The Issue of Liberal Fundamentalists

The post by the green eyed monster entitled "Defending Science from the Scientists" brought me back to my undergraduate curriculum in religion and environmental sicence and encouraged me to once again go down the dangerous road of Religion v. Science, God v. Evolution, and of course Richard Dawkins v. Anyone who will challenge him.

Richard Dawkins, the well known scientist, atheist, and author of The God Delusion, claims that belief in a supernatural creator qualifies as a delusion. This is an absurd claim for a scientist to make, since it is of course science that claims only physical observations can be observed or "proven." To imply that the physical sciences are capable of disproving the existence of an admittedly non-physical Being, seems to me unfounded. Dawkins should not use his position as an esteemed scientist to venture into the realm of things he has only superficially studied and try to influence the susceptible masses with flawed logic. This essay addresses Dawkins's argument more fully.

Dawkins sometimes comes across like the bully on the playground: he is usually the one who needs to reaffirm his position by beating up on those around him. Dawkins seems to believe that religion actually creates miserable people, wars, and damaging fundamentalist ideologies. While there are many historical examples that he can use (see the Crusades), I don't believe he has thought through the implications of his pseudo-logic. Much of what we do on a daily basis flies in the face of what scientific literalism tells us. For example, modern medicine's motto perhaps ought to be: keeping the unfit alive to reproduce and combat evolutionary theory since (insert year).

The unquestioned faith in anything claiming to be scientific that dominates most of the world's universities is explored in the recent documentary, Expelled. In this film, Ben Stein does a good job of exploring the current state of affairs in academia (and the "educated" world at large) regarding intellectual freedom, or lack thereof. In reality, popular academia is often controlled by scientific fundamentalists, who adopt the complete opposite, yet no less outlandish, perspectives associated with religious fundamentalism.

Scapegoating and ridiculing those who believe in God in the name of science is just an immature adults' game of "mine is bigger than yours."