Professor Dawkins has been making something of a fool of himself lately (I tried to find a more charitable way of putting it, but I fear I have failed) over his knowledge of the works and opinions of Charles Darwin, of whom he is so well-known as being supposedly the great high priest, or vicarious presence in our own times. That indispensable website, Protect the Pope, draws our attention to one occasion on which this was embarrassingly revealed, which I had previously missed, and which occurred during a recent debate in Australia between Dawkins and Cardinal Pell. Of that, more presently. First, though, that wonderful moment of revelation, when we all discovered that Dawkins couldn’t even say what the full title of Darwin’s greatest and most quasi-iconic work, On the Origin of Species, actually was. The circumstances were these. The modestly entitled Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science (“a clear-thinking oasis”, it calls itself) had commissioned a poll from Ipsos MORI to discover “the extent to which adults recorded as Christian in the 2011 UK Census … believe, know about, practise and are influenced by Christianity, as well as their reasons for having described themselves as Christian in the Census”. The poll discovered that “when given four books of the Bible to select from and asked which was the first book of the New Testament, only 35 per cent could identify Matthew as the correct answer”. In a discussion with Giles Fraser, former Canon Chancellor of St Paul’s Cathedral, Dawkins said that an “astonishing number [of self-identified Christians] couldn’t name the first book in the New Testament” and that this indicated that they were “not really Christian at all”: this declaration led to the following highly amusing piece of dialogue between Dawkins and Fraser, who quite rightly said that the poll asked “silly little questions” to “trip” people up:
2:58 PM
Professor Dawkins doesn’t seem to know much about Darwin: either what his masterpiece is actually called, or even what he believed about God (he wasn’t an atheist)
There is, Darwin said, an ‘impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe … as the result of blind chance or necessity…. I deserve to be called a Theist’
William Oddie

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