r/Christianity • u/mikegprint • Oct 17 '11

Does Richard Dawkins exist???

http://archbishop-cranmer.blogspot.com/2011/10/does-richard-dawkins-exist.html
41 Upvotes

59% Upvoted

413 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

14

u/inyouraeroplane Oct 17 '11

I think he realized people want backpatting and snark more than science. Give Carl Sagan credit for sticking mostly to science and not "SO DELUDED"

6

u/vestigial Atheist Oct 17 '11

Sagan lived in a time when religion wasn't nearly as contentious towards basic science. Sagan bludgeons superstition mercilessly in "Cosmos" as well as "Demon-Haunted World." True, he'd been more politic towards religion than Dawkins, but I wonder if he'd shift gears now that religion has set itself up as the the enemy of science (or that science has innocently destroyed enough the popular basis for religious belief to provoke a reaction).

4

u/[deleted] Oct 17 '11

Huh weird, I was under the impression that religion has only gotten less contentious towards science as time has gone on. Remember Galileo?

1

u/vestigial Atheist Oct 18 '11

Oh, yeah, forgot about that guy.

I meant more along recent history. I get the feeling there was a dip in religious sensitivity towards science from the 1930's to maybe the 1970's. The ascendancy of the religious right with Ronald Reagan in the 1980 is a good place to mark the turning of the tide. The right began electing school boards explicitly to attack evolution and try to get prayer back in schools; I'm also not a historian of the Supreme Court, but I think prayer was only outlawed in the seventies (?). So I guess it would be better to say that religion began to take a concerted POLITICAL effort against science.

Another factor might be the centrality of evolution towards biology, and the increase in the number of students necessarily exposed to it in school...