(May 2, 2014 at 3:49 am)ManMachine Wrote: I think there are certain Christian groups that would want to categorise him as an atheist to justify their own simplistic view of the issues, and Dawkins certainly has anti-theist views (The God Delusion' case in point) but in his own words he is agnostic with anti-theist views. I'm not calling him agnostic, I'm just reporting that he calls himself agnostic.Yes, but the "fact" you posted claims that he never called himself an atheist, and that's obviously not true. Dawkins is an agnostic atheist. The terms are not exclusive; only an anti-theist cannot also be an agnostic.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould