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Is Dawkins really a scientist?
Saturday 9 February 2008
With regard to Dawkins’s approach to the rationality underlying the universe, the physicist John Barrow observed in a discussion: “You have a problem with these ideas, Richard, because you’re not really a scientist. You’re a biologist.” The audacious accusation is recorded in “There is a God: How the world’s most notorious atheist changed his mind” by Antony Flew with Roy Abraham Varghese. According to Barrow, biology is little more than a branch of natural history. “Biologists,” says Barrow, “have a limited, intuitive understanding of complexity. They’re stuck with an inherited conflict from the nineteenth century, and are only interested in outcomes, in what wins out over others. But outcomes tell you almost nothing about the laws that govern the universe.” (pp xix-xx)
Appendix A to the book, which I shall summarise and comment on in a later blog, seeks to show that our immediate experience of rationality, life, consciousness, thought, and the self militate against every form of atheism including the newest.
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