Right, the man is an accomplished and well-respected biologist with a firm grasp of physics. Calling him an idiot is, well, rather idiotic.
As pointed out by another person recently on the news, the present failure of the scientific community is at having sat on the sidelines whilst religious fundamentalists have gone to war against scientific discovery, invariably posing fallacious arguments (flawed logic) to argue their points to their "flock." Such is the example of creationism vs evolution, a totally fabricated conflict precisely because creationism is a belief on "who" made it all, while evolution is a scientific field of evidence-based study on "how" life changed over time. The intersections of such are virtually nil, thus little real conflict exists.
Dawkins is one of a handful of scientists, within the larger scientific community, that attempts to reverse the trend of ignorance propagated by extremist fundamentalist preachers. Of course he's going to get some flak, be labeled an idiot, by people who have been programmed to believe geological & archeological evidence is all wrong and dinosaurs walked the Earth with Man less than 6,000 years ago.
One argument posed is that he's an idiot for arguing with such people, but when you examine the harm that has been imposed over just the last 40 years because we "didn't" address such behaviors, it becomes rather obvious the scientific community should indeed be much more adamant in their efforts to fight back the lunacy of fundamentalist dogma. It has resulted in disruption of scientific advancement many times in the past, and is doing so again. It is discouraging children from obtaining educations in favor of memorizing a single book and is a primary factor in the catastrophic delay imposed on identifying, accepting, and acting to counteract the effects of Climate Change.
Dawkins an idiot? No.
Now, Bill Nye on the other hand, is foolish (still not an idiot). In a recent television interview, Bill Nye made the mistake of arguing belief of religion vs belief of evolution. In such an action, he fell hook, line, and sinker for the fundamentalist preachers' bait of contraposing religious belief to that of evolution acceptance. In this error, he gives the notion that evolution is belief-based and thus taints his own wells of argument. Evolution is both fact and theory (indeed, ever-modifying theories). There is no belief associated with it.
