Skip to main content Skip to navigation

If religion is so dangerous what do we do about religionists: the Dawkins Debate

Chaplaincy Lecture. Monday 25 February, 17.30. Chaplaincy.

  • "If religion is so dangerous what do we do about religionists: the Dawkins Debate."
  • Led by John Cornwell
Mr John Cornwell is an English journalist and historian, known particularly for his science writing and books on the Papacy. He is Director of the Science and Human Dimension Project at Jesus College, Cambridge. His works include A Thief in the Night, Hitler's Pope (1999) and The Pontiff in Winter (2002) and most relevantly for the Chaplaincy Lecture his acclaimed 2007 book Darwin's Angel.
 
Instead of debating the existence of God and other such ontological never-ending disputes Mr Cornwell is interested in placing the discussion in the socio-political ambit: the unspoken conclusion of Dawkins is that religion should be quarantined and somehow eventually purged. This seems to him an attack on pluralist societies, and in this way Dawkins shows himself to be fundamentalist in a political sense. Within this context he will also critique Dawkins' view that religious belief is a form of virus and that believers are virus cariers. What he would like to do is to attract a wide constituency of atheists, agnostics, and believers into the debate.