Telegraph.co.uk

Richard Dawkins branded 'secularist bigot' by veteran philosopher

By Martin Beckford, Religious Affairs Correspondent
Last Updated: 9:01pm BST 02/08/2008

The prominent scientist Richard Dawkins has been denounced as a "secularist bigot" by a philosopher who was himself once renowned for being an atheist.

He is accused by Prof Antony Flew of being more interested in promoting his personal views than finding the truth, in the latest controversy over his best-selling book The God Delusion.

Prof Dawkins, professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, is also said to have "scandalously" selected particular quotes from Einstein to back up his claims that God does not exist and that people who believe in a divine creator despite an abundance of contradictory evidence are delusional.


However, the author has been left unshaken by this latest attack on his work, telling The Daily Telegraph that Prof Flew, now 85, has lost the ability to read a book, let alone write one.

Prof Flew, a former Reading University philosophy professor, was known as "the world's most notorious atheist" before he became convinced of the existence of a "divine intelligence" in 2004.

In an article for the Christian website Bethinking.org, he writes: "The fault of Dawkins as an academic was his scandalous and apparently deliberate refusal to present the doctrine which he appears to think he has refuted in its strongest form."

He says there are five references to Einstein in the index to The God Delusion, but no mention of his belief that the complexity of physics led him to conclude that there must be a divine intelligence behind it.

"An academic attacking some ideological position which he believes to be mistaken must of course attack that position in its strongest form. This Dawkins does not do in the case of Einstein and his failure is the crucial index of his insincerity of academic purpose and therefore warrants me in charging him with having become, what he has probably believed to be an impossibility, a secularist bigot."

He went on: "The whole enterprise of The God Delusion was not, as it at least pretended to be, an attempt to discover and spread knowledge of the existence or non-existence of God but rather an attempt - an extremely successful one - to spread the author's own convictions in this area."

Prof Dawkins replied: "Antony Flew, having lost the ability to write a book, was persuaded by a Christian ghost writer, Roy Varghese, to let him write it instead. It is one thing for a footballer or a supermodel to use a ghost writer, but there is something absurd about a philosopher using a ghost writer.

"Flew has now apparently lost the ability to read a book, too, for his 'review' of The God Delusion turns out to be a review of its index and nothing but its index. He only needed to read Chapter 1, in order to see the absurdity of his claims about my treatment of Einstein."

He added that an Einstein letter he tried to buy at auction this year proved that the physicist considered religions "childish superstitions".