The Prestidigitator

I really don’t want to contribute to the hyperbole that this debate has already created but I can safely say that this is the finest one hour of debate, one-sided as it is, I’ve seen in a very long time. Two amazingly articulate intellectuals take on Catholicism and religious hypocrisy. To be fair, I do wish that the two proponents of the Catholic church would have been a little more, I don’t know, Christlike instead of pretending that (institutional) child abuse and homophobia are urban myths.

Stephen Fry makes an especially brilliant case against the so called ‘force for good’. Nod along or throw stuff at your computer but this is what good television is all about.

Go watch. Now.

Richard Dawkins’s new book is a strange animal. Marketed as a textbook to illuminate, it turns out to be a polemic of sorts and as a result, is bound to infuriate what should have been his core audience – deniers of evolution.

Being an avowed nontheist myself, I find it a little bothersome that Dawkins refers to creationists as ‘history deniers’ and often places them on the same allegorical boat as holocaust deniers. This is especially funny because Ben Stein and his ilk constantly draw parallels between evolutionists and the Nazis. Tangled web, this.

I’ve been a little wary of the ‘New Atheist’ movement spearheaded by Dawkins, Dennett, Harris and Hitchens (with the occasional cracker-defilement by a certain tentacled professor) mostly because they tend to come across as a tad intimidating. Make no mistake; I greatly admire their writings and have spent hours in front of my computer listening to them bemoan the stupidity of our species. However, I’m of the opinion that if one can’t be convinced by reason and logic, he/she ought to be ignored. There is only so much that can be done for people who insist on finding meaning in silly stories. If you believe that virgins give birth or that you’ll be a ‘well-hung billionaire with wings‘ in your next life, you mostly likely spend a lot of your free time away from what we call, the real world. Let evolution take its course, I say.

(See what I did there?)

The book, however, does a lot of things right. Dawkins explains in painstaking detail how evolution and dating techniques really work and dispels myths about the absence of transitional fossils and other such media fuelled fallacies. Personally, I feel very strongly about this; what is at stake here is the grandest theory in history that provides an all encompassing view of life. Despite the abundance of information out there in the public domain, I was asked why a worm still exists (sic) if we evolved from it . Nevermind that I threw a fit at the mere insinuation, it is imperative that one possesses a rudimentary understanding of what one wants to argue against. And for that, this book is a brilliant start. It is informative and dare I say, entertaining.

Dawkins’s book is a clear and lucid case against anti-evolutionists though he does resort to name-calling once every ten pages. If you can overlook that, the book will provide hours of great science reading. Despite being such an elegant theory, Dawkins reiterates what makes evolution truly remarkable. It can be disproved. But it hasn’t. Not by anyone credible, anyway.