Sunday, October 5, 2008

Richard Dawkins - The Enemies of Reason

There are two ways of looking at the world – through faith and superstition or through the rigours of logic, observation and evidence – in other words, through reason. Reason and a respect for evidence are precious commodities, the source of human progress and our safeguard against fundamentalists and those who profit from obscuring the truth.




Yet, today, society appears to be retreating from reason. Apparently harmless but utterly irrational belief systems from astrology to New Age mysticism, clairvoyance to alternative health remedies are booming. Richard Dawkins confronts what he sees as an epidemic of irrational, superstitious thinking... He explains the dangers the pick and mix of knowledge and nonsense poses in the internet age, and passionately re-states the case for reason and science.




The Irrational Health Service
In this episode, Dawkins looks at how health has become a battleground between reason and superstition. A third of us now spend a total of over 1.6 billion a year on superstitious alternative remedies, but 80% of them have never been subjected to properly conducted trials.





Slaves to Superstition
In the episode, Dawkins tackles the epidemic of irrational, superstitious thinking which is blotting the light of logic and evidence. After garnering tips on psychics' entirely earthly trade secrets from the illusionist Derren Brown, Dawkins attends a seance and confronts the medium. Time and again, the interviewees appeal to personal revelation or second-hand anecdote to justify their belief.





More documentaries like this...

Who Wrote the Bible

Zeitgeist

The Root of All Evil

The Genius of Charles Darwin

Judgement Day - Intelligent Design on Trial

The Real Eve

Support the 'cause', buy the DVD today...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Astrology is based on a canopy over a flat world against whose surface are attached stars, five of which wander about. Why do we not insist that astrologers use the ancient cosmology and not allow them to use modern astronomy?

Anonymous said...

"The light from some of the closest stars started its journey at the time of the dinosaurs..."

Lemme see, the last dinosaur standing stood about 65 Myears ago, roughly the distance in lightyears to the Virgo galaxy cluster (not close and not visible to the un-aided eye).

There you go combating ignorance, Mr Dawkins!