Professor Richard Dawkins embroiled in Twitter row over Muslim comments

Long dick, I'm a fat man with a long dick

 

Long dick? No girth?

 

Some views held by the very religious is just dumb. That how I feel about their views, not how I view them. The were offered something beautiful and choose that even though the cost was logic. I understand the decision, I just find it harmful.

 

We can't have everything

 

Just fold it a few times and you should have something to be proud of

 

Why do you think there are so many Jewish tailors?

 

Because most of you are homos?

 

Haha, I wasn't expecting that reply. Cheers, I'm going to go watch figure skating now.

 

Lmao!

 

He is so much better in this form than on twitter. I still find some small disagreements, but at least his reasoning is very well thought out and laid out.

 

As Dawkins said, the following is a fact:

“All the world's Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge."

So why is everybody mad at poor little Richard? All he did was state a fact (albeit a trivial one) over a pubic medium. He is, after all, a learned man and a figure many people look to for facts. I don't think the real problem is with the fact, as he tries to make it out to be on his website. Even if people focus on the fact and argue about the fact and why he mentioned the fact, it's not the problem. It's just a statement of a fact.

Let's think about the next part.

"They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.”

Here is where the Richard boards the Snark Express straight to Asshole Town. Here he's attempting to turn the fact into a basis for hyperbole, which, in my analysis, reads as follows:

1. Muslims have done nothing of value for 500 years.
2. The worth of Muslims today is measured in Nobel Prizes and/or other standards of success invented by Westerners.

For being a internationally renowned thinker, he is being awfully reactionary and frankly, an old coot. I mean, if this doesn't sound like something your crazy grandpa would say at the dinner table, I don't know what is:

No, I have surely not heard those statements. But yes, I do think teenagers nowadays drive too fast.

 

I think the tweet can be read different ways depending on what your biases are. But according to Dawkins explanations on his website, here is how I think it was meant.
“All the world's Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge."
A statement of fact aimed at pointing out that the religion is in some way at fault for hindering great achievements.

then the second part
"They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.”
The people are capable of great achievements, they did it in the past.



As far as the Nobel Prizes being invented by the west, well choose another way to measure. Look around and randomly choose 10 things you would consider great inventions. are at least two of those inventions coming from Muslims?
This is not a knock of the ability of the people, it's a knock on the restrictive nature of the religion. The early indoctrination and requirement to adhere to specific lines of thought. I think Dawkins explains it well in this quote "I don’t think skin colour has the slightest bearing on ability to win Nobel Prizes, whereas it is highly probable that childhood education in a particular religion does. Educational systems that teach boys only memorisation of one particular book, and teach girls nothing at all, are not calculated to breed success in science."

I did not like Dawkins attempt to broach this topic via twitter because there are just too many ways to interpret such a statement. But now that we have more to go over, it's an interesting topic to look into. And I know that you have great affection for some Muslim peoples, and their culture. This is not an attack on most of that, it's not an attack on their hearts, it's not an attack on their personalities, it's an attack on the restrictive nature of the religion.

By the way, it does not only hold true to Muslims, but they are simply an immense block of people in the world. Any religion, if it is being applied in a restrictive nature, is going to result in a similar inability to excel at science. A scientific mind requires freedom to think outside the box, to unabashedly believe anything the facts bear out. The stronger one holds to the verasity of a religious claim the less likely they are to be able to hone a scientific mind.

 

Down to 285lbs. Don't make me fatter than I am. And if you do, add that weight to the girth of my dick. Please.

 

Just busting your balls brother. I'm a fat ass, and only 60 lbs. lighter than you. I'm probably shorter; being 5'8" too.

 

I agree with this. I don't think that analysis changes my point. He is ignoring the fact that different cultures measure great success in different ways. He is in essence acting as a gatekeeper to the "civilized" section of society and denying Muslims entrance based on an arbitrary criteria of number of Nobel Prizes won.

