I know, I know: the very title itself is nearly blasphemous.

Richard Dawkins is, after all, the "Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University". Oxford is a respected institution, and you'd think such a title would imply, if nothing else, an understanding of science. Further, Dawkins is a respected scientist, and is invited to write stories and articles about science for a wide audience.

I, on the other hand, am a semi-anonymous blogger who makes frequent spelling and typing errors and has ZERO scientific credentials, other than what one gets in a respectable postgraduate degree in engineering.

If you had to bet on one of us, having no other evidence, then I'd assure you that you should bet on Dawkins, not myself, having a better understanding of what science is and is not.

Heh, of course, I do have other evidence, and thus I'll present my audacious case to you: Richard Dawkins does not understand science. The only thing I have to convince you is the evidence.

Imagine I came up to you and said: "God exists! I have absolute scientific proof!" Imagine you asked me for this "scientific" proof, and I explained that in some other reality, or perhaps in the future, it might be possible to devise some kind of experiment, which, when run, would prove my point.

Hopefully, you'd be wise enough to fall off your ass laughing at me. At least in your head, if not aloud, due to your considerable kindness and politeness.

When a person says such a thing, they demonstrate a willingness to confuse this reality with another, an inability to recognize the difference between established fact and fond hope, and ultimately, an inability to recognize what actually is scientifically testable, and what actually is not.

I call this technique "proof by wishful thinking." Our beliefs are scientific because we can imagine a future which proves them to be so. If I cannot provide an example of a valid experiment by which to test my beliefs against others, you'd be right to suspect me of trying to pull a fast one on you.

Note that.

Next, I'd like to ask: What is "science"? Karl Popper is perhaps the most influential philosopher in this area. Popper argued that for an idea to be "scientific", it must be disprovable, or falsifiable.

To crib from The Karl Popper Web:

In one majestic and systematic attack, psychologism, naturalism, inductionism, and logical positivism are swept away and replaced by a set of methodological rules called Falsificationism. Falsificationism is the idea that science advances by unjustified, exaggerated guesses followed by unstinting criticism. Only hypotheses capable of clashing with observation reports are allowed to count as scientific.

And Wikipedia:

In the philosophy of science, verificationism... held that a statement must be in principle empirically verifiable in order to be both meaningful and scientific... After Popper, verifiability came to be replaced by falsifiability as the criterion of demarcation. In other words, in order to be scientific, a statement had to be, in principle, falsifiable.

Note this also.

Alright! Now we're ready for dear Doctor Dawkins. First, let's start with a small, minor error by Dawkins to see how the points I've mentioned above bear on his outlook.

Here, Dawkins proposes that the paternity of Jesus is, in fact, a "scientific" question:

... imagine that forensic archeologists, by some unlikely set of circumstances, discovered DNA evidence demonstrating that Jesus was born of a virgin mother and had no father....

Either Jesus had a father or he didn't. The question is a scientific one, and scientific evidence, if any were available, would be used to settle it.

Okay, my stalwart and dedicated readers, what's wrong here?

The first problem I see is that Dawkins is clearly stuck in a pre-Popperian scientific outlook. His argument rests on the idea that science is based on verifiability, not falsifiability. He further implies he can imagine "DNA demonstrating that Jesus was born of a virgin mother."

Really???

In fact, the very thing he wants to call "scientific" is an utterly unscientific and unfalsifiable: Which DNA pattern could ever prove a man had no human father? A child born of miraculous conception could conceivably have any DNA pattern known to mankind. If a brand-new Y chromosome could be produced, then any other pattern could be introduced as well. There would be no way, looking at the DNA alone, to prove categorically it wasn't produced by sexual means.

The question is analogous to asking for a piece of Java code which could prove it wasn't written down by a human. We could establish, perhaps that it contained information no human should have (e.g. the next sequence of winning lottery numbers), but that still wouldn't prove there was no human being involved.

Next, even if we showed Jesus's DNA was different than Joseph's, all we'd be establishing was that Joseph was not the father (it could have been some other man) -- we would not be establishing a virgin conception! Dawkins would surely look for another suspect... and then, if all the male DNA in the region could be produced and excluded, would state that mutations happen, or that someone might have been missed!

