Dawkins to purge those with unjustified beliefs

In this audio interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson, the leftist-atheist-evolutionist Richard Dawkins favors firing a professional who has idiosyncratic beliefs that are irrelevant to his profession:

I don't think that he should be employed in a hospital, because what you are saying about that man -- He has the kind of mind that is so adrift with reality, that even if he is a competent eye surgeon, I don't think that he could/should be trusted. [at 20:00]

I wonder how anyone would hold a job under such a standard, and how you would ever get eye surgery done. Dawkins makes it clear that he is talking about beliefs that have no bearing on the practice of eye surgery.

His main target is organized religion and other views that he considers anti-science. But, as I often post on this blog, our most brilliant professors at our most prestigious universities hold all sorts of anti-science views. And I just focus on the hard sciences like Physics. The situation is much worse in the humanities and social sciences.

To me, believing in the multiverse, or string theory, or black hole information is just as wacky as Dawkins' examples. I am tempted to add supersymmetry and quantum computing to the list.

It is the political Left that always wants to root out people for their beliefs, and purge them somehow. I am not trying to get these professors fired. I just want to determine if what they say is right or wrong.

The great majority of the public holds religious views that are not backed up by scientific findings. Jerry Coyne argues, like Dawkins, that it is all in conflict with science. See this debate with a philosopher who says that most religious

According to a new paper by Neil Van Leeuwen, religious “credence” is nothing like mundane factual belief. It has, he claims, more in common with fictional imaginings. Religious folk do not really “believe” – in the ordinary sense of the word – what they profess to believe. Like fictional imaginings, but unlike factual beliefs, religious credences are activated only within specific settings.

That is, religious belief can be like a small child with an imaginary friend. The child sometimes acts as if the friend is real, but if pressed against some concrete factual consequence, the child obviously understands that the child is not real.