This day in history: Richard Dawkins was born on this day in 1941. Dawkins is a British author, biologist, evolutionist, leftist, agnostic and militant atheist. That last part may be confusing. In 2002 Richard Dawkins publicly argued for the position of militant atheism and claimed that he will not feel anything after death, however, in later years, when interviewed, he claimed that, on a scale of 1 to 7, where 1 is perfect faith in God and 7 is perfect confidence in atheism, he is a 6.9. Dawkins declared that he was an agnostic in 2006 and 2012. (In his book The God Delusion, Dawkins said that "permanent in agnosticism in principle" is "fence-sitting, intellectual cowardice.")
In a debate with Giles Fraser (former Canon Chancellor of St Paul's Cathedral) Dawkins said that most Christians weren't Christian because they couldn't tell you the first book of the New Testament. Giles asked Dawkins if he could recite the full title of Darwin's Origin of the Species, and Dawkins boasted that he could. When challenged, Dawkins dithered and said: "Oh God." (The full title of Charles Darwin's book is On the The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life and evolutionists rarely cite the book's full title as it is racist.)
On February 14, 2012, an editorial in The Daily Telegraph claimed regarding the radio debate: "Dr. Fraser skewered the atheist campaigner Richard Dawkins so fabulously, so stylishly, and so thoroughly that anti-religion’s high priest was reduced to incoherent mumbling and spluttering."
Theodore Beale wrote concerning the embarrassing incident for Dawkins:
“As I have said repeatedly, Richard Dawkins is a huge intellectual fraud, and perhaps those who previously expressed incredulity at the idea that I would quite easily trounce the old charlatan in a debate will find it just a bit more credible now. This behavior isn't an outlier or a momentary lapse of memory, it is entirely characteristic. The man quite frequently pretends to knowledge that he patently does not possess and assumes he knows things that he obviously does not, which is why he avoids debate with those who are aware of his intellectual pretensions and are capable of exposing them.
It's bad enough that Dawkins couldn't come up with the name of what he considers to be the most important book ever written immediately after claiming he could do so, but in addition to stumbling a little on the subtitle, he even forgot the rather important part of the title that refers to the actual mechanism supposedly responsible!"
See also Does God Exist? - 300 Books to Download
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