Atheist Forum

So there he is once again parading his religious bigotry on prime-time television.
Richard Dawkins is on our screens again lauding his idol in a new series called 'The Genius Of Charles Darwin'.
Now it so happens that Dawkins is an excellent pedant, expounding his opinions clearly and logically, and when he sticks to his brief (assuming that he had one) he makes an excellent job of describing Darwin's evolution and illustrated it marvellously from cruel nature filmed in Kenya and elsewhere.
Where he falls down , as he normally does, is in his conviction that:
Darwin's theory of evolution somehow 'disproves' religious belief in a God-created system

That the theory of evolution is somehow a radical departure from conventional knowledge and belief, whereas in effect, Darwin is now a part of mainstream orthodoxy
.
Darwin in his writings does not mention God and certainly at no point does he attack religion in the form of Christianity; all that he apparently left to his arch-disciple, Dawkins.
I am surprised at the way Dawkins continually makes unscientific statements as if they were in fact based upon scientific method.
For the theory of evolution is just that, a theory. Logically it points to the derivation of ;life from a single source - the single-celled bacterium or whatever, but that logical construction is currently not scientifically testable and therefore is not scientific. The same strictures apply to his blase assumptions that life itself sprang accidentally out of lifeless chemicals. That can be argued with apparently flawless logic, but again it is not , at this time scientifically testable, or, to put it another way, any attempt to verify that opinion scientifically have been an absolute failure. Perhaps one day scientists will create life and verify Dawkins religious obsession, but until they do, he is not talking science.

But Dawkins does not stop there. Oh no! He goes further and maintains that God did not create the universe it 'just happened' in the big bang. Now this opinion, by its very nature will never be scientifically testable, so what Dawkins is telling us here is his religious belief, and quite frankly I am not interested in his religious beliefs. If he sticks to science, then he is good, even excellent, but when he ventures outside of science he is just another religious bore.
Now Darwin himself. His theory of evolution is elegant and from what we observe looks as if it is true. Dawkins maintains that this theory is possibly the most important scientific theory ever.
But is it?
I judge the importance of science from the effect that it has had upon the world - how it has changed our live (normally for the better). One only has to consider the effects of the following scientific discoveries upon our lives and compare them with any comparable effect that Darwin's theories have had to see just how small the impact of evolution has been upon our lives:
Newtons dynamic theories and calculus
Priestley's chemical discoveries
Faraday's electrical discoveries
Maxwell's electro-magnetic discoveries
Telephony discoveries
medical advance discoveries
Atomic theory discoveries.
Hertz's radio wave discoveries.
Relativity discoveries
Quantum theorem discoveries
Shockley's semi-conductor discoveries
Turing's computing discoveries

This short list has altered our world forever and improved the standards of living and life expectancy enormously. These are all effects of good science.

What effect has Darwin had except to change our view of the world?

Where he falls down , as he normally does, is in his conviction that:
Darwin's theory of evolution somehow 'disproves' religious belief in a God-created system

Darwin in his writings does not mention God and certainly at no point does he attack religion in the form of Christianity; all that he apparently left to his arch-disciple, Dawkins.

I am surprised at the way Dawkins continually makes unscientific statements as if they were in fact based upon scientific method.

For the theory of evolution is just that, a theory. Logically it points to the derivation of ;life from a single source - the single-celled bacterium or whatever, but that logical construction is currently not scientifically testable and therefore is not scientific.

The same strictures apply to his blase assumptions that life itself sprang accidentally out of lifeless chemicals. That can be argued with apparently flawless logic, but again it is not , at this time scientifically testable, or, to put it another way, any attempt to verify that opinion scientifically have been an absolute failure.

Perhaps one day scientists will create life and verify Dawkins religious obsession, but until they do, he is not talking science.

But Dawkins does not stop there. Oh no! He goes further and maintains that God did not create the universe it 'just happened' in the big bang. Now this opinion, by its very nature will never be scientifically testable, so what Dawkins is telling us here is his religious belief, and quite frankly I am not interested in his religious beliefs. If he sticks to science, then he is good, even excellent, but when he ventures outside of science he is just another religious bore.

Now Darwin himself. His theory of evolution is elegant and from what we observe looks as if it is true. Dawkins maintains that this theory is possibly the most important scientific theory ever.
But is it?
I judge the importance of science from the effect that it has had upon the world - how it has changed our live (normally for the better). One only has to consider the effects of the following scientific discoveries upon our lives and compare them with any comparable effect that Darwin's theories have had to see just how small the impact of evolution has been upon our lives:
Newtons dynamic theories and calculus
Priestley's chemical discoveries
Faraday's electrical discoveries
Maxwell's electro-magnetic discoveries
Telephony discoveries
medical advance discoveries
Atomic theory discoveries.
Hertz's radio wave discoveries.
Relativity discoveries
Quantum theorem discoveries
Shockley's semi-conductor discoveries
Turing's computing discoveries

This short list has altered our world forever and improved the standards of living and life expectancy enormously. These are all effects of good science.

What effect has Darwin had except to change our view of the world?

We don't need any theory to disprove the existence of God the above mentioned facts are not denyable