Tonight, University of Wisconsin welcomes professor Richard
Dawkins to our campus as part of the Distinguished Lecture Series. Mr. Dawkins,
an evolutionary biologist, is best known in this country for his best-selling
work, ?The God Delusion.? I will be attending the lecture tonight, and I whole-heartedly
encourage everyone ? religious and non-religious people alike ? to attend as
well.

While Mr. Dawkins is best known as an atheist, I suspect
that if you asked him, the word ?atheist?? would not be the first term he would
use to describe himself. If you get anything from his lecture tonight, I hope
you recognize that Mr. Dawkins is not a nihilist, out to promote despair and
desolation.  ?The God Delusion? is an
explicit attack on religion, but in his earlier works ? ?The Blind Watchmaker,?
?Climbing Mount Improbable? and especially ?Unweaving the Rainbow? ? Mr.
Dawkins reveals he is most interested in understanding the wonder and majesty
of the universe.

For example, in ?Unweaving the Rainbow,? Mr. Dawkins
discusses Newton?s experiment that proved that white light was really the
combination of the light of the visible spectrum. From that simple experiment,
scientists have since been able to discern the chemical composition of distant
stars, determine the universe is expanding rapidly and calculate the very age
of the universe to a surprisingly accurate degree. The results that the ?unweaving?
of white light produced are indeed incredible and awe-inspiring.

Science, reason and empiricism are responsible for helping
us comprehend our place in the universe, in addition to raising our standard of
living an incredible amount over the past few centuries. This is an undeniable
fact. However, the fact that belief in the supernatural ? specifically, in organized
religion ? is still so prevalent seems to indicate religion provides something
the scientific outlook cannot. I contend, to the contrary, that science and
skepticism can provide an even more satisfying worldview than can belief in the
supernatural.

In a recent opinion piece, (?American faith not going
anywhere,? Feb. 27), Wasim Salman wrote that faith would always have a role to
play as long as we do not completely understand the nature of the universe.
Furthermore, he argued the elegance of faith is not chained to any standards of
evidence and can be molded to fit individual and institutional beliefs.

First, the argument that faith can explain the as-of-yet
unexplained is intellectually shallow at best. If you argue science can?t
explain a certain phenomenon, a scientist will likely response ?Yes, but we?re
working on it.? And even if science fails to explain everything about the
universe, it does not follow that faith?s explanation ? ?God did it? ? provides
a satisfactory answer. We?re here because of Darwinian natural selection. If
you believe there?s something more to this life, faith and science offer
different paths for finding that deeper meaning. Faith states that it has
answers, as long as you don?t ask questions. Science, on the other hand,
encourages questions and relies on constant investigation of knowable facts.

Another challenge to science is that while it helps explain
the nature of the universe, it does not provide a reason for living in this
universe. While science might not offer the moral proclamations or criteria for
getting into the afterlife, the scientific outlook can provide both the
direction for how we should live our lives and an explanation as to why we?re
here ? the two questions faith and religion try to answer.

In 2004, a Yale mathematician estimated that everyone on
this planet shares a common ancestor from as recently as 3,000 years ago. When
one recognizes that we are all related to and interconnected with one another,
the violence and hatred common throughout the world become completely
senseless.

Geneticists have pointed out that the number of people that could
possibly exist far exceeds the number of people that ever have existed. Given
the slim probability of our individual existence, the opportunity provided by
nature?s complex processes must not be taken for granted.

Corey Sheahan ([email protected])
is a senior majoring in history and
economics.