Last night (Friday, November 2), I tweeted the following:

@RichardDawkins says Mormons are too stupid to be president. Is David Harold Bailey too stupid to be rocket scientist? http://www.wnd.com/2012/10/richard-dawkins-anti-mormon-self-delusion/

(Bailey is a mathematician and computer scientist with a B.S. from Brigham Young University and a Ph.D. in mathematics from Stanford. He was a NASA computer scientist for fourteen years, and currently works at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.)

I hardly expected a response from Professor Dawkins himself, so I was surprised when Professor Dawkins tweeted back:

@AnswersAuthor I doubt he believed in the charlatan Joseph Smith’s magic hat, or that Native Americans are Jews.

Well, I’m not a Mormon and I’m no expert on LDS doctrine. I don’t know anything about a magic hat or Jewish Native Americans—so for now, I’ll have to take Professor Dawkins’ word that these are tenets of LDS faith.

But so what? If Mitt Romney is mentally unfit to be president simply because he’s a devout Mormon, then Kevin Rollins was mentally unfit to be CEO of Dell Computers; Jon Huntsman, Sr., was mentally unfit to be a plastics entrepreneur and philanthropist; J. Willard Marriott and J.W. “Bill” Marriott, Jr., were mentally unfit to run the Marriott hotel empire; David Neeleman was mentally unfit to run JetBlue, David Harold Bailey was too stupid to be a NASA scientist, and on and on.

Since these devout Mormons were all highly intelligent, high-achieving individuals, that would seem to obliterate Professor Dawkins’ argument. I have never heard Professor Dawkins ever offer a single scrap of evidence that Mitt Romney made crazy, irrational policy decisions as governor of Massachusetts or CEO of the Olympics. If there were such evidence to present, I trust Professor Dawkins would have eagerly presented it.

It’s obvious to me that Professor Dawkins’ argument against Governor Romney is specious and irrational, based on atheistic prejudice, not fact and reason. The evidence for high-achieving, successful Mormons flatly and definitively contradicts Richard Dawkins attacks on Governor Romney. So I tweeted back:

@RichardDawkins Mitt’s Mormon beliefs haven’t prevented him from balancing budgets. Obama’s Keynesian beliefs are killing the economy. #Fact

After sending that tweet, a thought hit me: Professor Dawkins had offered a testable, falsifiable hypothesis. He had said that, in his opinion, it was highly unlikely that mathematician and NASA computer scientist David Harold Bailey seriously believed in Mormon doctrines, which Dawkins characterized as belief in “the charlatan Joseph Smith’s magic hat, or that Native Americans are Jews.”

So I decided to google it—and in 0.39 seconds I had my answer. I immediately tweeted a second reply to Professor Dawkins:

@RichardDawkins Whoops, Prof, you’re wrong again. David H Bailey has a website harmonizing science & LDS theology: http://www.sciencemeetsreligion.org/ 

As of this writing, I’ve received no reply.

I guiltily confess I felt a bit gleeful when I composed that tweet. But it is so much fun to be right.

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For a more thorough discussion of Professor Dawkins anti-Mormon views see my blog piece, “Does Atheism Make You Stupid?” or the related commentary piece at World Net Daily.

“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
—George Orwell

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UPDATE, Monday, November 5:

On November 3, Richard Dawkins tweeted, “Bishop Romney really IS Mormon in the full batshit doolally sense.” The eminent professor apparently thinks all he has to do is mock Mormon belief and it somehow proves that Mitt Romney is crazy. But Professor Dawkins hasn’t proven anything.

The only way to prove Dawkins’ thesis is to go over Romney’s record as governor and CEO of the Olympics, and unearth some crazy “batshit” Mormon-induced decisions and policies Romney initiated. If no such decisions and policies can be found, Dawkins’ claim cannot be substantiated.

The mere fact that Mitt Romney holds a religious view that Richard Dawkins deems to be “batshit” and “doolally” proves nothing. The government at all levels is populated by religious believers of all kinds, and all of those believers embrace doctrines Dawkins considers “batshit.” Yet these government leaders somehow manage to function quite effectively nonetheless.

Professor Dawkins needs to show that the religious views of Mitt Romney have actually, demonstrably prompted disordered behavior. He has never offered a scintilla of evidence to support such a claim. And if there is no evidence to that effect, then those religious ideas must be deemed harmless, even if they seem like “batshit” to the esteemed professor.

Fact is, one could easily make the case that Mormon values of hard work, honesty, humility, personal responsibility, and so forth actually make Romney more qualified as a leader than a non-Mormon. You will never see a devout Mormon on welfare, for example. Why is that? It’s because Mormons believe in self-reliance and in taking care of their own.

Whatever Professor Dawkins may think of “magic hats,” much of what is admirable about Mitt Romney appears to come from his Mormon moral and ethical principles. You can’t just say a person has a religion you think is “batshit,” and therefore he’s unfit for office. You must provide evidence that those beliefs have made him dysfunctional as a leader. Absent such evidence, Professor Dawkins is only spouting anti-Mormon bigotry.

Frankly, the only dysfunctional behavior I observe is that of the hysterical biology prof who tosses around terms like “batshit” and “doolally.” It is sad to witness Professor Dawkins’ intellectual meltdown.