"The universe doesn't owe us condolence or consolation; it doesn't owe us a nice warm feeling inside"
"I was driving through the English countryside with my daughter Juliet, then aged six, and she pointed out some flowers by the wayside. I asked her what she thought wildflowers were for. She gave a rather thoughtful answer. 'Two things,' she said. 'To make the world pretty, and to help the bees make honey for us'. I was touched by this and sorry I had to tell her that it wasn't true…What are flowers and bees, wasps and figs, elephants and bristlecone pines–what are all living things really for?…The answer is DNA," Richard Dawkins, Climbing Mount Improbable (W.W. Norton 1997), 256,268.
Speaking at the Cheltenham Science Festival, Dawkins, a prominent atheist, said that it was ‘pernicious’ to teach children about facts that were ‘statistically improbable’ such as a frog turning into a prince.
Speaking about his early childhood he said: “Is it a good thing to go along with the fantasies of childhood, magical as they are? Or should we be fostering a spirit of scepticism?’
“I think it's rather pernicious to inculcate into a child a view of the world which includes supernaturalism – we get enough of that anyway,’ the 73-year-old said. “Even fairy tales, the ones we all love, with wizards or princesses turning into frogs or whatever it was. There’s a very interesting reason why a prince could not turn into a frog – it's statistically too improbable.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/10875912/Reading-fairy-stories-to-children-is-harmful-says-Richard-Dawkins.html
Dawkins is such a bore. Fairy tales are an integral part of raising children. It nurtures their sense of wonder (or their 'appetite for wonder') without hitting them with theological treatises and demanding too much of them. Dawkins should be applauding this, right? Or is there some objective criteria that determines what one can perceive as wonder?
ReplyDeleteDawkins constantly flits between fairy tales and belief in God, conflating the two without ever justifying the conflation. Children are pretty adept at growing out of belief in fairy tales and differentiating such belief from belief in God. Dawkins has never been able to make this elementary distinction, hence his myopic obsession with Santa Claus. Despite his bluster and posturing, he never really left Santa behind.
Dawkins never quite spells out what a 'false belief' is and why it is 'wrong' to hold a false belief? Let's grant his worldview. Instilling a sense of the supernatural in children will very likely lead to greater efficiency in propagating their genes, since people who believe in the supernatural generally live longer and have more children, and so belief in the supernatural could, paradoxically, be both a 'true' and a 'false' belief at the same time, since NS clearly 'favours' those with supernatural beliefs. So on Dawkins' own terms he ought to be writing books and articles about the need to foster in children a sense of the supernatural.