Richard Dawkins Award | |
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Awarded for | Publicly proclaiming "the values of secularism and rationalism, upholding scientific truth wherever it may lead." [1] |
Presented by | Center for Inquiry |
First awarded | 2003 |
Currently held by | 21 individuals |
Website | centerforinquiry |
The Richard Dawkins Award is an annual prize awarded by the Center for Inquiry (CFI). It was established in 2003 and was initially awarded by the Atheist Alliance of America coordinating with Richard Dawkins and the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. [1] In 2019, the award was formally moved to CFI. [2] CFI is a US nonprofit organization that variously claims on its website to promote reason, science, freedom of inquiry, and humanist values, or science, reason, and secular values. [3] The award was initially presented by the Atheist Alliance of America to honor an "outstanding atheist", who taught or advocated scientific knowledge and acceptance of nontheism, and raised public awareness. [4] The award is currently presented by the Center for Inquiry to an individual associated with science, scholarship, education, or entertainment, and who "publicly proclaims the values of secularism and rationalism, upholding scientific truth wherever it may lead." [1] They state that the recipient must be approved by Dawkins himself. [1]
The Richard Dawkins Award is named in honor of the British evolutionary biologist. In a 2013 poll conducted by Prospect magazine, Dawkins was ranked first in the list of "world thinkers" rankings. He is famous for his atheistic beliefs, [5] and has written books including The God Delusion and Outgrowing God: A Beginner's Guide. [6] [7] The first Richard Dawkins Award was received by James Randi, a magician who investigated and debunked various paranormal claims. [8] [9] In 2005, Penn Jillette and Teller, jointly as Penn & Teller, received the award. [10] [11] In 2009, Bill Maher received the award; due to his views on vaccines and his criticism of evidence-based medicine, oncologist David Gorski referred to him receiving the award as "inappropriate". [12] In 2020, Javed Akhtar became the first Indian to receive the award. [13] In 2021, Tim Minchin received the award. [14] In 2022, Neil deGrasse Tyson received the award saying it was an honor that he would hold above all others. [15]
Year | Portrait | Name | Notes [a] | Ref(s). |
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2003 | James Randi | Randi was a magician who investigated and debunked mind-reading, ghost whispering, fortune-telling, and other paranormal claims. Professionally known as "Amazing Randi", he was a recipient of the MacArthur award. [9] | [8] | |
2004 | Ann Druyan | Druyan is a film producer, director, lecturer, and a writer. She is an agnostic, and asserts that religious faith is "antithetical to the values of science". [16] [17] [18] | [1] [10] | |
2005 | Penn & Teller | Penn Jillette and Teller, jointly known as Penn & Teller, are an Emmy Award winning magician duo. Both identify as atheists. [11] [19] [20] | [1] [10] | |
2006 | Julia Sweeney | Sweeney is an actor and writer, notable for her work in Saturday Night Live . She has written My Beautiful Loss of Faith Story explaining her atheism. [21] [22] | [1] [10] | |
2007 | Daniel Dennett | Dennett served as a professor and the director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He has authored various books including Consciousness Explained, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, and Kinds of Minds. [23] He argues that we "must not preserve the myth of God – it was a useful crutch, but we've outgrown it." [24] | [25] | |
2008 | Ayaan Hirsi Ali | Ali is a Somalian immigrant who served as a member of Dutch Parliament. She is a former Muslim converted to atheism, and a vocal critic of the Quran. [26] In 2023, Ali converted from atheism to Christianity and is still critical of Islam and the Quran. [27] [28] [29] [30] | [4] | |
2009 | Bill Maher | Maher is a political satirist and the host of Real Time with Bill Maher . He starred in the 2008 film Religulous , which the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science referred as "the most prominent film against religion in the United States" of 2008. [31] [32] | [12] | |
2010 | Susan Jacoby | Jacoby is an author and a Pulitzer Prize finalist. She is an atheist, and has authored various books, including The Age of American Unreason and Strange Gods: A Secular History of Conversion. [33] [34] | [4] | |
