Are you ignorant?

I like the way in which Dawkins (speaking to Lawrence Krauss), weasels his way out of what "ignorant" means, saying that he was misunderstood when he used it; I seem to remember he used similar tactics when Midgley lambasted him on "The Selfish Gene" for the way in which the word "selfish" was used both techically and in an ordinary language sense; he came back saying he only meant it in the specialist way which (as extracts from his book in The Myths We Live By show) is palpable nonsense. The inability to see that in context it comes across as an insult (i.e. as in "you ignorant pig"), and synomymous with "dumb" shows that he has a very limited understanding of how language works.

Dawkins: I like your clarification of what you mean by reaching out. But let me warn you of how easy it is to be misunderstood. I once wrote in a New York Times book review, "It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I'd rather not consider that)." That sentence has been quoted again and again in support of the view that I am a bigoted, intolerant, closed-minded, intemperate ranter. But just look at my sentence. It may not be crafted to seduce, but you, Lawrence, know in your heart that it is a simple and sober statement of fact. [...] To call somebody ignorant is no insult. All of us are ignorant of most of what there is to know. I am completely ignorant of baseball, and I dare say that you are as completely ignorant of cricket. If I tell somebody who believes the world is 6,000 years old that he is ignorant, I am paying him the compliment of assuming that he is not stupid, insane or wicked.

The writer of the blog also has a priceless remark (http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2007/06/dawkins-and-kra.html)

The importance of promoting evolution without defining religion as some kind of ignorant voodoo has been a regular theme here at Wired Science.

In the end, the ultimate enemy of enlightenment isn't belief in a particular thing, but dogma and self-righteousness -- qualities that are amply demonstrated both by people of faith and by people of science.

Quite a few people manage to hold on to their religious convictions -- belief in God, in non-arbitrary morality, etc. -- while accepting that natural selection is real, the earth billions of years old, and so on. It's these sort of people that evolution's defenders need to produce.

Krauss seems to get this, but the boorishness of people like Dawkins doesn't help anyone, except maybe people who think scientists hate God. Is there some way of making him switch teams? At this point, the best thing that could happen to the public acceptance of evolution would be Richard Dawkins' full-fledged conversion to Christianity, whereupon his alienating intellectual tendencies would show moderate, generally sensible fence-sitters the stupidity of fundamentalism.