宗教與科學的戰火重燃？——論道金斯的無神論

導言：宗教與科學的戰火重燃？

不少人都說，在人類歷史中，宗教與科學正在進行一場殊死之戰，教廷審判伽理略就是一個明顯例子。其實這說法有很大問題，因為宗教與科學的關係是相當複雜的，一些衝突的個案故然存在，但這不能反映兩者有本質性、不能避免的矛盾。再者，近代的歷史學家指出宗教對科學的發展也有不少正面的影響，甚至認為現代科學的興起很大程度要歸功於基督教的創造論。所以，宗教與科學的戰爭說基本上是一個神話，特別是最近五十年內，科學與宗教的對話已迅速發展成為一門茁壯的跨學科研究，而其中的主流意見是肯定宗教與科學的和諧的。

On Richard Dawkins’ Atheism and His Criticisms of the Design Argument

On Richard Dawkins’ Atheism

and His Criticisms of the Design Argument

Kai-man Kwan

[Published: Kai-man Kwan, “On Richard Dawkins’ Atheism and His Criticisms of the Design Argument.” CGST Journal 49 (July 2010), pp. 165-203.]

Introduction: An Evolutionary Biologist Turned the High Priest of Atheism

Richard Dawkins is Reader in Zoology in the University of Oxford. He has a good reputation in his field of ethology. In particular, his books The Selfish Gene and The Extended Phenotype have made significant contribution to evolutionary biology, and won him a fame in the 1980s. He is now the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University who is supposed to promote science to the general public. Dawkins is a good communicator, and his books on popular science are rightly acclaimed.

Dawkins has long expressed negative opinions about religion. The perceived threat of creationism has provoked him to write a polemical work The Blind Watchmaker. This work established his status as one of the most prominent contemporary defenders of Darwinism. He not only tried to point out the weaknesses in the arguments of the Creationists, but also heaped scorn on them. Gradually, he became heavily involved in the contemporary science/religion debate. His attention was no longer restricted to the issue of evolution. He also relentlessly advocated the conflict thesis that science and religion were basically incompatible. In recent years, he launched an all-out attack on religion, root and branch. Dawkins has already uttered a number of antireligious statements during his Royal Institution Christmas Lectures. In a two-part series The Root of All Evil? on Channel 4, which was shown in Jan 2006, Dawkins argued that religion is not only irrational, but also positively evil and harmful. In 2006 he published the God Delusion, which summarized his case against religion, and for a kind of in-your-face atheism. Since he is so passionate about his own atheistic position and is so zealous to propagate it, he can be called the high priest of atheism. In this paper, I will examine Dawkins’s atheistic naturalism with a special focus on his criticisms of the design argument. His God Delusion will be extensively quoted (with the book title abbreviated as GD).[1]