2011 | Christopher Hitchens | Hitchens was a journalist who authored the book God Is Not Great , which writer Susan Sontag called "the small world of those who till the field of ideas". [35] | [36] [37] | |
2012 | Eugenie Scott | Scott is an anthropologist who served as the director of National Center for Science Education. She is an atheist. [38] | [39] [40] | |
2013 | Steven Pinker | Pinker is a linguist, psychologist, and a professor at Harvard University; he has authored How The Mind Works. He is an atheist. [41] [42] | [43] | |
2014 | Rebecca Goldstein | Goldstein is an author with a Ph.D. in philosophy. She is a recipient of 2014 National Humanities Medal. She authored the fictional book 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, which The Guardian writer Jonathan Beckman referred as "[mocking] the delusions of both the godly and the godless". [44] [45] [46] | [47] | |
2015 | Jerry Coyne | Coyne is a professor of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago. He is a supporter of evolution, and asserts that "belief in God is [...] detrimental, even dangerous, and fundamentally incompatible with science." [48] [49] | [50] | |
2016 | Lawrence Krauss | Krauss is an American-Canadian physicist. He has been referred by Melissa Pugh, then president of Atheist Alliance of America, as a "passionate advocate of atheism and reason known throughout the world". [51] | [51] | |
2017 | David Silverman | Silverman is an American who has served as the president of the American Atheists organization. The Washington Post referred to him as one of America's "most prominent atheists". [52] [53] | [54] | |
2018 | Stephen Fry | Fry is a British comedian, actor, and an activist who received the award because of "his role in the world of skepticism, atheism, rationalism." [55] | [55] | |
2019 | Ricky Gervais | Gervais is a British comedian, screenwriter, and actor, known for his critical thinking, rationalism, and secularism. [56] | [56] | |
2020 | Javed Akhtar | Akhtar is a poet and lyricist, who is the first Indian to receive the award. He received the award for "critical thinking, holding religious dogma up to scrutiny, advancing human progress and humanist values." [13] | [57] | |
2021 | Tim Minchin | Minchin is a musician and comedian, who received the award for "inspiring a global audience to find joy in reason, science, and skepticism." [58] | [14] | |
2022 | Neil deGrasse Tyson | Tyson is an American astrophysicist, author, and science communicator. Since 1996, he has been the director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space in New York City. | [15] | |
2023 | Bill Nye | Bill Nye is an American mechanical engineer, science communicator, and television presenter. He is best known as the host of the science education television show Bill Nye the Science Guy (1993–1999) and as a science educator in pop culture. | [59] | |
2024 | Brian Cox | Brian Cox is British phyicist, best known for his pop science books and as a presenter of science programs on television. | [60] |
Ann Druyan is an American documentary producer and director specializing in the communication of science. She co-wrote the 1980 PBS documentary series Cosmos, hosted by Carl Sagan, whom she married in 1981. She is the creator, producer, and writer of the 2014 sequel, Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey and its sequel series, Cosmos: Possible Worlds, as well as the book of the same name. She directed episodes of both series.
Richard Dawkins is a British evolutionary biologist, zoologist, science communicator, and author, born in Africa. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, and was Professor for Public Understanding of Science in the University of Oxford from 1995 to 2008. His book The Selfish Gene (1976) popularised the gene-centred view of evolution and coined the word meme. Dawkins has won several academic and writing awards.
The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI), formerly known as the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), is a program within the U.S. non-profit organization Center for Inquiry (CFI), which seeks to "promote scientific inquiry, critical investigation, and the use of reason in examining controversial and extraordinary claims." Paul Kurtz proposed the establishment of CSICOP in 1976 as an independent non-profit organization, to counter what he regarded as an uncritical acceptance of, and support for, paranormal claims by both the media and society in general. Its philosophical position is one of scientific skepticism. CSI's fellows have included notable scientists, Nobel laureates, philosophers, psychologists, educators, and authors. It is headquartered in Amherst, New York.