I don't think the "ten random inventions" is a reliable metric.

Islamic society, when stable, has produced many scientific achievements. In and around the Ottoman Empire in the middle ages there were huge advances in astronomy, mathematics and medicine made by Muslims scientists. Since the start of the Ottoman-Habsburg wars, scientific advances by Muslims have been on the decline due to external and internal strife in the Middle East, West Asia and North Africa. The fact that significant scientific work has dried up isn't due to the religion. It was there the whole time.

That quote describes the education Muslims receive perfectly... in tribal Pakistan. In the modern Middle East, the girls are often more educated than the boys. I think Dawkins is tripping over himself to be a reactionary atheist malcontent and not realizing that he is speaking in total hyperbole. It certainly doesn't help that he is doing it over twitter. He might as well be trying to have a rational discussion (not that I think that's his goal) in Youtube comments sections

Well put.

I would say that I think it's pretty unlikely that a Muslim is going to make any major breakthroughs in the field of say, evolution. But there is no difference in belief between Muslims and Christians that would hinder one over the other in scientific pursuits.

 

lets set Dawkins aside for a moment and look at the concept of using any metric. As humans, we judge, and especially if we are hoping to improve, we use metrics to make those judgments. This particular judgment was not an all reaching judgment of a peoples, but a specific one which holds one thing to be positive that some may not view as a positive. Scientific endeavors matter. Many think this is hogwash. If they think that advancements in tech, science, healthcare, education are trivial, and that what really matters are the bonds of family, the love of god, the overall happiness, then any metric that measures scientific study is pointless. And, there is a real logical and understandable basis for looking at the world in that lens. Just look at those two categories, there is a lot going to the second group.

But if you say that advancements do matter, science and tech, mathematics and physics, healthcare and medical research, then there are metrics that can be used. It is a reasonable metric to look at Science based Nobel Prizes. That's just one metric, but an interesting one. It says nothing about the abilities of 99.99999% of the population because so few garner such a prize, but it does mark those who make the biggest contributions in a field. If you choose chemistry, that's pretty specific, you could say that the best chemists the world has seen in the past century are not Muslim. That is a very specific statement based on this metric. Dawkins was simply opening up that metric.

There are other metrics that could be used, but they would draw the same ire but would be more difficult to track and less poignant.

Other metrics could look at scientific papers. We could look at patents. We could look at owners of tech companies. We could look at graduation rates from scientific fields. We could look at a lot of stuff, and each metric only gives a small piece of the puzzle. But that does not mean that there is not any merit to the single metric chosen.

You say it's due to external strife in the Middle East, but why is there so much ongoing external strife? That may have some to do with the religion too. sunni vs shiite as an example.

When you have such a rich history of scientific advancements that constricts to a trickle nowadays, I think there are going to be multiple reasons. Strife from fighting certainly may play a role, perhaps the disparate economic situation in many Muslim nations might share some blame. But I really think you are being blind if you don't think that religion also plays a large role in the situation.

You may ask why did the religion not hinder in the past, but it does now? that makes no sense. But that's not fair since scientific advancements are built off of past knowledge. 500 years ago, when there were many top minds, much less was known in the world as a whole so you could still be a scientist and not have that conflict with science. You are figuring out math for example, not something that slaps religion in the face like so much of science does today. If you are to learn today what is needed today to be a good scientist, you have to accept current logical paradigms like evolution, or at least have a well thought out scientifically based reason to deny that theory. There is so much more known today that being a very devout person precludes most people from developing a scientific mind.

I think he made a statement that was not representative enough. But I think you too are being disingenuous only pointing out tribal Pakistan. I think the truth lies somewhere in-between. I knew a teacher who was teaching in Dubai, a very westernized school, and some of the stories he told were ridiculous. Certainly not as bad as women not receiving education, but the topics they were allowed to cover were highly scrutinized and the textbooks were very demeaning to certain groups in society. By the way, he quit right after 911 when the kids were standing on their chairs and cheering for the towers falling down and drawing happy pictures of the towers and people jumping to their death. Sorry, got side tracked, but my point is that the truth lies in the middle.

