Battle of the professors: Richard Dawkins branded a fundamentalist by expert behind the 'God particle'



Theoretical physicist is seen as a potential Nobel Prize-winner after Cern findings appeared to confirm his theories about a 'God' particle

In an interview with a Spanish paper he accuses Richard Dawkins of concentrating his attacks on fundamentalists - and of being one himself

Dawkins last weekend declared that raising a child in the Catholic church was worse than sex abuse dished out to youngsters by priests



Athiest campaigner Richard Dawkins was yesterday branded a 'fundamentalist' by one of his most eminent scientific colleagues.

The militancy of Professor Dawkins's attacks on religious belief mean he is 'almost a fundamentalist himself', scientist Peter Higgs said.

Professor Higgs, whose theory on the sub-atomic 'God particle' was recently supported by experiments at the Cern research centre near Geneva, is considered one of the world's leading scientists and is widely tipped for a Nobel prize.

Clash of the scientific titans: Theoretical physicist Professor Peter Higgs, left, has called biologist Richard Dawkins, right, a 'fundamentalist' and branded his attacks on religion 'embarrassing'

INOFFENSIVE ATHEIST Peter Higgs is a British theoretical physicist best known for his prediction of the discovery of a new kind of elementary particle which acts on others to give them mass.

The so-called Higgs boson became known as 'the most sought-after particle in modern physics' since its existence is neccessary to explain the widely-accepted Standard Model of particle physics.

Professor Higgs is now seen as a shoo-in for the Nobel Prize next year after experiments in the Large Hadron Collider at Cern this year appeared to confirm his predictions.

He first became interested in what lies behind mass in the Sixties, developing the idea that particles acquired the property a fraction of a second after the Big Bang as a result of interacting with a theoretical field. He described theoretical model (now called the Higgs mechanism) in a paper published in the Journal Physical Review Letters, just as other physicists came to the same conclusions independently.

On July 4, 2012, CERN announced the ATLAS and CMS experiments had seen strong indications for the presence of a new particle, which could be the Higgs boson.

Professor Higgs is an atheist and has said he doesn't like that the particle is nicknamed the 'God particle', as he believes the term 'might offend people who are religious'.

DARWIN'S ROTTWEILER A self-described 'militant atheist', Richard Dawkins came to prominence with his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, which popularised the gene-centred view of evolution and introduced the term meme.

An emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, he was the University of Oxford's Professor for Public Understanding of Science from 1995 until 2008.

He is a longstanding atheist, a vice president of the British Humanist Association, and a supporter of the Brights movement, which aims to promote public understanding of irreligious worldviews.

Well known for his criticism of creationism and intelligent design, his 1986 book The Blind Watchmaker he argues against the watchmaker analogy, an argument for the existence of a God based on the complexity of living organisms.

However, his wider notoriety came in 2006 with the publication of The God Delusion, in which he contends that a supernatural creator almost certainly does not exist and that religious faith is a delusion.

Dawkins' criticism of the teaching of creationism in schools has earned him the moniker 'Darwin's rottweiler', a reference to biologist T. H. Huxley, known as 'Darwin's Bulldog' for his advocacy of evolutionary ideas.

Professor Higgs has used his new status to pour scorn on 71-year-old Professor Dawkins, a champion of evolution and author of The God Delusion which argues that belief in God is irrational.

Professor Dawkins's contempt for religion has recently led him to suggest that being raised as a Roman Catholic is worse for a child than physical abuse.

But Professor Higgs said that Professor Dawkins has caricatured religious believers as extremists and ignored those who try to reconcile their beliefs with science.

In an interview with the Spanish newspaper El Mundo, Professor Higgs, who is 83, said: 'What Dawkins does too often is to concentrate his attack on fundamentalists. But there are many believers who are not just fundamentalists.

Shoo-in for the Nobel Prize: Traces of traces of a proton-proton collision measured in the Compact Muon Solenoid instrument in the search for the Higgs boson, which scientists believe they have now found

'Fundamentalism is another problem. I mean, Dawkins in a way is almost a kind of fundamen- talist himself.'

Professor Higgs also told the newspaper: 'The growth of our understanding of the world through science weakens some of the motivation which makes people believers.

'But that's not the same thing as saying they are incompatible. It is just that I think some of the traditional reasons for belief, going back thousands of years, are rather undermined.

'ROMAN CATHOLIC TEACHINGS ARE WORSE THAN CHILD SEX ABUSE'

Richard Dawkins last weekend told Qatar-based news network Al Jazeera he believed that raising a child a Roman Catholic was worse than child abuse.

Interviewer Mehdi Hasan asked Professor Dawkins about previous comments he made, when he said: ‘Horrible as sexual abuse no doubt was, the damage was arguably less than the long-term psychological damage inflicted by bringing the child up Catholic in the first place.’

Mr Hasan asked: ‘You believe that being bought up as a Catholic is worse than being abused by a priest?’.

Professor Dawkins replied: ‘There are shades of being abused by a priest, and I quoted an example of a woman in America who wrote to me saying that when she was seven years old she was sexually abused by a priest in his car.

‘At the same time a friend of hers, also seven, who was of a Protestant family, died, and she was told that because her friend was Protestant she had gone to Hell and will be roasting in Hell forever.

‘She told me of those two abuses, she got over the physical abuse; it was yucky but she got over it.

'But the mental abuse of being told about Hell, she took years to get over.’

Roman Catholic former Tory MP Ann Widdecombe said: ‘Dawkins doesn’t know what to say next to get attention. No sane person would believe that being brought up in a force for good, in the Ten Commandments, in the Beatitudes, and in the Gospels can be worse than child abuse.’

'But that doesn't end the whole thing. Anybody who is a convinced but not a dogmatic believer can continue to hold his belief. It means I think you have to be rather more careful about the whole debate between science and religion than some people have been in the past.'

Professor Higgs added that a lot of scientists were also religious believers. I don't happen to be one myself, but maybe that's just more a matter of my family background than that there is any fundamental difficulty about reconciling the two,' he added.

The criticism of Professor Dawkins – who was Oxford University's Professor of the Public Understanding of Science from 1995 until 2008 – ends a year in which his determination to condemn religion has led to a number of abrasive arguments.

He recently spoke about a woman who had written to him about her abuse by a Roman Catholic priest and her anguish when she was told that a Protestant friend would burn in hell.

Being told about hell, Professor Dawkins said, was worse because it was more difficult to get over than physical abuse. It seems to me intuitively entirely reasonable that that is a worse form of child abuse, that will give more nightmares because they really believe it,' he said.

Earlier this year he suffered ridicule following a Radio 4 Today programme interview in which he was challenged by a priest to give the full 21-word title of On The Origin Of Species, the work by his hero Charles Darwin that established the theory of evolution.

After confidently promising listeners that of course he knew the title, Dawkins flailed through a series of 'ums' and 'ers'.