BeliefNet has an interview with Richard Dawkins. Here are some of the more provocative portions:
Interviewer: What are your thoughts about the despair some people feel when they ponder natural selection and random mutation? The idea of evolution and natural selection makes some people feel that everything is meaningless--people's individual lives and life in general.
Dawkins: If it's true that it causes people to feel despair, that's tough. It's still the truth. The universe doesn't owe us condolence or consolation; it doesn't owe us a nice warm feeling inside. If it's true, it's true, and you'd better live with it.
Interviewer: Is atheism the logical extension of believing in evolution?
Dawkins: They clearly can't be irrevocably linked because a very large number of theologians believe in evolution. In fact, any respectable theologian of the Catholic or Anglican or any other sensible church believes in evolution. Similarly, a very large number of evolutionary scientists are also religious. My personal feeling is that understanding evolution led me to atheism.
Actually, Dawkins draws a much stronger correlation between evolution and atheism in a speech he gave last Fall. You can hear what he had to say about the incompatibility of evolution and theism here.
The fact is that almost all of the more prominent writers on evolution say the same thing Dawkins says, i.e. that an understanding of evolution leads to atheism. It's obvious that evolution is a trojan horse for getting atheism into our schools and as such teaching it clearly violates the separation of church and state. The desire on the part of people like Dawkins to have evolution taught in schools is really an ill-disguised attempt to brainwash our children with atheistic materialism.
Does the foregoing sound a little extreme? Does it sound a bit laughable? If your answer is no, it sounds about right to you, then what justification is there for teaching evolution in schools? If your answer is yes, the assertions in the previous graph are absurd, then why is the same argument not considered absurd if we insert Intelligent Design in place of evolution and theism in place of atheism?
Interviewer: If you had to name top sources for optimism and hope in a naturalistic or materialistic worldview, what would they be?
Dawkins: I think there is something glorious in the universe, in contemplating the Milky Way galaxy, in contemplating the fact that this is only one in billions of galaxies, contemplating the fact that at the beginning of the 21st century, humanity really has gone a very long way toward understanding the universe in which we live and the life form of which we are a part. I find that a truly inspirational thought.
Here's another inspirational thought that follows from Dawkins' worldview: We're born, we look at the stars, and we die. So what's the point? For Dawkins' answer go back to the interviewer's first question and Dawkins' reply.
Dawkins says the following, and then the interviewer asks him about it:
Dawkins: Then there's the added fact that it is the only life we're ever going to get. Don't kid yourself that you're going to live again after you're dead; you're not. Make the most of the one life you've got. Live it to the full.
Interviewer: You've criticized the idea of the afterlife. What do you see as the problem with a terminally ill cancer patient believing in an afterlife?
Dawkins: Oh, no problem at all. I would never wish to disabuse or disillusion somebody who believed that. I care about what's true for myself, but I don't want to go around telling people who are afraid of dying that their hopes are unreal.
Funny, we thought he'd just done pretty much exactly that just prior to the interviewer's question.