Scientific skepticism or rational skepticism, sometimes referred to as skeptical inquiry, is a position in which one questions the veracity of claims lacking scientific evidence. In practice, the term most commonly refers to the examination of claims and theories that appear to be unscientific, rather than the routine discussions and challenges among scientists. Scientific skepticism differs from philosophical skepticism, which questions humans' ability to claim any knowledge about the nature of the world and how they perceive it, and the similar but distinct methodological skepticism, which is a systematic process of being skeptical about the truth of one's beliefs.
The Brights movement is a social movement whose members since 2003 refer to themselves as Brights and have a worldview of philosophical naturalism.
Ernest Nagel was an American philosopher of science. Along with Rudolf Carnap, Hans Reichenbach, and Carl Hempel, he is sometimes seen as one of the major figures of the logical positivist movement. His 1961 book The Structure of Science is considered a foundational work in the logic of scientific explanation.
Javed Akhtar is an Indian screenwriter, lyricist and poet. Known for his work in Hindi cinema, he has won five National Film Awards, and received the Padma Shri in 1999 and the Padma Bhushan in 2007, two of India's highest civilian honours.
The Center for Inquiry (CFI) is a U.S. nonprofit organization that works to mitigate belief in pseudoscience and the paranormal and to fight the influence of religion in government.
Benjamin Radford is an American writer, investigator, and skeptic. He has authored, coauthored or contributed to over twenty books and written over a thousand articles and columns on a wide variety of topics including urban legends, unexplained mysteries, the paranormal, critical thinking, mass hysteria, and media literacy. His book, Mysterious New Mexico: Miracles, Magic, and Monsters in the Land of Enchantment, was published in the summer of 2014 and is a scientific investigation of famous legends and folklore in the state of New Mexico. In 2016 Radford published Bad Clowns, a 2017 IPPY bronze award winner, and he is regarded as an expert on the bad clowns phenomenon.
The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science is a division of Center for Inquiry (CFI) founded by British biologist Richard Dawkins in 2006 to promote scientific literacy and secularism.
Rebecca Watson is an American atheist blogger, vlogger, and YouTuber. She is the founder of the blog Skepchick and former co-host of The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe podcast.
Robert Allen Baker Jr. was an American psychologist, professor of psychology emeritus of the University of Kentucky, skeptic, author, and investigator of ghosts, UFO abductions, lake monsters and other paranormal phenomena. He is the editor of Psychology in the Wry, a collection of satire, and was formerly the co-editor of Approaches, a quarterly journal of contemporary poetry. His satirical and humorous verses have appeared in Vogue, Saturday Review, The Journal of Irreproducible Results, Worm-Runners' Digest, and other journals. He wrote 15 books and is a past fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.
The term New Atheism describes the positions of some atheist academics, writers, scientists, and philosophers of the 20th and 21st centuries. New Atheism advocates the view that superstition, religion, and irrationalism should not be tolerated. Instead, they advocate the antitheist view that the various forms of theism should be criticised, countered, examined, and challenged by rational argument, especially when they exert strong influence on the broader society, such as in government, education, and politics.
Leo Igwe is a Nigerian human rights advocate and secular humanist. A campaigner both in Nigeria and internationally as part of Humanists International, he specializes in documenting the impacts of child witchcraft accusations in Africa and in combating discrimination against atheists. He holds a Ph.D. from the Bayreuth International School of African Studies in Germany and a graduate degree in philosophy from the University of Calabar in Nigeria.
CSICon or CSIConference is an annual skeptical conference typically held in the United States. CSICon is hosted by the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI), which is a program of the Center for Inquiry (CFI). CSI publishes the magazine Skeptical Inquirer.
Robyn Ellen Blumner is an American attorney, civil rights expert and the current president and chief executive officer (CEO) of the secular educational organization Center for Inquiry (CFI) and executive director of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. She holds a J.D. degree and worked for several years as director of local affiliates of the American Civil Liberties Union advocating for civil liberties and civil rights before becoming a newspaper columnist and editorial writer in Florida.
Bertha Vazquez is an American educator. She retired from classroom teaching in 2023 and became the Director of Education for the Center for Inquiry. Vazquez was appointed a Committee for Skeptical Inquiry fellow in 2020, and received the 2023 Friend of Darwin award from the National Center for Science Education (NCSE).