Well, today I was doing some reading on evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and found out that he and Adams had been good friends prior to Adams death in 2001 and Dawkins used some quotes by Adams to try to express his sentiments about religion. The one I came upon reads as the following:
"Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?"
It's an interesting, humorous quote but its one that just irritates me, and I have to go to something I heard Don Miller say in order to express my irritation.
"If you and I were to get up for sunrise tomorrow and you were to say, "My goodness,the sunrise is beautiful," and I were to say, "Prove it. Its just dirt and light and water."
...So if I had a pile of camel dung, we would all go, "Well that's not beautiful" and then we'd look at the sunrise and we'd go, "Well that is beautiful."
"Well what's the difference? It's dirt and light and water. That's all. But nobody stands around camel dung and says, 'Look at the way the light shines off it' - you don't do that. There are certain things that are mysterious and they exist in the realm of the poetic."
That's why the quote irritates me. To these scientists and atheists, there is nothing more to these two scenes other than a combination of elements and the picturesque nature of one scene is more pleasing and causes certain chemical reactions in the brain that the other doesn't. Yet Dawkins and Adams feel they're capable of saying something IS beautiful. "IS" is a definitive word - it is absolute and beauty is a metaphysical term, something I don't think Dawkins has any right to try to acknowledge.
Moreover, I find it irritating that Dawkins tries to take any sort of moral stance against anything (see: Religion as Child Abuse on Dawkins' page). It's completely and totally inconsistent of him. In an atheist's world, morality cannot exist. I've said it before: altruism and morality are simply byproducts of chemical reactions in the brain - that's all that there CAN be in a determinist's worldview. To go against that "morality" is to redefine morality subjectively, because morality is simply reactive. One simply does or doesn't do what one can or cannot do, yet Dawkins is trying to take a stand against the church and religious parenting on moral grounds? Good job, Richard - we really should just have these parents killed, don't you think? Strengthen the gene pool?
As an English major, its amazing to me to note the inconsistencies in rhetoric that public figures CONSTANTLY fall victim to. I just cannot understand how the public falls victim to such propaganda time and time again without noticing the inconsistencies on both conservative and liberal sides. Good job, world.
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