Your general strategy here seems to be shaping up as trying to claim that I never responded to challenges that I’m pretty sure I did respond to, along with throwing in implications that I am “extremely silly”, “clueless”, and “ingenuous”. Whatever. In your latest post I’ve found one new and one previously overlooked challenge and am happy to respond here. If I’ve failed to answer something else, feel free to point it out.
Really? So you claim that Dawkins is your style of supposed weak atheist, who doesn’t deny the existence of God and is simply open-minded in an admirably neutral manner? I happen to love his writing which I think is both intelligent and often beautiful in its celebration of science and enlightened philosophy, but your claim about his view of God is ridiculous and just simply wrong. Let’s have a look.
You might ask yourself how someone who doesn’t advocate what I have called “strong atheism” and deny the existence of God could have written a book called The God Delusion! The title alone should end the discussion right there, but by all means let’s explore it further. Chapter 4 is entitled “Why There Almost Certainly is No God”, and let us here very clearly understand that his use of the adverb “almost” is meant in a strict scientific sense that is almost sarcastic, with the implication that all real knowledge is necessarily probabilistic but in this case we sure as hell know where the probabilities lie. He wastes no time in clearly explaining this right at the beginning:
*The argument from improbability is the big one … My name for the statistical demonstration that God almost certainly does not exist is the Ultimate Boeing 747 Gambit. The name comes from Fred Hoyle’s amusing image of the Boeing 747 and the scrapyard … Hoyle said that the probability of life originating on earth is no greater than the chance that a hurricane, sweeping through a scrapyard, would have the luck to assemble a Boeing 747.
… It turns out to be the God Hypothesis that tries to get something from nothing. God tries to get his free lunch and be it too. However statistically improbable the entity you seek to explain by invoking a designer, the designer himself has got to be at least as improbable. God is the Ultimate Boeing 747.*
The same chapter goes on to dismiss those who claim to have had personal subjective experiences of God (“I have dealt with illusion and hallucination in Chapter 3”) and to mock the idea that God can send messages to millions of people and hear from all of them simultaneously (“such bandwidth!”).
The chapter ends with a summary of its six main points and the conclusion that, if Dawkins’ arguments are accepted, then “the factual premise of religion – the God Hypothesis – is untenable.”
And this isn’t the only book in which Dawkins makes such arguments. Dawkins, like Krauss and other crusading hardline atheists, has widely publicized his views in numerous books, lectures, and interviews. Dawkins has indeed acknowledged a “fanatical” desire to promulgate his ideas. I will say again that Dawkins is both brilliant and eloquent and I actually agree with and even admire much of what he says. But anyone who claims that he doesn’t explicitly deny the existence of God, and that his views are some kind of neutral ambivalence, has either never read anything he’s written or is just engaging in absurd knee-jerk defensiveness.
Suffice it to say that I could make all the same statements about Krauss, too, who you also defend as merely an open-minded skeptic. In fact he’s worse, because he also claims supremacy of the hard sciences – physics in particular – over all domains of philosophy, which is stunningly myopic.
(emphasis mine)
The bolded statement is categorically wrong.
The core difference between atheism and agnosticism is that atheists assert an opinion on the existence of god, varying between weak atheism (“I don’t know whether God exists”) and the kind of strong atheism that is the more widely proselytized (“God does not, or almost certainly does not, exist”) along with assorted strawman arguments and occasional gratuitous mockery, as we have seen.
Whereas agnosticism asserts a position on the epistemology of the whole argument, that the existence of God is not knowable, and certainly not amenable to resolution by scientific evidence.
Indeed I think the major problem with many of Dawkins’ otherwise enlightened and eloquent arguments – and those of Krauss, though Krauss has a few more problems – and the only real argument I have with him – is the same problem that I have with most avowed atheists, which is that he sets up the concept of God as a strawman that he defines in a limited context like creationism or simple-minded principles of causation, and then knocks down the strawman.
I referred to myself as “more or less an agnostic” because I don’t much care for labels, but if you had to pin a label on me, that would probably be it, as I have defined it. I also see value in religions as social institutions and instruments of social tradition and continuity.