# I pit Richard Dawkins, Victor Davis Hanson and people like them **URL:** \ **Category:** The BBQ Pit\ **Created:** [March 4, 2012, 6:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-richard-dawkins-victor-davis-hanson-and-people-like-them/614708 "2012-03-04T06:24:32Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 10
**Author:** ![FixMyIgnorance](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/7feea3/32.png) [@FixMyIgnorance](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FixMyIgnorance)\ **Post date:** [March 5, 2012, 9:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-richard-dawkins-victor-davis-hanson-and-people-like-them/614708/181 "2012-03-05T21:52:30Z")
> [@Cheshire\_Human](#): > > The lamb/well thing was just the only one brought up in detail in this thread, so it’s the example I used to make my point. I agreed with the OP. As of your earlier post up there, I see where you’re coming from now and why you’d call it a strawman argument. You’re basically saying that he’s mischaracterizing Lent and that attacking people for trying to circumvent rule X is a waste because there’s no evidence that God cares about X at all in the first place. As such, Dawkins’ criticism does not convince people who view Lent differently than how he’s portraying it. Fair assessment of your stance? If so, then yes, I might agree with you here that the words could have probably been better-chosen. Either way, it’s a one-sentence point amidst countless books and interviews that make Dawkins’ stance clearer in context. There is no evidence _period_ for determining what God may or may not want. _All_ of the premises are arbitrary and manmade. We can _always_ move the goalposts and find exceptions to rules. ---
**Author:** ![DrDeth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b487fb/32.png) [@DrDeth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrDeth)\ **Post date:** [March 5, 2012, 10:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-richard-dawkins-victor-davis-hanson-and-people-like-them/614708/182 "2012-03-05T22:09:34Z")
> [@FixMyIgnorance](#): > > Quote: > > "The theological mind takes a delight in the niceties of dietary laws and the ingenuity required to dodge them. In South America, capybaras (sort of giant guinea pigs) were deemed to be honorary fish for the purposes of Catholic dietary laws on Fridays, presumably because they live in water. According to the food writer Doris Reynolds, French Catholic gourmets discovered a loophole that enabled them to eat meat on Fridays. Lower a leg of lamb into a well and then ‘fish’ it out. They must think God is awfully easily fooled. " Thus, he was quoting a bogus source and he should have known better. The pun “fish” doesn’t work in French, nor have I heard anyone use this sort of reasoning, nor have I seen any official Church source say this was OK. Now yes, some form of what we would today consider “meat” was allowed as “fish”. But remember. The Bible was written many thousands of years before Linnaeus. “Fish” did not mean back then what it means now (and today it’s kinda meaningless, Taxonomy-wise). Whales (as they lived in the sea) were Fish. Perfectly reasonable definition. Hardly scientific, yes, but many of Linnaeus terms are now outdated too. Thus, if the Bible sez “Eat Fish on Fridays” and according to the Bible whales are Fish, then it’s not theological hairsplitting or nonsense to eat whale on a Friday. Here Dawkins was being a idiot. And, a special kind of idiot as he accepted a bad source for a cheap jab, and he makes fun of other peoples “rules” for things- as if Science doesn’t sometimes also make up rules which are silly to others (how many planets are there?) ---
**Author:** ![DrDeth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b487fb/32.png) [@DrDeth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrDeth)\ **Post date:** [March 5, 2012, 10:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-richard-dawkins-victor-davis-hanson-and-people-like-them/614708/183 "2012-03-05T22:17:35Z")
> [@FixMyIgnorance](#): > > Let’s go to the source of Dawkins’ quote: > > [http://www.marconews.com/news/2010/mar/02/lets-talk-food-lenten-foods-turn-time-penance-trad/](http://www.marconews.com/news/2010/mar/02/lets-talk-food-lenten-foods-turn-time-penance-trad/) > > The entire point of something like Lent is that the Church asks you to inconvenience yourself to serve as a reminder that God is the top-dog and that pleasures are a lesser priority. People do it for different reasons but I think it can be reasonably summed up as teaching discipline/restraint/patience/sacrifice/“getting closer to God”/etc. > > Obviously, the purpose of self-sacrifice is lost if you’re simply trying to figure out a way to game the system. What is the point of the self-sacrifice? In many cases, it is seen as a form of debt repayment to God / being rewarded in other ways / etc. So how is acting upon loopholes that avoid sacrifice actually accomplishing this goal? > > That is why Dawkins said “they must think God is so awfully easily fooled.” It’s like trying to claim that you’re engaging in self-sacrifice like everyone else when, in reality, you’re just trying to find a way to fulfill your pleasures. THAT’S what misses the point. > > So no, I don’t think Dawkins missed the purpose behind the rules at all. He was illustrating how people will bend and twist religious practices/guidelines to suit their needs, dropping them whenever it’s convenient and picking them back up when it’s favorable to their ends. Except Dawkins purports to be a scientist. Citing a second hand source, who admits their source is nothing more than a rumor (and is certainly false), as a way to prove that religion is “silly” is just plain poor scientific writing and poor critical thinking. He should know better. The point is, yes, Lent is supposed to be a sacrifice. But this story is false. Thus it is not an example of the faithful trying to “game the system”. ---
