A contingent argument follows ... if the pope's itinerary does, as rumours have suggested, include Oxford and the giving of a lecture there, and if it were suggested that representatives of the University took a formal role in welcoming him to the apices somniantes, the prospect might make Dr Dawkins the Barmy Biologist superbly, delightfully, hopping mad.
Fingers crossed and pray hard.
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He is fantastic, isn't he? But ... rather like characters in Dickens ... just that bit too exotically overdrawn for plausibility? Any suggestions as to other authors who might have invented him, or story-lines which he might have graced? Or ways of enjoying him even more?
I'm probably guilty of being over-obvious, but didn't Gulliver meet Prof Dawkins in Laputa?
ReplyDeleteMaybe, as is not uncommon in Oxford, Dawkins will stage a protest. Now that you suggest these things, I hope it all comes to pass.... It would be lovely to see...
ReplyDeleteMy original claim was that C.S. Lewis invented him for one of his novels, perhaps "That hideous strength", and that he somehow evolved into real life therefrom. Other scholars, however, have disproved this thesis, alleging Lewis's known tendency to develop characters having more diabolically seductive charms.
ReplyDeleteThe fossil record, however, attests to no more "complexly organized" being than a "homo Ricardus (Dawkins)". At present, cultural evolutionists are astonished, and take him as a sign of genetic mutation which by natural selection is more likely to fail than succeed according to the principle corruptio optimi pessima.
Voila.
ReplyDeleteFlannery O'Connor's "Enoch and the Gorilla."
Ambrose Silk, labouring away as the sole Atheist in the Ministry of Information's Religious Division, may well have dreamed him up for an article in the magazine 'Godless Sundays at Home'.
ReplyDeletecf. Waugh, 'Put out more Flags'