It’s a level of religiosity. A Muslim and a Christian who are both extremists wont be studying the periodic table. But I think there are more extremist Muslims in the world than Christian extremists.



I don’t agree with everything Dawkins said, but I do think there are some underlying topics that should be discussed more often in an open but not racist way. Because these topics are race-adjacent they appear to be dangerous things to talk about. But fact is that being highly religious is a problem in our modern world, at least from my perspective.

 

Oh man, I didn't mean to write that much. lets just smoke the peace pipe instead.

 

You've touched on a lot of really good points here and I agree with most. I just want to make a few comments on the sections above that I bolded.

The first bolded section: I think this is basically the point I want to make. However, as long as we're both trying not to be hyperbolic, I would amend it a bit. In my experience in MENA and with Muslims, I would not describe their attitude towards science and tech as "trivial" at all. I taught English at a science and tech school in a very poor part of Morocco. The attitude I ran into at that school is that science and tech are the only way to lift themselves out of poverty. So they learned two, or sometimes three, languages so that they could contribute to the sciences. People in MENA are well aware and in support of science, tech and the advancements of modern life. They don't always have access to those things.

So no, they haven't won any Nobel Prizes, or invented a gadget in my pocket, or published X amount of scientific papers. These standards are either highly political (like the Nobel) or highly dependent on pre-existing privilege. Even genius kids in Morocco simply don't have access to the resources of the west in order to meet our standards of achievement. A PhD from the top-rated university in Morocco means nothing in the Western educational system.

God, happiness and family are important to them as well. It's not either/or. It's not black and white.

The second bolded point: I don't think Dawkins was simply doing anything, even if it was his intent. I can't pretend to know exactly what happened, since I haven't kept abreast of all his twitter arguments with various religious types, but he is essentially playing dumb by ignoring the pragmatics of his statement. The simple statement of facts do not exist in a vacuum.

Sunni vs Shiite is internal. While that has caused some strife, it hasn't been destabilizing.

External strife is more often destabilizing. Read the history of the Ottoman empire from the Habsburg wars until WWI. Read about French colonialism in North Africa. Read about the Sikes-Picot agreement. Read about BP and the CIA in Iran. I'm sure you're aware of the West's continued involvement and propping up of dictators throughout the region.

I'm not saying religion doesn't have some impact on science in MENA. I'm just saying it's minor in comparison to the destabilizing strife and poverty that so much of the Muslim world experiences.

In the past, Muslim scientists thought about science much like their western counterparts during the Enlightenment. To them, nature was God's language, and it was mankind's duty to learn as much as possible. And today, much like many Christians, politics have gotten in the way of scientific research. Like I said before, neither a Muslim nor a Christian is probably going to make a breakthrough in evolutionary biology any time soon. However, I would say that highly religious people making modern scientific breakthroughs is not unknown. I know a few Christians who are very open and progressive with their faith and basically accept whatever comes as God's law. It's the people who stick to the literal interpretation of their book that are the hardest to convince. Unfortunately, Islam is allllllll about the literal, unchanging word of the Qur'an. But, as I've said many times in many other threads, very very few people follow the exact word of the Qur'an. It goes without saying that the Taliban won't be making any scientific discoveries.

Totally agree. The truth is always in the middle somewhere. I'm not saying that everywhere has a stellar educational system, but just about every country in MENA I can think of has adopted a western style educational system. Whether or not they enforce it or fund it is a different story...

Yeah, people accusing him of racism are totally missing the point.

I don't see a problem with being highly religious. Live and let live, you know?

Hey man, not even a problem. I don't view this as an argument, more of a discussion. This forum has a problem with hyperbole. But if you are being calm and reasonable, then no peace pipes are needed (but I'll smoke it anyway)