Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins (b. 1941, Nairobi) is a British evolutionary biologist and former Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford (1995–2008). Trained under Niko Tinbergen, he rose to prominence with The Selfish Gene (1976), which popularized the gene's-eye view of evolution and introduced the concept of the 'meme'. The Extended Phenotype (1982) developed his most substantive theoretical contribution to biology. In The Blind Watchmaker (1986) and Climbing Mount Improbable (1996), he argued that cumulative natural selection suffices to explain apparent design, rendering the teleological argument obsolete.

With The God Delusion (2006), Dawkins became a central figure of so-called New Atheism alongside Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens. He defends a strong evidentialist atheism, treats the God hypothesis as a scientific question, and offers a probabilistic argument from biological and cosmological complexity against theism (the 'Ultimate 747 gambit'). He is sharply critical of religious moderation, faith-based epistemology, and religious education of children.

His treatment of theology has been widely criticized—by Alvin Plantinga, Alister McGrath, Terry Eagleton, John Lennox, and David Bentley Hart—for engaging only popular forms of belief and ignoring classical theistic metaphysics. Philosophers also dispute his use of memetics and his framing of faith. Despite these critiques, Dawkins remains among the most influential public advocates of scientific naturalism in the contemporary Anglophone world.