- Atheism
In 2006 religion was in the news again, and once again someone had written a book that had made a lot of people angry. Just as everyone wanted things to calm down and return to the illusory peace, along came this "militant atheist" Richard…
- Biblical Morality
The history confirms it. Christians were on both sides of abolition, and the slaveholders had the better of the proof-texting; the Southern Baptist Convention was founded in 1845 to defend slavery from scripture and apologised for it in 19…
- Humanism
The company. The label has been worn by Bertrand Russell, Carl Sagan, Kurt Vonnegut, who was honorary president of the American Humanist Association and said at Isaac Asimov's memorial that "Isaac is up in heaven now", which brought the ho…
- Mormonism
The founder. Smith was tried in 1826 for "glass-looking", using a seer stone to find buried treasure for a fee; he dictated the Book of Mormon by placing the same stone in a hat and reading words from it. The Three Witnesses who swore they…
- Pantheism
Richard Dawkins called pantheism "sexed-up atheism". I agree, and would add that the sexing-up is exactly where the trouble starts.
- Teleological Argument - Argument from Design
A designer capable of fine-tuning a universe would itself be at least as complex and improbable as the thing it explains, and the argument would then apply to the designer. The theist exempts God from this by fiat (special pleading). See R…
- Darwinian Evolution
Darwin's theory has since been applied beyond biology, to the evolution of languages, technologies, and ideas (see Richard Dawkins on memes, and Daniel Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea, 1995), with varying success. The core insight, that…
- Evolution by natural selection
Evolution is not a random process. While genetic mutations arise randomly with respect to the organism's needs, natural selection, the central mechanism of biological evolution, is non-random: it systematically favours traits that enhance…
- Evolution
Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution (2009)
- Religious Upbringing of Children
The label. Richard Dawkins made the point in The God Delusion with a newspaper photograph captioned with three children's religions, and asked how the caption would read if it had said "a Keynesian child" instead. Religious identity is ass…
- The God Delusion
Richard Dawkins (2006)
- The Portable Atheist
Subtitled Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever, this is Hitchens' anthology of unbelief: Lucretius, Omar Khayyam, Hobbes, Spinoza, Hume, Shelley, Mill, Marx, George Eliot, Darwin, Twain, Freud, Bertrand Russell, Einstein, Orwell, Carl Sa…
- The Selfish Gene
Richard Dawkins (1976)
- People who be and be not based
Richard Dawkins - Author, Evolutionary biologist
- Douglas Adams
Douglas Adams (1952–2001), author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. A "radical atheist" and close friend of Richard Dawkins, who smuggled more philosophy into comedy than most philosophers manage in prose. The puddle that marvels at…
- John Lennox
John Lennox (born 1943), Northern Irish mathematician at Oxford and Christian apologist. Argues that science and faith are compatible and that the universe's intelligibility points to a mind behind it. Debated Richard Dawkins and Christoph…
- William Paley
Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (1986), whose title is the reply
- Recomended YouTube Channels
The Poetry of Reality with Richard Dawkins — https://www.youtube.com/@poetryofreality — Richard Dawkins' own channel: interviews, lectures and readings. Dawkins is on the based list, which makes the missing note an oversight rather than a…
