Evolutionary biologist and very vocal atheist Richard Dawkins says he's planning to become a children's author. In an interview with Britain’s More4 News, Dawkins, who recently retired as the Charles Simonyi Professor in the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford, says he wants to write a book that explores children’s relationships with fairy tales and myths, and whether these stories affect their ability to think about the world rationally and scientifically.
Bringing children up to believe in spells and wizards and things turning into other things is "unscientific" and "anti-scientific," he says. "Whether that has a pernicious effect, I don't know."
Dawkins says he will "look at mythical accounts of various things and also the scientific account of the same thing. And the mythical accounts that I will look at will be several different myths of which the Judeo-Christian one will just be one of many. And the scientific one will be substantiated by appeals to the children to think for themselves, to look at the evidence. Always look at the evidence." —Heather Wax