Q&A: Neo-Darwinism
Neo-Darwinism
Question
I watched several lectures by Dawkins and his fellow neo-Darwinists. Do Dawkins’s arguments really hold water? I got the impression that he has become a mirror image of the very thing he is fighting against. He often sounds like an “atheist fundamentalist,” if that is even possible, battling religious fundamentalism (and religion in general). In one of his lectures I saw that the conclusion he reached was that religion leads to ignorance and wars, but I can also show logically that secular nationalist movements, secular Marxist movements, etc., lead to exactly the same result—not to mention that Marx’s supporters claimed that Marx’s ideas were “scientific” socialism, and the Nazis said that the Jewish “race” was inferior and proved it by “scientific” means—all without God.
What do you think about the phenomenon in general and about Dawkins in particular? And is it possible that people who place science above everything and do everything they can to humiliate religion have actually created a religion of their own without noticing?
Answer
It is no accident that I devoted an entire book to my views on Dawkins and his arguments; its title in Israel is God Plays Dice.
Indeed, he is a fundamentalist and his arguments do not hold water. But that should not surprise you, and there is no need to put the phrase “fundamentalist atheist” in quotation marks. Atheists are usually more fundamentalist than the religious people they attack. In most cases they do not even have the sense of self-irony that many religious people have, and certainly not the willingness to examine their own position. In many respects, this is a cult.