Richard Dawkins to Appear on Doctor Who

Ravalox writes "In an interview with The Independent, current curator of the Doctor Who legacy Russell T. Davis announced that distinguished evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins would be making an appearance in the new season of Doctor Who. To quote Davies: 'People were falling at his feet ... We've had Kylie Minogue on that set, but it was Dawkins people were worshipping.' Dawkins is the author of many best-selling non-fiction books, from The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker to The God Delusion, and a renowned advocate of both Darwin's evolutionary theory and the merits of atheism."

Not the first member in his family...

I just thought I'd mention that Richard Dawkins is married to Lalla Ward, who played the Time Lady Romana (second version) in the original series. She was also married to Tom Baker for a short time.

Re:Not the first member in his family...

And Douglas Adams wrote for the old show. Douglas Adams and Dawkins were good friends.

And

He is going to be holding a toilet plunger and be shouting "Exterminate!! Exterminate the believer!!"

Richard Dawkins + Time Machine

Dr Who: Richard, what are you doing with that fish, duct tape and four lizard legs?
Dawkins: What, you think evolution *just happened*?

Re:Richard Dawkins + Time Machine

Dr Who: Wait, where did you get duct tape and four lizard legs? This is like a gajillion BC.
Dawkins: I brought the legs with me, I found the duct tape here. Who knew?

Put Simply

There is no god, and Dawkins is his prophet.

Realignment of priorities is in order

We've had Kylie Minogue on that set, but it was Dawkins people were worshipping.

Kylie Minogue [google.com] was on the set and people were chasing Richard Dawkins??? Wow, that show really IS for geeks.

How profoundly sad

That someone can be famous in the 21st century for being an "advocate of Darwin's evolutionary theory".

Re:How profoundly sad

At least Dawkins is rational and uses his brain.

I was just saying that it's kind of a bummer that those qualities are rare enough to draw admiration.

Atheists, Come Out!

View his call to arms: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/113 [ted.com]

Have we ever done a poll on religious beliefs on Slashdot?

H2G2

Dawkins is the author of many best-selling non-fiction books, from The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker to The God Delusion,...

... and Who is this God Person Anyway?

Re:Dawkins may may a renowned evolutionary biologi

But he's only famous/infamous for his atheism, and he knows it. He certainly wouldn't be invited to be on "Dr. Who" if he wasn't an Atheist.

There are plenty of atheists who aren't famous. I'm one of them. Dawkins isn't famous for his atheism, he's famous for being a vocal advocate of his atheism and doing it rather well. It's a subtle distinction, but an important one.

Ironically, atheism may have work out financially for him, but he sends the wrong evolutionary message by promoting it for society. Theists do better in society, so that's what he should remind people of, "survival of the fittest". Dawkins should promote theism, as those who embrace God are the fittest to survive in our society, due to social stigmatism on atheists..

And this, of course, is silly. Don't confuse Social Darwinism with Biological Darwinism. The rest isn't even worth a response.

Re:Dawkins may may a renowned evolutionary biologi

Agree with the message above, priest/xaman/rabi is the only job where your boss doesn't exist.

Re:Dawkins may may a renowned evolutionary biologi

But he's only famous/infamous for his atheism

He has published a set of highly readable books on evolution [google.co.uk] over many years.

He certainly wouldn't be invited to be on "Dr. Who" if he wasn't an Atheist.

Where is your evidence for this statement ? I find it sad that those of religious pursuasion are prepared to make definitive statements without the facts to back them up.

Theists do better in society,

Again: evidence ?

Re:Dawkins may may a renowned evolutionary biologi

Theists do better in society, so that's what he should remind people of, "survival of the fittest". Dawkins should promote theism, as those who embrace God are the fittest to survive in our society, due to social stigmatism on atheists.

You are using the classic "religion is useful" argument. But just because it may be useful, doesn't mean it is true. What Dawkins is interested (as he has stated repeatedly) in is truth, not potentially locally convenient psychology. Also, categorizing atheists as you are is nonsense. We are all atheists with respect to specific theologies and gods we don't believe in. You know that feeling you get when people start talking to you in all earnestness about how great Poseidon is? That's how Dawkins feels about your god. Finally, using evolution and "survival of the fittest" in the way you are is an antiquated tautology. "Fittest" in an evolutionary sense is defined as those who survive and reproduce. Atheists seem to be doing fine in that regard and always have (much of China, for example, is atheistic by some Abrahamic standard and is, in fact, also mostly nontheistic too). Finally, I'm sure the fact that he's married to one of the most famous and popular Dr. Who characters of all time might have something to do with why he's appearing on the show (see the first post).

But he's only famous/infamous for his atheism, and he knows it.

I"m guessing his multiple bestsellers (many of which have nothing to do with religion) and being the inventor of the term "meme" AND his position as Charles Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford might have something more to do with his fame. By the way, he also happens to be a non-astrologer too.

Re:Dawkins may may a renowned evolutionary biologi

"But he's only famous/infamous for his atheism"

Yeah right, and Hawkings is only famous for his wheelchair.

"Theists do better in society"

Which society? - India for instance has at least twice as many polytheists as the entire population of the US.

Re:Dawkins may may a renowned evolutionary biologi

Even Dawkins admits that, strictly speaking, he's an agnostic. He doesn't know that God doesn't exist. But there's any number of things that could just as easily apply to. No one says they're an agnostic with respect to unicorns. They just say "Unicorns aren't real." Only when it comes to this "God" concept, does everyone become such a pedant. If we applied the same standards to God that we did to unicorns, no one would take Dawkins to task for saying he's an atheist. He explains this all in "God Delusion." I suggest you read it.

