The Terrible Twins

Richard Dawkins was on Newsnight last night, talking about his book for kids The Magic of Reality.

Talk about 'terrible twins'! Dawkins was in typical high dudgeon but the only thing Paxman could find to challenge him about was his contention that science was more 'poetic' than 'myth'.

I was dead tired but I had to dash off a letter to Newsnight and this is what I sent:

I watched Jeremy Paxman’s interview with Richard Dawkins tonight and agree with Prof Dawkins that truth is more important than comfort.

While I have become used to Prof Dawkins supercilious and patronising comments about theists, I was somewhat concerned by Jeremy Paxman’s dismissal of everyone who believes in the essential truth of the Genesis account of creation as ‘stupid’.

There are a significant number of scientists with impeccable qualifications who find the biblical account of creation more scientific than the Darwinian hypothesis.

When I read The God Delusion, I expected to be seriously challenged. Instead, I was struck by the juvenile shallowness of Dawkins’ arguments. He used arguments I abandoned at the age of eighteen.

Moreover, it should not be overlooked that some years ago, on Melvin Bragg’s In Our Time, Dawkins admitted that he believed in spontaneous generation, only he preferred to call it ‘autocatalysm’ (self-creation) because that sounded more scientific.

I have read a number of Dawkins’ books as well as books by other evolutionists, and the more I read, the more I believe evolutionists have got it wrong.

I appreciate that Paxman and Dawkins, for reasons best known to themselves, are able to believe in unintelligent design, that everything came into being because Nothing exploded, that the laws of physics were established by random processes and that life arose spontaneously from non-life. I just don’t have the faith to believe all that stuff.

Dawkins and Paxman are intelligent men and I defend their right to tell me I’m mistaken or that I’m just plain wrong. Both men are entitled to their opinions and, given the opportunity, I could defend my views reasonably articulately. But although I’m certainly not the world’s most intelligent guy, I kind of resent being called ‘stupid’ because I disagree with them.

Now I've gotta get some sleep. Good night.