“Date rape is bad. Stranger rape at knifepoint is worse,” says Richard Dawkins. Seeming to have anticipated, although not understood, the feminist reaction this kind of sentiment generally evokes, he finishes the tweet: “If you think that’s an endorsement of date rape, go away and learn how to think.”

Thus Richard Dawkins, once known as a respected evolutionary biologist and author, who demolished the arguments of the creationists, now regarded as a bad tempered crackpot. His message seems to be: “Why won’t we all just learn how to think, damn it! Then we could all live together in a peaceful society where …….women shut up about sexual harassment”.

It is a great shame. This is a man who has huge knowledge and who has a gift for popularizing science. Instead of continuing to educate an ignorant public on what he knows best, he pontificates on every matter under the sun – and makes an ass of himself with bigoted remarks. He understands the scientific method, a process intended to mitigate the interference of human subjectivity in data collection, as a universally applicable way of understanding the physical world. Unfortunately, he thinks it can be applied to everything else, and those who disagree with him are “feeble-minded obscurantists who cling to emotion, tradition or the supernatural to shield themselves from the power of his truth bombs…..To him, the humanities are expendable window-dressing, and the consciousness and emotions of his fellow human beings are byproducts of natural selection that frequently hobble his pursuit and dissemination of cold, hard facts”. (based on an article by Eleanor Robertson, theguardian.com, 30 July 2014)

From an Epicurean point of view Professor Dawkins is bad news. Epicurus was not an outright atheist – he simply believed that the gods refused to get involved in the minor and boring problems of the human race. Were he alive today it is possible that he might concede that there could well be a prime mover who authored the Big Bang, because, simply, know one knows (yet). Epicurus was a rationalist, an atomist and a supporter of the simple science of the day. He would regard Dawkins as now being as dangerous to rational thought and the idea of ridding the world of supernaturalism, bible literalism and blowhard religionists. Moderation is all.