So there's two errors: in the explicit context of discussing what makes a proposition "scientific", he equates "scientific", with verifiability -- not falsifiability -- and then produces what seems to be an utterly unverfiable question as an example of a "scientific" proposition. Popper would have blown a gasket!

A small, but serious and telling gaffe for the "Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science."

But wait, that was just a warm up: Popper does it twice in the same article. The next case is even worse:

... the presence of a creative deity in the universe is clearly a scientific hypothesis. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a more momentous hypothesis in all of science. A universe with a god would be a completely different kind of universe from one without, and it would be a scientific difference. God could clinch the matter in his favour at any moment by staging a spectacular demonstration of his powers, one that would satisfy the exacting standards of science.

Here we see the confusion again: Dawkins again shows us he thinks about science (apparently exclusively, in this article) in terms of verifiability, not falsifiability. If people saw what Dawkins considered "a spectacular demonstration", Dawkins would conclude that to be "scientific" proof of God!

What "spectacular demonstration" could unquestionably prove God's existence? No matter what reasonable test Dawkins proposes, someone could suggest co-incidence or deliberate fakery as a more likely explanation. Calling down fire from heaven? Secret US technology employed to justify a theocracy! Healing someone? Remissions happen. Sunspots or stars spelling out a personal message for Richard Dawkins to believe? Heck, everything unlikely happens: there are all kinds of fruit with Allah's name in them, and a face on Mars, all by chance -- what does that prove?

None of these, even if they happened, would prove God's existence. The underlying mechanism would still be in question, just as it was when a friend of mine was healed of Lupus after we prayed for her.

A further point: Dawkin's repeated assumptions about experiments which could be run. For something to be falsifiable, one must be able to propose an actual experiment -- not assert, in a confident tone -- that someone else will surely be able to propose one. Yet twice, Dawkin wants to claim credit for some point by saying something (controversial!) is "scientific" because someone -- someone else mind you -- would be able to propose an experiment which could verify (not even falsify!) that view. Yet the proof of such is left ... as a fond hope.

See my point above.

This is a telltale sign someone is engaged in wishful thinking, not rigorously trying to think about reality in a way which covers all the bases. In Dawkin's train of thought, as expressed here, there are a lot of little clouds where "a miracle occurs" to get him to his final conclusion.

Having seen a few, I believe in miracles. I fully admit, due to the transient nature of time, and the possibility of human failure (my own) that I could be wrong. I also admit this is nothing I can use to "prove" my beliefs or experiences to others. I have a religious belief system, and I know it. I know what science is, and what it is not. And I do not make my logical arguments depend on "miracles" -- proofs someone else will surely someday supply.

But Richard Dawkins does not. He believe that religions and science overlap -- not that they *could*, but that they already DO. (Yet he provides no evidence for this stunning contention.) He thinks the negation of a religious statement ("God exists") is a scientific one ("God does not exist"). He implies science moves forward by categorically verifying theories, not disproving them. And he thinks religious and historical questions, such as the virgin birth -- and presumably the thoughts of Napolean, and the last words of Jesus -- could be proven scientifically.

Verificationism is dead in the real world, but it lives on in Dawkins' mind.

The first quote about Popper I cite above mentions that "psychologism, naturalism, inductionism, and logical positivism are swept away" by Popper's observations. Then, in the second, for brevity I edited out a statement that verficiationism "was an essential feature of the logical positivism of the so-called Vienna Circle..." These philosophies were generally atheistic ones, and they were, in fact, dismantled by Popper's observations.

When does Dawkins make these errors? When he's talking about that which he hates most: theism. His religious fervor clouds whatever knowledge and judgment he has, even about his specialty -- science.

He cannot see these errors because he has much too much riding on them: he falls back into verificationism, as many atheistic scientists did before Popper made their cherished religious assumptions implausable. So it's no surprise that Dawkins lives in a pre-Popper world when these kinds of questions come up. It is, after all, the more comfortable place to be an atheist.

Good thing it no longer passes as "scientific" thinking.

Or does it... ?