Nonsense.

their world would be shattered completely if they learned that they were wrong.

"Learned" implies evidence, and if there were any evidence they would simply change their stance to the appropriate form of theism. That's the rational way to go about things. To date there has not been any single piece of credible evidence for the existence of God(s).

Like the other poster said: Please just read The God Delusion, it explains all of this.

Re:Dawkins may may a renowned evolutionary biologi

There is no distinction at all between any fictional beings, except perhaps that deities happen to be less likely to exist than unicorns. With the unicorn, the FSM, or the yet unseen sub-atomic particle you only need to admit (as a skeptic) that you cannot prove or say much about it, since no evidence for the positivity of it's existence has been shown.*

With gods and such, particularly the monotheist version,you just have to sit back and ponder on the entire scheme of the religion at hand to see how bizarre the underlying philosophy is. People think it's the tenets of faith/the law that makes religion un-likable, but that's not really it. I would be willing to accept any of that, but it is the "god" bit itself that is disgusting. Thousands of religions, each thinking they are "right", the others are wrong, their god is the Truth, all of them required of "believe" that. All of them expected to live and die by those respective "beliefs", those "leaps of faith" that become a microcosm of existence for each, sending them to the limits of insane behavior. And all of them not recognizing that it is their respective god that is responsible for this sick scenario, assuming we forget everything we know about physics and the dynamics of the world. Islam, the most philosophically advanced theology of the monotheist faiths(abstract god, non-deification of humans including prophets..etc), had its second Caliph arrest and kill anyone who talked about destiny/determinism debate. He had good reason to do so. The only gods that are not six-year-old in mentality happen to be the ones that do not "want" you to do things.... they sidestep the philosophical debate entirely. And by doing so, they warrant no attention from us as well - i.e the only sensible gods do not matter. It's a catch .22 that religion cannot win.

Religion is a simplistic, silly idea that has no place in the free world of today. We have strong instincts for it, sadly, but I hope one day we no longer need them to emotionally survive. The world is beautiful without deities. Let's grow up and forget about them.

* This is in contrast to mathematical logic, where you can indeed make statements about provability, both negative (there does not exist...) and positive(there exists...).

Re:Dawkins may may a renowned evolutionary biologi

In the God Delusion, Dawkins is quite clear, I believe he titles the chapter "Why there is almost certainly no God".
Most atheists are aware that you can't prove the absence of God, anymore than you can prove his presence.
So most atheists could be called agnostics, but we are as agnostic about the Christian Yahweh, as we are about Thor or Shiva.

So yes we are technically agnostics, but that may confuse us with those who actually give some credibility to these superstitions.
Almost all atheists, are saying "There is no (credible reason to believe there is a) God"

Remember, Atheism is "Free of Theism", not "God does not exist"

Re:Dawkins may may a renowned evolutionary biologi

[...] there's certainly no way to prove that there's not a god, so aren't they also believing in something independent of scientific proof?

There is also no way to disprove that the universe was created by a tea pot orbiting Venus. There is no readily available tool to scientifically disprove that.

We atheists simply think that it is plain silly to believe in the tea pot because some ancient scrolls written by some guru says so. Now, if someone were to find the tea pot, or any trace of it, it would be interesting.

Re:Dawkins may may a renowned evolutionary biologi

I never really understood atheism anyway.

Usually "agnosticism" means someone who actively believes you cannot know whether God exists or not. Atheism comes in two flavors: strong and weak.

"Strong" and "weak" refer to the comprehensiveness of the propositions encompassed, not to the degree of conviction or its vigor. A weak atheist position is that of a person who is without a belief in God. They don't "actively disbelieve" in God any more than you "actively disbelieve" in the brown chicken in my attic. There is no reason to think such a chicken (or God) exists--you simply lack belief in it, without "denying" the chicken. Or God.

A strong atheist position is the position that no God exists, supported by proof, evidence or belief. Whether this is the sort of thing that can be proved is perhaps open to debate--reasonable people disagree on whether it is a religious belief or not.

In my view, it's pretty slam dunk to see that any time a religious belief has resulted in something testable that could be offered as proof or disproof of God's existence, we have found that that sort of God doesn't exist. I don't know how many times you need to be told by someone that there is a chicken behind this door, no really, only to find when you open it that there is no chicken, before you suspect that there probably aren't any chickens here at all.

No proof does not mean 50:50 probability.

I think you would find that most atheists would accept that you can't prove that personal gods do not exist.

But that doesn't mean the odds are the same as a coin toss. If we take Christianity for example, each time we find an inconsistency in the Bible (no walls around Jericho, no reports of anyone outside the middle east reporting a global flood, no town of Nazareth at the time Jesus was supposed to be alive, no reports of graves opening and the dead walking in anything but the gospels) then it lowers the probability of a biblical god.

And people of faith take a much more extreme attitude than most atheists. They insist that the probability of their god existing is 100% exactly, while the probability of anyone else's god existing is 0% exactly.

They need to realise that if you can't disprove that Yahweh exists then you can't disprove that Zeus, Odin or Atum (at least he had fun creating the world) exist either.

Re:Dawkins may may a renowned evolutionary biologi

Occams razor is supposed to be applied to scientific theories.

Not at all. It is a simple logical device which you can apply to any deduction.

Re:Dawkins may may a renowned evolutionary biologi

Do you know about man who was not made an EU commissioner because he was a Catholic?

That's disingenuous: He was rejected because he stated that he would be compelled to force his religiously based views on others -- it had nothing to do with him being Catholic.

I do think Dawkins does do one thing that is harmful: he attacks theism without understanding it.

This is a fallacy. You positively do not have to be understand very much about Norse mythology to realize that's it's a silly belief system. The same applies to other gods.