'Darwin's Rottweiler' and God

WORLD OF SCIENCE - BOB BROCKIE

A fortnight ago, Christian zealots in America ritually burned the effigy of the famous Oxford scientist Professor Richard Dawkins. Dawkins was given a church funeral service and his life-sized dummy set aflame.

Why immolate Professor Dawkins?

The Baptists were enraged because he is the world's noisiest atheist and because Dawkins' 2006 book The God Delusion has sold more than 1.5 million copies.

Zoologist Dawkins' first interests took him into the world of bee and chicken behaviour, memory, and the death of neuron cells. He also edited the authoritative journal Animal Behaviour for many years, before leaping to fame in 1976 with his bestseller The Selfish Gene. He followed that with several popular books championing Darwinian evolution and, so fierce was Dawkins in putting down anti-evolutionists, that he became known as "Darwin's rottweiler".

The professor was especially enraged by creationists, whom he saw as victims of a preposterous, mind-shrinking falsehood. Dawkins will not argue with creationists on a public stage because he says it gives them "the oxygen of respectability" – something he says they have not earned. He is happiest making anti- creationist TV programmes such as Beyond Belief.

More recently Dawkins has widened his range of fire, taking on religion in general. He argues that all religions, from Islam to Christianity, depend on a farrago of vacuous supernatural nonsense and it's not just harmless nonsense. He says religion can be lethally dangerous, as it gives believers unshakeable confidence in their own righteousness and teaches enmity toward other equally irrational faiths, leading to barbarous crusades, pogroms and jihads. Dawkins is contemptuous about all organised religion, which he compares to a brain disease.

As professor of the public understanding of science at Oxford, Dawkins cannot understand why people treat religious belief so politely and why it is above normal questioning and criticism. He thinks it should be open to the same public scrutiny and criticism as politics and science. "Let's stop being so damned respectful," he says and, acting on his own advice, brings his confrontational style to bear on all religious beliefs and practices. Dawkins says he does this to balance the well-funded, wall-to-wall propaganda of deluded fire-and-brimstone televangelists.

After the advances of the Enlightenment, Dawkins finds the current wave of religious fundamentalism, spiritualism, pseudoscience, mysticism, superstition and unreason sweeping the planet almost beyond belief and asks what century are we living in.

Before committing Dawkins' effigy to the flames, the US Christians called upon him to repent of his apostacism. No answer forthcoming, he was denounced as a shameless Antichrist, damned to burn for eternity in hell, and set alight in front of cameras to the accompaniment of agonised screams and canned laughter from an off-screen Devil.

A couple of days ago, the same zealots repeated their performance, but this time with "a Hitler named Hillary Clinton – the anti-God baby killer who plans to turn the United States into Sodom and Gomorrah". To see Professor Dawkins and Hillary Clinton go up in smoke, try Google for "Dawkins funeral" and "Hillary funeral".