We’ll need champions of science like Richard Dawkins to win the war on woke orthodoxy – Telegraph.co.uk

Richard Dawkins is surely just as known for his militant atheism as for his scientific genius. He is loved by some and loathed by others for his zealous crusades against religion and his savage mockery of the sacred. But this week, he was excommunicated by those you might least expect: his fellow atheists.

Dawkinss act of blasphemy was not against any religious doctrine. He did not voice scepticism of transubstantiation, but of transgenderism. He did not query whether bread and wine can become the body and blood of Christ, but whether a man can become a woman and vice versa.

And so the American Humanist Association has stripped Dawkins of its 1996 Humanist of the Yearaward. The AHA had initially honoured Dawkins for his extraordinary contributions to communicating science to the public. But 25 years later, the AHA has accused him of abusing "scientific discourse"to "demean marginalised groups".

The AHA alleged that Dawkins had "accumulated a history"of offensive statements, but singled out one tweet for condemnation: "In 2015, Rachel Dolezal, a white chapter president of NAACP, was vilified for identifying as black. Some men choose to identify as women, and some women choose to identify as men. You will be vilified if you deny that they literally are what they identify as. Discuss."

Of course, Dawkins said nothing demeaning or bigoted in that tweet. He merely raised a question about the inconsistency of modern identity politics.

Its a good question, in fact. Why is it that racial boundaries are today more likely to be viewed as fixed, but gender as fluid? After all, you dont have to go full Rachel Dolezal and try to live life as a black person to fall foul of the modern racial gatekeepers. In recent years, white people have been denounced for "cultural appropriation"over acts as trivial as practising yoga, braiding their hair in cornrows or writing fiction from the perspective of non-white characters.

At the same time, the belief that gender can simply be a matter of self-declaration has been placed beyond question. "Trans women are women"is now a foundational woke commandment. Clearly, it has even become an article of faith for self-professed "humanists".You might think that humanists and atheists would be the first to recognise how dogmatism hinders the search for truth. But there are greater forces at work, which Dawkins has himself picked up on.

At the end of last year, writing in the Spectator, Dawkins warned that scientific truth was coming increasingly under attack. Most insidiously, truth was being undermined in academia, in the very institutions set up to discover and uphold the truth. A school of thought that claims there is "no objective truth... no natural reality, only social constructs"has come to dominate, he said. This worldview also prioritises the so-called lived experience and identity of the speaker over empirical reality. Proven scientific facts, Dawkins complains, are too often dismissed as products of "patriarchal domination".

In his Spectator piece, Dawkins switches frequently between attacking the nascent woke ideology and the theologians he has been battling for decades. Although he does not make the link explicitly, the similarities between the two groups are too great to ignore.

In fact, Dawkins has personal experience of them converging. Last year, Trinity College Dublin rescinded his invitation to address its Historical Society. And in 2017, a radio station in California cancelled an event he was due to speak at. Both de-platformed Dawkins because the world-famous atheist had fiercely criticised Islam and not just Christianity. Criticism of Islam is prohibited by the woke not on theological grounds, but because critcising the beliefs of a "marginalised group"is considered bigoted (or Islamophobic,in this instance).

But no deity or dogma whether formed in the 7th century or the 21st should be so sacred as to be beyond question. As the woke orthodoxy becomes more powerful and resistant to challenge, well need far more heretics like Richard Dawkins.

Fraser Myers is assistant editor of Spiked

Original post:
We'll need champions of science like Richard Dawkins to win the war on woke orthodoxy - Telegraph.co.uk