Western art grew from our religion and a striving to illuminate and understand mankind's relationship with God. So did non-Western art -- the pyramids, the Norse sagas, the statues of Easter Island and a number of other things that enrich our lives. Even cave-art was almost certainly related to the supernatural. Belief produced Michelangelo's Pieta and the Sistine Chapel, Leonardo's The Last Supper, the great Cathedrals of Europe, the works of Dante, Shakespeare, Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, and virtually every great masterpiece.Did you see that? He made the classic "Atheism = Nazism" link. I mean COME ON! All you have to do is google 'Gott mit Uns' and you'll see the absurdity. As for the artists, now I know they're not around to ask, but I reckon a safer bet is that Michaelangelo painted the sistine chapel for a nice pay out from the church, not out of his love of god. The industrialization of Western Europe was apparently down to a bunch of monks. A fine example of twisting facts to fit your thesis comes when he attributes the discovery of the big bang theory to a Catholic Priest. I think the guy he's talking about is Georges Lemaître, who was a physicist AND a priest. But first of all, this guy did not discover the big bang, that discovery is accredited to Alexander Friedmann. Second, even if this priest did discover the big bang, it was his physics training that led him there, not his theology. No holy book has ever led to a great scientific discovery and great science is only carried out in the absence of religious reasoning. Had Christianity (or any of the other monotheistic religions) never existed, we would still have physics, we would still have philosophy, we would still have astronomy, chemistry, engineering, biology and so on and so on. Do you know why? Because these discoveries came from people using their minds not their bibles!
Modern atheist art has produced the pickled cows and sharks of Damien Hirst, the soiled bed-linen of Professor Tracey Emin, and, in literature, the mumblings and ravings of Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, attempts to portray a meaningless world. Socrates and Plato, pagans but believers in a god, laid the foundations of Western philosophy, including its humanistic aspects. Atheism produced the meaninglessness and worse of Nietzsche, an unintentional progenitor of Nazism, and then of Sartre, spiritual father of the Pol Pot Genocide, as atheism produced Communism in general, responsible for about 100 million deaths and ruined lives beyond count.
One last point, Richard Dawkins is an Ethologist by training, not a Geneticist. This guy really hasn't got a monkin' clue.
