Sunday, April 8, 2007

Dawkins and Collins on NPR's Fresh Air

Dawkins and Collins had separate interviews on NPR's Fresh Air (not yet posted). As usual Dawkins is excellent and answers all questions with a combination of logic and humility that is to be commended. Its Collins that is always frustrating. On a dime, Collins can go from reasonable to crossing what I call the "point of intellectual dishonesty", or PID.

Some of Collins' reasons for believing in god are his experiences with patients, the DNA code and the nature of the universe. Here we have the three major PIDs of religious scientists; 1) Because it makes me feel better it should be true, 2) Because its awe-inspiring it must be god and 3) Belief out of ignorance. Collins should know better. I will not go into arguments because it has been covered much better than I could by Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and others but I thought outlining the fallacies in a short paragraph would help.

Am I the only one that would like to see them in a joint interview? They did have a joint interview on Time magazine, but the audio for this interview is not available.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

You write very well.