Some of his subsequent films are less funny than unpleasantly bitter. Born in Aldershot, Hampshire, McEwan is considered by many to be one of the finest novelists of his generation in the U. From the beginning of his career, his work has been characterized by an extremism verging on cynical detachment with respect to his main subjects: sex, death, and moral evil.
But it is with Black Dogs in that his books begin to acquire an explicitly theological dimension. Abandoned by his parents, he was raised by his paternal grandmother, whose maiden name he adopted. His books are graphic satires of the nihilism plaguing modern society in a godless universe. Son of the famous English post-war comic novelist, Kingsley Amis, Amis fils is the author of nearly 30 books, including novels, short-story collections, and works of non-fiction.
A perennial Nobel Prize candidate, he has won every major American literary prize. Roth grew up in a Jewish family in Newark, New Jersey, but his unsparing depictions of his largely Jewish characters have been controversial within the American Jewish community. His always pronounced misanthropy has taken on an explicitly atheistic tenor in his late books, with their dominant theme of human frailty, futility, and the finality of death.
In the s, his company, Kurzweil Computer Products, Inc. Myers and others, but his ideas are the logical extension of premises most atheists share.
However, Brockman is perhaps best known as the founder of Edge. Jacoby, a former newspaper reporter, is a bestselling author and blogger. Though she is a strong atheist activist, her voice is one of relative moderation. He has done research on the properties of neutrinos and other elementary particles. He is best known, however, as a prolific author of popular-science books and as a crusader against paranormal claims and against religion.
Religion flies you into buildings. Hecht is a true polymath: she pursued advanced studies in France and received her Ph. She also maintains a busy schedule of interviews, lectures, and poetry readings.
Fang, who holds a Ph. Born Fang Shimin, he was attacked with a hammer by hired thugs in , but escaped with only minor injuries. A prominent surgeon whose work Fang had criticized was jailed for ordering the attack. They have fundamental conflicts. I have always opposed efforts at reconciliation. Educated at Harvard University, where he studied under Richard Lewontin, he is a specialist in the problem of speciation.
He runs a web site called Why Evolution Is True, and has published a bestselling book by the same name. What more is there to say?
Books: Why Evolution Is True. Wright is a journalist, bestselling author, and founder of Bloggingheads. Currently Senior Future Tense Fellow at the New America Foundation, he is a revisionist Darwinian evolutionary psychologist, who believes emergent and nonlinear dynamical effects influence the evolutionary process. Carrier is a historian, author, and blogger. He received a Ph. He now runs the Naturalism as a Worldview web site, as well as a blog.
He also participates in numerous public debates with Christians. He has written more than 50 volumes of philosophy, journals, travel, and political and cultural commentary.
The principal focus of his philosophical writing, both historical and systematic, has been philosophical hedonism. He traces his philosophical lineage to the Cynic, Diogenes of Sinope. Throughout our evolutionary history, humans have often lacked the time to scrutinise and weigh up the evidence — needing to make quick assessments. Even older children and adolescents who actually ponder the topic of religion may not be approaching it as independently as they think.
Emerging research is demonstrating that atheist parents and others pass on their beliefs to their children in a similar way to religious parents — through sharing their culture as much as their arguments. Some parents take the view that their children should choose their beliefs for themselves , but what they then do is pass on certain ways of thinking about religion, like the idea that religion is a matter of choice rather than divine truth. But are atheists more likely to embrace science than religious people?
Many belief systems can be more or less closely integrated with scientific knowledge. Some belief systems are openly critical of science, and think it has far too much sway over our lives, while other belief systems are hugely concerned to learn about and respond to scientific knowledge.
Some Protestant traditions , for example, see rationality or scientific thinking as central to their religious lives. Meanwhile, a new generation of postmodern atheists highlight the limits of human knowledge, and see scientific knowledge as hugely limited, problematic even, especially when it comes to existential and ethical questions.
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Email required. By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Notice and European users agree to the data transfer policy. He rarely takes a holiday, but travels frequently to give talks — in the last four months he has been to Ireland, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria and Brazil.
Though he says he prefers to speak about science, God inevitably looms. In his mission, Dawkins is still, at heart, a teacher. How dare you force your dopey unsubstantiated superstitions on innocent children too young to resist? How DARE you? But depending on your point of view, he is also a hero, a heathen, or a liability. For some, his controversial positions have started to undermine both his reputation as a scientist and his own anti-religious crusade.
Friends who vigorously defend both his cause and his character worry that Dawkins might be at risk of self-sabotage. The foundation is run by a team of three in Washington DC and supports multiple projects in the US, such as Openly Secular, a campaign to encourage atheists to proclaim their secularism, and the Teaching Institute for Evolutionary Science, which provides teachers with evolution-themed tools.
Dawkins regularly goes on fundraising lecture tours, where his fame comes in useful. In person, Dawkins subverts his reputation for stridency. He is reticent to the point of awkwardness, always scrupulously courteous. Dawkins and Ward have lived in a large house in north Oxford since The style is bohemian, eclectic, the taste of someone who prowls souks. Their two dogs, small fluffy creatures called Cuba a havanese , and Tycho a coton de Tulear named after a 16th-century Danish astronomer , have the air of pets who run the joint.
As a child, he preferred to read books while his nature-loving parents John and Jean were out spotting birds and plants. Jean, aged 98, lives on the family farm in Chipping Norton, outside Oxford, where Dawkins visits her weekly. Even then, surrounded by nature at its most vivid, Dawkins remained uninspired. He remembers, as a young child, being taken in a safari car to watch a pride of lions gnawing at a carcass. While the rest of the group stared in fascination, he stayed on the floor playing with his toy cars.
He does, however, know every class and order of the animal kingdom, a product of the classical zoological education he received as an undergraduate at Oxford. If he has trouble sleeping, he mentally scrolls through the alphabet and assigns mammals to letters. As a postgraduate, Dawkins excelled at the early stages of the research process, mulling theoretical questions and coming up with hypotheses. But he lacked patience with the laborious hours of data collection or methodical lab work.
On a recent spring afternoon, sitting in his back garden, he explained the evolution of social insects by imitating an ant whose sole function was to guard the entrance hole to a giant bamboo stick in which the ant colony lived. The ant had an elongated head that it used like a door to block the hole and prevent the entrance of intruders. Dawkins hunched in his chair and stuck his head forward, then jerked it back, blocking and unblocking the hole. The performance was strangely captivating, but the ant was simply a means to explain the social behaviour of insects.
He would regularly stay up all night writing code on the sole computer in the zoology department, an Elliot — at the time a relatively compact machine, now the kind of elaborate object kept for historical interest by the Science Museum. The language of technology was ubiquitous in The Selfish Gene. To its critics, the book was an assault on human values: it seemed to suggest, in that stark title alone, that we existed simply to pass on our individual genes and cared nothing for each other, the common good, community.
To Dawkins, this was a basic misreading of his argument. In his next book, The Extended Phenotype , which he regards as his most significant contribution to science, Dawkins explained that he wrote The Selfish Gene while on sabbatical, after returning, high on ideas, from a conference on artificial intelligence. Dawkins has never lost his affection for technology. He is an Apple devotee, and an early adopter; he owns the 47th Tesla electric car to be sold in Britain.
In his spare time, he plays the EWI , an electronic musical instrument similar to a clarinet.
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