My friend Billy Dalto noted a statement made by Richard Dawkins in a typical lecture he delivered to TED; about religion, he says:

It teaches people to be satisfied with trivial supernatural non-explanations and blinds them to the wonderful real explanations we have within our grasp. It teaches them to accept authority, revelation, and faith instead of always insisting on evidence.

Debunking Dawkins is an excellent example of "feeding the troll," as he seems to created a career for himself almost solely out of controversy (and controversy of the lowest order).  Nevertheless, this statement is so archly stupid I felt it worth discussing.

The first obvious question: if Dawkins' contention is that religious people are "satisfied with trivial supernatural non-explanations," whence science itself?  Did it emerge from the shadows of the middle-ages, nurtured by a secret clan of radical atheists?

Not at all, as Dawkins ought to know; much of his work as an evolutionary biologist owes its existence to "the father of modern genetics," Gregor Mendel, who seems to have had a tiny bit of the exploratory instinct in him despite being a freaking priest!

Would a list of religious scientists be too facile a rebuttal?  I don't want to embarrass Dawkins.  It must be difficult to make claims like the above when Darwin himself was a theist, as were Copernicus, Bacon, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Kelvin, Planck, Schrodinger, and many thousands of others.

Is it piling on to remind Richard that the Jesuits and the Catholic Church were the repository for much of our scientific knowledge for several centuries?  I guess we're lucky they didn't toss all the books out, contended as they must have been with their "trivial supernatural non-explanations!"

I am not suggesting that belief in a god is correct, only that -as usual- Dawkins is imbecilic in ascribing to theism and religion a variety of bogus ills.  For millennia, humans have believed in religious traditions of all sorts and not abandoned reason, sat down in the dirt, and waited for the afterlife.  Does he think that Pythagoras secretly scoffed at the notion of the soul?  That Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi only pretended to be Muslim?

Nietzsche famously suggested that the Christian worldview, which posits man as the model of the maker of the universe, and that universe as an intelligible, ordered creation, was responsible for bringing about the scientific worldview, the Enlightenment, and ultimately atheism.  Hence, when his madman exclaims that "God is dead," he adds: "And we have killed him."

That is to say: the Platonism and anthropocentrism of the Christian worldview led inexorably to the study and dissection of the universe, its laws, its patterns; the study undermines the worldview which birthed it, yet it continues.  Reason and revelation are not incompatible, but linked in what Nietzsche viewed as an inevitably problematic sense.

Even if we disregard Nietzsche's argument, it is undeniable that scholarship and science were not the province of the atheist elect until quite recently; and only someone as arrogant and mindless as Dawkins would gloss over that fact, ignoring its implications.  Dawkins can't see how Archimedes could have been a scientist while believing, I suppose.

On the other hand, I find it hard to imagine how atheists become scientists: resigned to a purposeless, arbitrary world, their search for order is de facto without justification: why ought laws be what they are?  Why ought anything be intelligible?  Why ought one bother with any of this nonsense?  Because they like beakers?  As nerdy hobbyists?

Einstein favored Spinoza's god, as he put it: the deity that reveals itself through the ordered, deep beauty of the structure of the universe.  I would wager that the most profound thinkers we have, in science or any field, are of like mind, and that popularizing, pedantic pugilists like Dawkins are in the minority.