mary midgley on dawkins
Mary Midgley, author of a dozen books mostly on ethical philosophy read the item of 22 July on this weblog on Dawkins' thesis. She sent the following response.
Dear David - Many thanks for your very interesting piece about Dawkinsism. I've been rather slow replying because there are so many issues. I think you're quite right about pretty well everything in D's book. But what centrally worries me still is the question of motive. First, why on earth is it selling on this scale?? After that, the question why Dawkins himself is going on like this is certainly puzzling, and, as you say, suggests something wrong in the works there. But he isn't alone. There's Dan Dennett, Nick Humphrey, Grayling. Hichens and several others. How can it be that all these quite educated people seem to know nothing about any religion other than fundamentalist monotheisms, and are determined to ignore the political context which accounts for recent fanaticism there?