**Author:** ![Lobohan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lobohan/32/79_2.png) [@Lobohan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lobohan)\ **Post date:** [March 5, 2012, 10:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-richard-dawkins-victor-davis-hanson-and-people-like-them/614708/184 "2012-03-05T22:29:24Z")
> [@Maeglin](#): > > The real problem is that you are allowed to express yourself at all. I’m sure you’d rather not hear that you’re being silly. > [@](#): > > Let’s just take the first question about vampires. > > Something must motivate a belief. Something about the world has to be explained. If you think otherwise, then we’re done. Maybe this something is a question about events or an explanation of something you do see whose cause is not obvious. > > Suppose a bunch of people turned up dead and completely exsanguinated. There are no witnesses. There is no forensic evidence. Nothing. But for whatever reason, you are curious about the world and maybe you care about other people and think this needs to be explained. > > Perhaps you start from the belief that murders are random and unconnected. Then it takes evidence to prove otherwise. That’s fine. But the prior belief that phenomena are random and unconnected is something you choose, not something nature gives you. It’s an epistemological choice. > > Perhaps you have a prior belief that allows that it is more likely that murders be connected. The fact that the bodies are drained of blood is enough to convince you that in this case, the deaths are all connected. Your prior belief is a choice. You interpret the same evidence and get a different conclusion as someone with a different prior. > > So you want to posit a mechanism that killed the people and drained their blood. Vampires might be a nice place to start. A vampire would also explain why the bodies are drained of blood. It would also explain why the people were all murdered at night. Perhaps it would even explain the little puncture marks on the victims’ throats. So far, this is a pretty attractive explanation. A person with a prior belief that the events were not connected would never believe this story because he already denies that the murders had anything to do with each other. > > So now we check the vampire story for problems. There are problems. You find no convincing accounts of anyone ever seeing a vampire. For some people this is not a problem, because they have a prior belief that something can exist without having to see it directly. Sometimes they are very wrong about this but sometimes they are very right. It is a gamble. But perhaps this isn’t the worst problem. Perhaps the idea of someone being undead directly contradicts our best explanations for other phenomena which have not yet been proven false. Even the most epistemologically easy-going among us would have to abandon the vampire story, as attractive as it may be. So you need evidence for Vampires, but not for God. That doesn’t mark you as an exemplar of reasoned thinking. > [@](#): > > All the same, whether or not what we observe confirms or denies our beliefs is a function of the beliefs we had before we made the observation. This is what makes the god story so appealing. God can explain all sorts of things about the universe, from moral behavior to the problem of evil to where we go when we die. God explains nothing. It is a throwing up of hands and saying, “That guy did it via magic.” > [@](#): > > For some people, answers to these questions are important. There is nothing currently known about the rules of the universe that rule out the possibility of god. There is also nothing currently known about the rules of the universe that rule out Russel’s teapot. And all the known rules of physics preclude, for instance, Christian miracles. People don’t come back from the dead, levitate or transmute liquids. Saying that _the laws of physics don’t preclude God_ is insane. One of the attributes ascribed to God is that _He can break the laws of physics!