I have respect for Dawkins for saying it as he sees it. But he is definitely a terrible spokesman for science because his views are essentially the religion of atheism - a kind of blind faith in itself. Science says we only have a partial picture of the universe and cannot say whether there is a god. Dawkins claims he knows there is not a god and claims all people who have come to that conclusion are deluded. Not only is that extremely arogant (which I don't have a problem with because I'm prepared to say I know there is a god), but it is extrememly unscientific. When he claims his basis for coming to that conclusion is science, and then doesn't use scientific rigour in examining his firm conclusion, he is actually making himself a bit of a joke. If he admits that he has blind faith that the universe just came into being by chance, a chance so remote in terms of anthopic principles that it would not be accepted as a conclusion in any field of science, then he would at least have some kind of credibility.

As a spokesman for science he turns far more people away from science than he attracts to it. Its people like Dawkins that lead to people accepting nonsense theories like creationism. If they have come to know god in some limited way, and then have Dawkins telling them that science says god doesn't exist and physical matter is more real than anything else, they are going to not have any respect for "science". As it is those are Dawkins personal beliefs, nothing to do with science. And despite the fact he is pretty intelligent, his own failure to realise that shows a sever lack of critical thinking, and of jumping to unfounded conclusions based on assumption. As such he is closer to the creationsits than real science. And even within his own subject, 'his' (not his work at all of course) concept of the selfish gene is ignorant of the fact that natural selection acts on whole creatures and not on individual genes. One gene in combination with certain other genes can have a completely different 'nature' than the same gene in combination with other genes. Ernst Mayr would have been a far better spokesman because he stuck to the science and only claimed to know the science, and he thought about the science more lucidly than Dawkins. Dawkins claims to know the science and from that to know that god doesn't exist. That makes him a bad scientist, in ignorance of his own personal blind faith.

Simon