At Reason Magazine, Nick Gillespie interviewed Richard Dawkins on new threats to science.
Vintage Dawkins
The interview, in connection with his latest book, Genetic Book of the Dead (2024), is vintage Dawkins. I want to call attention to one part:
Gillespie: Last year, you wrote an article in The Spectator called “Why I’m sticking up for science” about the adoption of certain Māori origin myths being presented as science in New Zealand schools. What was going on there?
Dawkins: … The New Zealand government — which was then a socialist government; it’s changed now, but the present government is doing the same thing — is importing compulsorily into science classes in New Zealand schools, Māori myths. And they are being given equal status to what they call “Western science.” Which is just science. It’s not “Western”; it’s just science.
So the children in New Zealand are, I would have thought, being bewildered by, on the one hand, learning about the big bang and the origin of life and DNA and things like that; on the other hand, they’re being told it’s all due to this sky father and the earth mother probably having it off together. It’s pandering to, I think, a kind of guilt that white New Zealanders feel toward the Māori indigenous population, and bending over backward to show respect to the indigenous population. And I think that’s fine — it would be great for New Zealand children to learn about Māori culture and myths in classes on anthropology and history. But to bring them into science classes — that’s just not science.
I became involved because a number of distinguished scientists in New Zealand — fellows of the New Zealand Royal Society, which is the New Zealand equivalent of the National Academy of Sciences here — had written a letter protesting about this to a New Zealand journal called the Listener. As a consequence, they had their lectures canceled, they were threatened with expulsion, really quite unpleasant victimization of these distinguished scientists. And I had lunch with about half a dozen of them and heard all about it from them.
“Richard Dawkins on New Threats to Science — From Religion to Relativism,”, September 7, 2025
Canceled? No surprise. A number of Dawkins’s fellow evolutionary biologists in the northern hemisphere have been Canceled too, in their case for insisting that humans are sex binary.
And it’s happening because of a process that Dawkins happily cheered on for decades (and continued to cheer on in the interview).
How Dawkins Helps What He Professes to Oppose
Traditional culture in the English-speaking world was imbued with the rational thought processes encouraged by Judaism and Christianity. But that culture has fallen into decline. As Dawkins tells it,
It seems to me to be a bit like Moore’s law in computing, which is a definite mathematical straight line on a long scale in computer power. It’s not due to any one thing; it’s a composite of things that I think the shifting moral zeitgeist is the same, it is a composite of conversations at dinner parties, journalism, parliamentary/congress decisions, technological innovation, books. Everything moves on.
“From Religion to Relativism”
Books like Dawkins’s The God Delusion (2006) helped dinner parties celebrate the decline. And the decline resulted in the rise of the culture of private truth that Canceled the New Zealand scientists.
The decline of traditional public truth means that truth becomes whatever people need to believe in order to feel good about themselves. It could be private truth about sexes that don’t exist or murders that never happened. Its relationship with reality is at best negotiable. And anyone who doesn’t tolerate a powerful private truth — whatever its relationship to reality — gets Canceled.
Generally Clueless
Dawkins dimly guesses what has happened but remains generally clueless:
Well, I think atheism is just sensible. If you look at polls in America and in Western Europe, the number of people who profess religion is steadily going down. There are more religious people in America than there are in the rest of Western Europe. But it is coming down. So that’s part of the shifting zeitgeist. …
Well, I’m rather sorry I said that thing about being a cultural Christian, because people have taken it to mean I’m sort of sympathetic toward the belief.
Now that thing about the society which lets science be free to do what it does being a Christian society, that’s a matter for historians. And they might be right. It is possible that Christendom was the right breeding ground for science to arise in the 17th, 18th, 19th centuries.
“From Religion to Relativism”
What Sort of Science World Are We Left With?
It’s a world where science is poorly equipped to deal with exploding problems:
- “A massive fraud ring is publishing thousands of fake studies and the problem is exploding. These networks are essentially criminal organizations — Organized misconduct is rapidly poisoning the global scientific record.” Tibi Puiu, ZME Science August 6, 2025.
Then why should we continue to trust the assured results of modern science?
- “Scientific objectivity is a myth – cultural values and beliefs always influence science and the people who do it” — Sara Giordano, The Conversation, September 4, 2025.
Very well. If objectivity is only a myth — not even a goal — the scientific enterprise is not credible.
- “Gordon Guyatt, the McMaster professor widely regarded as the father of evidence-based medicine, emphatically denies describing youth gender treatments as “medically necessary.” Melanie Bennet, Juno News, September 12, 2025. Yet his signature is on the letter. His subsequent comments are a word salad.
So this is what’s become of evidence-based medicine?
It is becoming clear that when we lose our religion, we lose our science as well.
Cross-posted at Mind Matters News.