Dawkins has a new book coming out soon, this time it's aimed at children and seems to cover all kinds of important stuff from how science works to comparisons of things like creation myths through to specific facts like what a rainbow is made of (nod to Keats), from the PDF that you can download on the RD site the illustrations look wonderful, I hope it does well.
No doubt this will ruffle some religious sensibilities again (oh well, not difficult) I can imagine the apologists and fleas flocking in readiness even now, "how dare he call our beautiful creation stories "myths" who is he to thrust so called scientific facts in our face, science doesn't know everything, atheism is just another religion, Hitler was an atheist, my (insert God of choice) is love bla, bla" and such like; all of which will miss the point by a country mile as usual. Any bets on what follow up books will emerge? "The magic of faith" perhaps, "The reality of God" no doubt, lot's of illustrations of lambs, clouds and sunbeams, I should snap up some appropriate domain names, just in case :)
5 comments:
I'll be interested to see what this is like; hopefully it's quite matter of fact and not too over the top.
My son recently asked me what churches are for, and then we had a discussion about the idea that people have of "god" and that it's one of those things like (as I had explained to him previously) lucky 7 and unlucky 13, and that some people believe things even though there really aren't (what we usually consider reasons) to believe them.
Anyway, I didn't hear about this anywhere else - thanks for posting it.
Hi Lisa, my kids talk to me about religion all the time, it's drilled into them at school almost constantly and I'm really pleased that they have lots of really good questions about it.
My strategy is to always try to get back to the value of evidence, and that they need to make their own minds up; i.e. I try not to tell them what to think but teach them to think for themselves. I must say thought it's difficult to hide my contempt for some of the more indoctrinating and/or proselytising elements that they come up against, so it is difficult if not impossible to play a completely "neutral" role.
Yeah, we had a fast forward moment last week when in the car on the way home from school my son told me he'd been to a catholic church. I almost drove the car into the centre of the roundabout, but calmly asked for more info.
Turns out as part of the South America topic they visited a catholic church (he's at an independent school with no religious affiliation). So apparently it was about the religious proclivities of people in Bolivia, Argentina, Brazil, etc.
Still, he now sometimes says out loud, as we drive around town: there's jesus on the cross. Yeah, whatever -just propaganda, I think.
I think we will talk more about the details as he gets older. I also am aiming for not telling him things, but pointing out people think different things and letting him do some ruminating of his own. He's showing very rational tendencies as he already gets rather annoyed if anyone talks about the tooth fairy, pointing out that people just make those stories up up, so I expect the apple will not fall far from the tree.
I'm sure the book will be of interest to children preparing for a life in science.
It might be of less interest to children wondering why they have to deal with starvation, poverty, lack of natural resources - like water (38% of the planet does not have access to sanitation), massive global slavery (200m people are currently classed as slaves - a greater number than at any time in the past), starvation (a billion people starving is greater than at any time in the past), rising mental illness, 50m refugees from war in 2010 alone, and massive spending on weapons in the leading nations in which capitalism and science - not faith, and not religion - are the major players.
If the world is an ordered place, and man's biology is an ordered system, this mass disorder cries out for a solution. We all want to know all about the dust on Mars and the bones of dinosaurs dead now some 65m years. This information alone will solve half of the world's problems.
So, if science has some answers in this book or some proposals to help sort all this out - this book is going to be massive, massive best seller and I wish it everlasting success.
Iain, thanks for your comment. To be honest though I’m not sure I understand what you are implying other than a somewhat cynical swipe at a simplistic straw man of what science actually is. If the solutions to problems of sanitation, disease and food shortages are not scientific ones (as they already are in the developed world) then I can only conclude that either you have an utterly different idea of what science is from me or you live on a different planet?
As for children in underdeveloped countries not having an interest in science, I would beg to differ, in every third world country I have ever visited people have expressed an urgent need and desire for real science and technology education; most already have an embarrassment of medieval theocratic crap being shoved down their throats and guess what, it does nothing to help them other than give false consolation. Charity doesn’t seem to work in the long term either, so actually the evidence is that politics and religious dogma (like banning contraception or oppressing Women) and a *lack* of secular education are correlated much more strongly with poverty than a lack of Iron Age mythology.
If you are implying that religion does have solutions to these problems, solutions that science does not have, then please tell us what they are! Our shared Human experience (world-wide) so far is that religions of various flavours have had at least 10,000+ years to provide concrete answers to such challenges; so far from what I’ve seen the best they can come up with are solutions that are only materialized in the next life.
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