Guardian: Today is the first day of Eid, the end of the fasting month of Ramadan. I took the day off, as Eid on your own at work without family can be a rather bleak affair, and was surprised to find that when I logged on to Twitter (not a nice place over the past few days) there were lots of genuine Eid messages from non-Muslims and Muslim fasters, luxuriating in their first morning teas in a month. Even David Cameron’s “Eid Mubarak” registered quite low on my cynicism scale. I posted my own Eid greeting, and proceeded to bask in the unfamiliar good will of the morning.
Then Richard Dawkins, like a guest arriving too drunk to a polite and civil party, crashed into Eid. His tweet, apropos nothing at all, jarring with all the rest stated:
All the world’s Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.
Now, some are accustomed to Dawkins being a bit of a troll. But this, in its deliberately obtuse (say what you like, but Dawkins is not a stupid man) baiting, was a new low.
Most on Twitter engaged with his logic on its own terms, pointing out that he himself had earned fewer Nobel prizes then every single Muslim who has, that more Muslim Premier League players had scored more goals than all Nobel prizewinners put together, that Hilary Mantel had sold more books than someone who had sold none. All statements as valid and as nonsensical and as inconclusive as his original tweet.
Additional Materials
David Versus Goliath: Dawkins, McGrath or Me – Who is the Most Rational? Part II
Dawkins’ False Papal Fatwa: ‘Einstein was a Pantheist and not a Deist?’
A challenge for Dawkins: Where did carbon come from?
Categories: Europe
I have issued many more challenges to Dawkins than he has!
If we decide by the number of challenges, I am ahead!
On a more serious note, only rational conclusion we can draw from this is that he has so far been ignoring me, banking on his greater fame.
The other rational conclusion we may draw after reading the following article is that he does not have a rational answer of information presented in the article:
A challenge for Dawkins: Where did carbon come from?