*** Initially posted by BCSE member George Jellis ***
There are many atheists, agnostics and others who don’t like Richard Dawkins (I admit to being a personal fan of his) and, because the SJS campaign was always conceived as being theist friendly, some of his other publicly expressed views cannot be representative of the campaign’s stance but this article is a work of brilliance IMO!
The focus of the article is one I hold dear though I had never directly thought of it these terms … if creationists are right then I am wrong! Not just me but every intelligent atheist here, virtually (take that as read from now on) every science teacher, every science lecturer, every popular science writer, every scientist an entire establishment is wrong. They are not simply wrong, this isn’t just a mistake but we, they, the entire scientific community is wrong, mind-bogglingly wrong on a scale that almost impossible to imagine.
Check it out:
“The Only One in Step”
Richard Dawkins
I can’t find the original volume so I may have got the exact words wrong, but I recall one of those marvellous old Punch cartoons in which every last detail is painstakingly explained. A devoted mother is looking proudly on at a military parade as her son’s platoon marches past: “There’s my boy, he’s the only one in step!” On The Guardian letters page of December 19th 2006, I initiated an exchange about Professor Andrew McIntosh of Leeds university, who has publicly stated that he believes the world is only 6,000 years old, and publicly stated that the theory of evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics. Both these beliefs place McIntosh out of step with his scientific colleagues, not just his platoon but the entire regiment – to paraphrase Evelyn Waugh, the whole ruddy division. Amazingly, McIntosh is Professor of Thermodynamics at Leeds, and, equally amazingly, a letter supporting him has now appeared from Professor Stuart Burgess, Head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Bristol University . Other letters to the Editor indicate that a distressing number of otherwise knowledgeable and intelligent people have little conception of the enormity of what is being said.
Science doesn’t work by vote and it doesn’t work by authority. It is possible that Burgess and McIntosh really are the only ones in step, and the whole scientific establishment is flat wrong. Indeed, I shall bias my discussion in their favour by continuing to use that word ‘establishment’ with all its pejorative overtones of fuddyduddy, stick-in-the-muddy authoritarianism. I like mavericks. I like free spirits who buck the trend and strike out on their own. They are not usually right, but on the rare occasions when they are, they are very right indeed: importantly so, and all power to them. Maybe Burgess and McIntosh are right and all the rest of us – biologists, geologists, archeologists, historians, chemists, physicists, cosmologists and, yes, thermodynamicists and respectable theologians, the vast majority of Nobel Prizewinners, Fellows of the Royal Society and of the National Academies of the world – are wrong. Not just slightly wrong but catastrophically, appallingly, devastatingly wrong. It is possible, and I am going to follow that possibility through to its logical conclusion. I shall not here defend the views held by the scientific establishment. I am among those who have done that elsewhere, in many books. My purpose in this article is only to convey the full magnitude of the error into which, if Burgess and McIntosh are right, the scientific establishment has fallen.
[Read The Rest Of The Article Here]
http://richarddawkins.net/article,453,The-Only-One-in-Step,Richard-Dawkins
Yes he can be blunt, yes he can get right up yer nose but sometimes he is just plain awesome!!!!
Kyuuketsuki (Co-Founder: “Science, Just Science” Campaign)
