Richard Dawkins is a hero of the Saturn/Neptune opposition; his book The God Delusion was published last September as the forces of the establishment (Saturn) railed against the forces of the mystical (Neptune). Back in March, as we passed through the second phase of the opposition, I wrote about Deepak Chopra’s response to Richard Dawkins. You can read more about what Dr. Chopra has to say here, but suffice it to say that Dawkins has made a personal crusade out of bashing anything that doesn’t conform to establish scientific understanding.

For his new two-part television show on the BBC, Dawkins interviewed astrologer Neil Spencer who writes about the experience for Guardian Unlimited. Evidently the first episode of Dawkins’ program will be bashing alternative medicine; he will dedicate the second episode to astrology. Spencer writes:

Scientism, of course, hates meaning. It prefers to view humanity as a random accident, isolated in a cosmos of ‘indifferent vastness’ – the legacy of the post-Copernican enlightenment that Dawkins claims is now being ‘betrayed’. The opposing view, that the world has soul and purpose, that humanity and the cosmos are linked, is to be found not, as he and others claim, in the dogma of religion, but in art and in the depth psychology of Freud and Jung that Dawkins holds in contempt. The sweep of Romanticism, from Goethe and Beethoven down to Nash and Ginsberg is where modern humanity has articulated many of its quests for metaphysical and spiritual truth.

Dawkins and people like him can keep their dry and skeptical outlook on life. While googling what people are saying about Dawkins, I found this gem:

scientists who fall under the spell of scientism like Richard Dawkins are precisely like Falwell and Robertson; the only difference is the content of their thinking.
Beware of scientists who fail to demonstrate humility.
I hope people come away from this interview with a deeper appreciation for the importance of ideas. Ideas create ‘reality’. We create realities that either bring our souls alive or subject them to slow agonizing deaths.

My thoughts exactly! I’ll be interested to see what my friends in the UK think about these Dawkins programs.