Does he know any children?

Richard Dawkins apparently believed, when he was young, that the kiss of a princess could turn a frog into a prince. Perhaps he believed that rabbits wear waistcoats. He may have believed in the tooth fairy. It must have been a terribly disillusioning shock when he realized the truth. Carl Olson at Insight Scoop:

Really now, the man is simply deranged:

The prominent atheist is stepping down from his post at Oxford University to write a book aimed at youngsters in which he will warn them against believing in "anti-scientific" fairytales.

Prof Hawkins [sic] said: "The book I write next year will be a children's book on how to think about the world, science thinking contrasted with mythical thinking." ....

Prof Dawkins said he wanted to look at the effects of "bringing children up to believe in spells and wizards".

"I think it is anti-scientific – whether that has a pernicious effect, I don't know," he told More4 News.

"I think looking back to my own childhood, the fact that so many of the stories I read allowed the possibility of frogs turning into princes, whether that has a sort of insidious affect on rationality, I'm not sure. Perhaps it's something for research."

.... Most people know that children have wonderful imaginations, and are both credulous and very discerning, often in delightful (and occasionally bewildering) fashion. My three-year-old son, for example, is quite taken at the moment with Buzz Lightyear of "Toy Story" fame. "I'm Buzz Lightyear!" he announces, "I can fly high up into the sky! I have super powers!" But when asked if he can really fly, he says, with a knowing look: "No, I'm pretending." The same is true when he pretends to be a pirate or a soldier. "It's just pretend, Daddy." Duh, don't you adults get it? Yes, most of us do. But some apparently don't. ....

But Prof Dawkins, the bestselling author of The God Delusion who this week agreed to fund a series of atheist adverts on London buses, added that his new book will also set out to demolish the "Judeo-Christian myth".

He went on: "I plan to look at mythical accounts of various things and also the scientific account of the same thing. And the mythical account that I look at will be several different myths, of which the Judeo-Christian one will just be one of many.

"And the scientific one will be substantiated, but appeal to children to think for themselves; to look at the evidence. Always look at the evidence."

Indeed. Which is why the authors of the Gospels so often appealed to eye witness testimony, to evidence, to facts (cf., Lk 1:1-4; Jn 21:24-25). But I suspect that Dawkins' treatment of such matters will likely be just as shallow and lousy as were his philosophical engagements with theism.

Here are a couple of thoughts from J.R.R. Tolkien about fantasy and myth, taken from his essay, "On Fairy-Tales" and quoted by Richard Purtill in Lord of the Elves and Eldils: Fantasy and Philosophy in C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien:

... fantasy is a natural human activity. It certainly does not destroy or even insult Reason; and it does not either blunt the appetite for, nor obscure the perception of, scientific verity. On the contrary. The keener and the clearer is the reason, the better fantasy will it make .... For creative Fantasy is founded upon the hard recognition that things are so in the world as it appears under the sun; on a recognition of fact, but not a slavery to it. ...

Fantasy can, of course, be carried to excess. It can be ill done. It can be put to evil uses. It may even delude the minds out of which it came. But of what human thing in this fallen world is that not true? Men have conceived not only of elves, but they have imagined gods, and worshipped them, even worshipped those most deformed by their authors' own evil. But they have made false gods out of other materials: their notions, their banners, their monies; even their sciences and their social and economic theories have demanded human sacrifice. Abusus non tollit usum. Fantasy remains a human right: we make in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker.

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The Tolkien essay can be found here as a .pdf.

Update: Alan Jacobs notes a C.S. Lewis quotation:

Long ago, C. S. Lewis wrote, “About once every hundred years some wiseacre gets up and tries to banish the fairy tale.” Why? “It is accused of giving children a false impression of the world they live in. But I think that no literature that children could read gives them less of a false impression. I think what profess to be realistic stories for children are far more likely to deceive them. I never expected the real world to be like fairy tales. I think that I did expect school to be like the school stories. The fantasies did not deceive me; the school stories did.”

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