Last week, as the Dish noted, Dawkins caused an uproar by tweeting: “All the world’s Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.” Isaac Chotiner mounts a defense of Dawkins:
[T]here is something not quite right with many of the responses to Dawkins. The point he was trying to make, I would assume, is that Islam is a religion which holds back intellectual development, and thus the Nobel Prize count is skewed towards non-Muslim countries. This might be a silly argument in point of fact, but it is perfectly acceptable to make these types of claims. Religions are man-made things. People choose to follow a particular faith. It would be one thing to say that the color of one’s skin sets back one’s intellectual development; Dawkins was (I think) trying to say that a belief system human beings choose to…
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