The Week’s Hit-and-Run on Richard Dawkins

 Richard Dawkins is the Author of the Week (article for subscribers; cached version) in this week’s issue of The Week (dated October 2, 2009).  Like many of the articles in The Week, this was a summary of an original article, an interview of Dawkins by Stephanie Marsh that appeared in the August 22, 2009 issue of The Times. Dawkins' new book, The Greatest Show On Earth, is about the evidence for the theory of evolution.

The summary article in The Week begins like this:

Outspoken atheist Richard Dawkins is currently offering America a remedial education on the subject of evolution, said Stefanie Marsh in the London Times. [my italics]

First of all, why is the author of a book on evolution described as an "outspoken atheist"? Dawkins is a professional zoologist and a professor at the University of Oxford. Why aren't his academic credentials cited? The article could have been written to say "Oxford University zoologist Richard Dawkins...", but the author didn't do that. Marsh's original article certainly doesn't begin that way, and her first description of Dawkins is as  Britain's leading intellectual.

When the subject of atheism is broached,  instead of mentioning what Dawkins himself has to say (apparently too much, by The Week’s standards), Marsh describes what others say about him:

...when the day came, Britain’s "angriest", most "vituperative" atheist -- as his many critics like to call him, along with "belligerent", and even "mad" -- greeted me in a cheerful if rather delicate mood...

Here she's poking fun at these descriptions of Dawkins, because he’s nothing like that.  As it turns out, Dawkins is somewhat of a shy man, and on the occasion of the interview, he was a bit sad over the death of a favorite pet.  Without reading the source article, the reader of The Week’s summary would assume that Dawkins was some kind of atheist fire-brand, instead of what he really is: a passionate advocate for the public understanding of science.  If Dawkins rubs people the wrong way, it’s simply because he has little tolerance for the kind of obfuscation favored by religious advocates.

Second of all, if they’re going to immediately refer to Dawkins as an atheist, then why as an outspoken atheist?  It’s not enough for The Week to simply mention that Dawkins is an atheist (although atheist itself could be considered a pejorative) – they have to say something bad about him too.  So outspoken atheist it is.  (Usually atheist-bashers say that you’re militant.  Perhaps outspoken is progress of a sort.)  What is Dawkins’ crime, exactly – that he wrote a book about atheism?  (Gasp!)  So what: I have a shelf full of books about atheism, by a bunch of different authors.  Does that make those authors outspoken too?  How would the editors at The Week know that Dawkins is an atheist, unless he, um, spoke about it?

The summary article goes on to describe Dawkins’ motivation for writing the book:

Alarmed that 40 percent of Americans now believe that the world is less than 6,000 years old—and that a rising share of his British compatriots are also creationists—Dawkins decided to present the "evidence" that makes evolution undeniable.

I see that the word “evidence” is put in scare-quotes.  Why?  Are the editors at The Week skeptical of the theory of evolution?  (If so, they don’t deign to give reasons why.)  Maybe they were just trying to be funny.  I could understand if evolution-denier Wendy Wright tried to gainsay the evidence for evolution (video interview with Dawkins here); she is cited in the original article as an example of someone who holds steadfast to her creationist beliefs in spite of the evidence for evolution.  Marsh’s point is that Dawkins new book won’t help people like Wright.  But if you only read the summary article, then you wouldn’t get the joke, and you would conclude that it’s The Week itself that is denying the evidence.

By some dubious logic, the summary article makes the claim that Dawkins himself isn’t a “strict rationalist”, saying that:

He readily admits that human beings may simply never be capable of explaining everything about our universe. "I think we all think that there’s something else out there. I do, certainly. It’s just not supernatural."

But there is nothing here that buttresses the claim of him being an anti-rationalist. He's simply saying that science doesn't have all the questions answered yet.  Solving outstanding problems is what makes science interesting.  (It’s what we pay scientists to do.)  The full quote from the original article is:

As to the big unanswered questions: “I think we all think that there’s something else out there. I do, certainly. But it’s not supernatural. It’s ... I think there’s a lot that science doesn’t know and indeed may never know, and that’s exciting.”

There is no controversy about any this, and these statements are exactly what I’d expect a public advocate for science to say. There’s nothing anti-rationalist about it.  The summary article goes on to say:

For instance, Dawkins says, somewhere beings may exist that are "superhuman to a level that our imaginations cannot grasp".

But they pulled that quote from a completely different article about God and evolution that appeared in the Wall Street Journal:

To midwife such emergence is the singular achievement of Darwinian evolution. It starts with primeval simplicity and fosters, by slow, explicable degrees, the emergence of complexity: seemingly limitless complexity—certainly up to our human level of complexity and very probably way beyond. There may be worlds on which superhuman life thrives, superhuman to a level that our imaginations cannot grasp. But superhuman does not mean supernatural. Darwinian evolution is the only process we know that is ultimately capable of generating anything as complicated as creative intelligences.

This is a factual, succinct explanation of how evolution works.  Again: there’s nothing here that would lead one to claim that Dawkins himself isn’t completely rationale. In fact, that bit about superhuman life isn't even original to Dawkins. Arthur C. Clarke famously said that:

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

My recommendation to readers of this blog is to go read Marsh’s original source article instead of The Week’s confused summary.  There’s also a link to a video interview with Dawkins on that page, about the evidence for evolution, the subject of his new book.  Reviews of the book from The Times are here and here.