For the Sake of Science

Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss have a movie coming out later this year:

‘The Unbelievers’ follows renowned scientists Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss across the globe as they speak publicly about the importance of science and reason in the modern world – encouraging others to cast off antiquated religious and politically motivated approaches toward important current issues.

This is interesting in and of itself, but what really grabbed my attention was the list of speakers:

The film includes interviews with celebrities and other influential people who support the work of these controversial speakers, including:

Ricky Gervais
Woody Allen
Cameron Diaz
Stephen Hawking
Sarah Silverman
Bill Pullman
Werner Herzog
Tim Minchin
Eddie Izzard
Ian McEwan
Adam Savage
Ayaan Hirsi-Ali
Penn Jillette
Sam Harris
Dan Dennett
James Randi
Cormac McCarthy
Paul Provenza
James Morrison
Michael Shermer
David Silverman
…and more.

These are the same people listed at the end of the trailer and I don’t believe anyone not on the list makes it into any of the preview clips. So that leads me to wonder: Was PZ Myers snubbed? Once one of the most prominent members of the online atheist community, he has fallen into a very narrow band of caricature-feminist thought where he wants to promote philosophically-ignorant claptrap that presumes a non-descriptive nature to atheism. (Atheism is only descriptive.) He even said some pretty stupid things about Richard Dawkins over all this feminist malarkey:

Let’s stop the shouting that Richard Dawkins is some kind of raving misogynist. What’s happened here is that he is at some remove from all of the details, and this issue got blown up by lunatics who felt their manhood threatened and who exaggerated the situation to an absurd degree. I think he is wrong, but what he was arguing against was a cartoon of feminism which far too many people have been peddling on the blogs.

The so-called “lunatics” were saying much the same thing as Dawkins. PZ never bothered to give any of them a backhanded defense, interestingly. I think Dawkins recognized this, as well as PZ’s general lack of common sense, so now the bridge between the two may be burned (or at least severely charred). This is a far bigger blow to PZ than it is to the good doctor from Oxford; I hope it’s why I’m not seeing PZ’s name anywhere on this movie.

Filed under: Atheism/Humanism | Tagged: Lawrence Krauss, pz myers, Richard Dawkins, The Unbelievers | 3 Comments »