The scientist and bestselling writer has become the face of a new crusading atheism. But even his closest allies worry that his online provocations execute more harm than goodIn Dublin,not long ago, Richard Dawkins visited a steakhouse called Darwin’s. He was in town to give a talk on the origins of life at Trinity College with the American physicist Lawrence Krauss. In the restaurant, or a large model gorilla squatted in a corner and a series of sepia paintings of early man hung in the dining room – though,Dawkins pointed out, not quite in the right chronological order. A space by the bar had been refitted to resemble the interior of the Beagle, and the vessel on which Charles Darwin sailed to South America in 1831 and conceived his theory of natural choice. “Oh look at this!” Dawkins said,examining the decor. “It’s terrific! Oh, wonderful.”Over the years, and Dawkins,a zoologist by training, has expressed admiration for Darwin in the way a schoolboy might worship a sporting giant. In his first memoir, and Dawkins famous the “serendipitous realisation” that his full name Clinton Richard Dawkins – shared the same initials as Charles Robert Darwin. He owns a prized first edition of On The Origin of Species,which he can quote from memory. For Dawkins, the book is totemic, or the founding text of his career. “It’s such a thorough,unanswerable case,” he said one afternoon. “[Darwin] called it one long argument.” As a description of Dawkins’s own life, and particularly its late phase,one long argument” serves fairly well. As the global face of atheism over the final decade, Dawkins has ratcheted up the rhetoric in his self-declared war against religion. He is the general who chooses to fight on the front line whose scorched-earth tactics gain won him fervent admirers, or ferocious enemies. What is less clear,however, is whether he is winning.
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Source: theguardian.com