Dawkins and the Aliens
Yesterday, I talked about one of Aaron Tabor’s favorite arguments. Today, I want to talk about his other favorite argument. Aaron claims that Richard Dawkins believes that aliens seeded the Earth with life and since Dawkins is the Pope of atheism, all atheists are wrong and therefore Jesus.
Aaron has presented this type of argument to me multiple times and every time I refute it. But he keeps using it. Over the weekend, I got him to concede slightly. Now he claims that Dawkins “may” believe that aliens seeded the Earth with life, but he still continues to argue as if Dawkins seriously believes this.
So where is Aaron getting this from? Well, as it turns out there is a scene in the film “Expelled” in which Dawkins talks about this. For starters, Expelled is a ridiculous film starring Ben Stein. It is basically Creationist propaganda. The film makers heavily edited the Dawkins interview and Ben Stein talked over him a lot. Here is that interview.
So there it is, proof that Dawkins believes aliens designed life on Earth. Well not exactly. The point that I think Dawkins was trying to make was that even if life on Earth were designed, the designer would also need to be designed through a natural process of evolution via Natural Selection. In other words, the question of who designed life could just as easily be applied to the question of who designed God. I think he was also probably trying to make the point that many things are possible, but that doesn’t make those things probable. Dawkins has stated many times that he does not in fact believe aliens seeded the Earth with life and that he finds that possibility to be highly improbable.
But let’s say for the sake of argument that Dawkins really did believe something like this. Who cares? How does it relate to what you or I believe? Dawkins isn’t the Pope of me. No one is. Atheism isn’t a religion and as a point of fact, most Catholics don’t even agree 100% with their actual Pope of them. One of the great things about being an atheist is that we are free thinkers. We think for ourselves and we have no dogma, no doctrine, and no sacred text. Sure, we joke about The God Delusion or The Origin of Species being our Bible, but it is a joke. I think you would be hard pressed to find any atheist who would worship either of these books in the same way Christians worship the Bible. No, our only holy book is evidence!
Related articles
- Richard Dawkins: Uncertainty vs. dogmatism (examiner.com)
- All Christians are Dogmatic! (dangeroustalk.net)
- Paula Kirby on Dawkins’s “agnoticism” (whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com)
Filed under: anti-intellectualism, Atheism NOT Religion, Authority, Creationism, god of the gaps, Religious Manipulation, science