Dawkins: Religion Holds Back Science in America

Evolutionary biologist and "The Selfish Gene" author Richard Dawkins discusses why he believes America is the leading scientific nation, but is burdened by "an uncultured, ignorant, almost-majority" of people with strong religious views.

More from the Wall Street Journal:

[immortal]

Not only is it holding the us back but also the rest of the world.

[megashooter]

not just america.... its religion as a whole.

[tjstarr]

The people who push science forward in America are the exception, not the rule. They are free to study in their free time, to pursue their passions, to go into endless amounts of debt to learn about what fascinates them. Many of them are immigrants nowadays, or the children of immigrants. But the majority of the population remains scientifically ignorant, as Dawkins is well aware. He is trying to bridge the gap between scholars and the common people, and for that I am extremely grateful.

[anhbayar]

If there is a god will he strike me death? Will he?
He doesn't dare, he doesn't dare.

[AbrarManzoor]

People like Hasan ibn al haytham, ibn rushd, ibn sina, khawarizmi, newton, leibniz, Pascal were all theologians.God is never an hindrance to do science actually god is which inspired great minds to develop it but i also agree with Atheists at one thing that mythological religions has really hindered the growth of reason but the Concept of God had not.

[aaronsorensen]

My biggest point and downfall of Christianity is it forces people to turn away from true spirituality as there is no talk of chakras or meditation in the Bible.
Yet Jesus himself spent 6 years in India learning spirituality in the Hindu form.
I’m sorry but you don’t go to India to learn spirituality and not learn about how chakras and your energy work along with the main focus being meditation.
Now Christianity considers it pseudo science and the true learning of spirituality for consciousness as New Age BS.
This is what is holding back humanity in developing past cultural religions from what is mentioned in this video.

[cfroi]

As a Western society, we often ignore the entire history of the full church and focus on the Papacy and its role as a political tool instead of the other 80% of The Church. While the Catholic Church did hold back science, it no longer does today. In fact a lot of the widespread schools and education we have today is all because of the Catholic Church. Look back at places where Catholicism spread like Medieval England and you will discover the first writs are in Latin, not Old English. Or in the Eastern Church where they gave multiple languages an alphabet (Armenian, Georgian, Slavic, etc.) It's safe to say that without The Church we would not be as literate or preserved older writings. Yes Greeks did have universities, but the average literacy rate did not reflect that too well.

Evolution is nothing more than a Historical Theory, we didn't discover the Helix structure of DNA and say "wait, what did Darwin say?" neither did the Monk Mendel when he discovered how traits work (oddly enough, Darwin had no clue of Mendelian genetics when writing the Origin of Species, and even though I disagree with his theory, the scientific facts laid down are remarkable considering he found out a crude form of Mendelian genetics with simple observation)

To argue that someone not being taught a specific historical theory hinders their scientific understanding is complete nonsense.

No one references God or Darwin when making scientific breakthroughs.

Even the Christian opposition to cloning is more of an ethics dilemma as even Chinese scientists don't think it is okay to clone themselves and limit themselves to reviving extinct creatures.

[Pbalix]

i guess when when this dude dies... he will see how wrong he was