Are you a closet atheist?
I am what Richard Dawkins would call a closet atheist. That means I am an admitted atheist, but I don’t go around bragging about it. In fact, if possible, I avoid talking about the subject at all cost. I spent too much time in my youth going over and over this issue and I am a little weary of it: in the age of absolutism, it seems hard to change any minds or have meaningful discussions on this issue. The Socratic method of dialog died and with it went my interest in duscussing this almost pointless issue. But, there is a biological and an important cultural point of view to all this. In Dawkins’ book “The God Delusion,” he emphasizes how Darwin’s principle of natural selection offers a completely rational way of accounting for the seemingly most complex biological specializations we have identified. Some of these biological complexities, such as the rotor motor of bacteria or the vertebrate eye have been used in modern times by the “intelligent designers,” to infer the existence of God, as the master planner and designer. To me, the intelligent designers are the shills of religious dogma, reflecting the truly desperate religious fanatics who can’t live with science because they find it is encroaching on their religiosity: I certainly hope that’s true. But the science phobia of today is not doing America any great service. Dawkins’ point is that one could in fact, historically justify the concept of intelligent design right up until 1859, when Darwin’s “On the Origin of the Species” was first published wherein he introduced the concept of natural selection as the means by which all biological complexities could arise and thereby be explained by evolution. Darwin in fact used the eye as an example of something that seemed to be of some intelligent design, but, on closer examination, one could find examples of progressive evolutionary steps along the phylogenetic tree from the simple, pinhole camera eye of Nautilus to the most sophisticated eye of raptors and primates. Dawkins’ excellent book on this topic, “The God Delusion,” sold 1.5 million copies in its first year of print. He is a fluid and flamboyant writer who infuses his writing style with the high enthusiasm he has for science and evolution and the popular issues of religion and atheism. Richard Dawkins is currently a professor at Oxford University where he holds the Charles Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science. He is certainly our most famous and widely read atheist and a prominent secular humanist.
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