One Really Does Long…

…for Richard Dawkins to pause from his ignorant ranting for, say, a year and just conduct a serious conversation with somebody like Mike Flynn, in the dim and flickering hope he might say something like, “I never knew that!” Dawkins doesn’t even know what he doesn’t even know. Here he is: embarrassing himself by stepping way out of his field and holding forth on The Big Picture.

Once again, the concept of different sorts of intelligence is given massive empirical demonstration. Dawkins is very clever when it comes to understanding the life cycle of the wasp and explaining in pop sci terms some of the mechanisms of evolution. But when it comes to metaphysics and philosophy he is dumb as a bag of rocks and mistakes his small field of knowledge for an All Explaining Theory of Everything (sort of like your chatty electrician who really knows his business, but then pauses from doing a first rate job of rewiring your house to say, “You know, I think the whole universe is nothing but electricity and that God is like a huge cloud of static electricity…” and then proceeds to abandon the re-wiring job to wander around the neighborhood preaching his exciting new gospel of Electricism). You just want the guy to shut up and get back to his limited field of competence where he really is doing good work.