeed natural science.
In fact, all major discoveries started as minority propositions, held by few scientists or even one. That possibly apocryphal apple fell on Newton’s head only – it wasn’t a hail of apples bombarding the arithmetic majority of contemporaneous scientists.
Dawkins’s assertion would be irrelevant even if it were true. But it isn’t. I have this on good authority: Lewis Wolpert, as strident an atheist as Dawkins but a much more accomplished scientist, mournfully admits in one of his own agitprop books that over half of today’s scientists are believers.
And even those who aren’t still know that Darwin’s slapdash theory not only doesn’t “explain everything”, in Dawkins’s illiterate assertion, but in fact explains very little. Its principal attraction isn’t scientific but political.
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