I agree completely on your characterisation of Dawkins, and I would like to bring over a comment by kcurie because it seems like since Carl Sagan and Isaac Asimov died there isn't really anyone out there communicating science in the way it should be.

Closing the argument, I would say that the great reason why science is failing to provide anything more than an "auctoritas" or failing to explain that in science there should be no other authority than your rational mind applying a set of tools and concepts to the external world is the lack of people with a huge background of all sciences and of fairy-telling and oral communication/anthropology in particular. There are no scholars explaining the how questions and giving new possibilities for the "why" questions... there are no good philosophers that know what they are talking about when they talk about science, and there are no good scientific scholars which are given money and prestige to explain science in philosophical or magical ways.

[quoted with some slight edits]

We have met the enemy, and he is us — Pogo