_ > [@](#): > > This is partly because theists make it so and have revised god-ness over the centuries, but still. Physics has not yet proven that there can be no god. So if you start from the belief that there are things in the world that must be explained and that your epistemology admits to the existence of things you cannot see or test easily, then the very same evidence that hard-core materialists may think is stupid will confirm a theist’s beliefs. Obviously this makes communication hard. Again saying that “physics doesn’t preclude a being that can magically break the rules of physics” is nonsense. We are still left with no evidence for God and no evidence for Zombies. > [@](#): > > What you believe is a trade-off between sensitivity and specificity. You want your test for cancer to catch as many people as possible who really have the disease without giving too many false positives. If the test is too rigorous, it will have few false positives but will not accurately identify everyone who has the disease. What trade-off you are willing to live with is an epistemological choice. Prior beliefs about some things are silly because where they directly contradict things that we actually do know. But where we don’t know, it’s more or less fair game. The important thing here may not be having a rigorous epistemology all the time but being _right_ about the most material questions. And we close with Gibba-Jabba. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [March 5, 2012, 10:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-richard-dawkins-victor-davis-hanson-and-people-like-them/614708/185 "2012-03-05T22:29:37Z")
> [@Cheshire\_Human](#): > > The only thing I ever had to say about Dawkins in this thread was to agree with the OP that he attempts to refute religion, while assuming that he has no need to actually understand in detail what the people he’s refuting actually assert. As a result, what he comes out with is mostly just “inspiration for the atheists” type arguments. Convincing only for the already convinced. It’s useless for convincing believers that they are wrong, and it’s a waste of time for me to read further examples of, or recommend to others. Dawkins steps outside of his field of expertise, refuses to gain expertise in the field he pontificates on, and thus turns out writing that’s largely a waste of paper. He makes many arguments, I don’t doubt that. The lamb/well thing was just the only one brought up in detail in this thread, so it’s the example I used to make my point. I agreed with the OP. Could you give me a succinct summary of what religious people actually assert? For in my experience lots of religious people assert lots of different things, so your objection is rather baseless. The “moderate” criticisms of the book seem to often say that “none of my friends are fundamentalists so any criticism of them doesn’t address the god I believe in at all” and never quite explains what that god is. Sorry, Dawkins can’t individually address the wide variety of god beliefs out there - the existence of which is an excellent reason for not believing any. And IIRC he said he had the usually British religious upbringing, so he isn’t totally ignorant. As for the lamb/well thing - I read the book, and I don’t remember that part at all. Was it a full chapter? Or was it more or less a joke, an example of the odd things believers do. I hardly think his argument rests on this in any way. ---
**Author:** ![davidm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/davidm/32/225_2.png) [@davidm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/davidm)\ **Post date:** [March 5, 2012, 10:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-richard-dawkins-victor-davis-hanson-and-people-like-them/614708/186 "2012-03-05T22:45:59Z")
> [@Calculon](#): > > A simple example of the complete ineptitude of Dawkins in not just theology, but also the philosophy of science is when he argues (in chapter 4 I think) that God cannot be an explaination for anything, because that the raises the question of who created God. It is inept theologically because just about all religions hold that God exists out of logical necessity, and is not created in any sense… I think you’re missing the whole point of the “who created God” argument. You have to look at the context in which it’s usually used. It’s a response to the [Argument From Existence.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_argument) This discussion usually goes as follows. Believer: “Nothing can exist without having been created. Therefore the universe had a creator, God.” Non-believer: “Who created God”? This is actually a rhetorical question meant to point out that Believer started with the premise that nothing can exist without having been created; then violated that premise by postulating something that exists without having been created, namely God. You seem to be saying that the starting premise is that nothing can exist without being created - _except God_. That’s not an argument for the existence of God, since it assumes the existence of God as it’s premise. It’s like saying “God exists, therefore God exists”. If you want to prove that God exists, this is not the way to do it. It doesn’t work, and telling someone who points this out that they’re theologically ignorant doesn’t fix the broken logic. It’s like telling them “Oh, I see your problem. The reason you don’t believe in God is that you don’t believe in God.” And I think you’ll find that a great many theologians have in fact abandoned the argument for this very reason. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [March 5, 2012, 11:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-richard-dawkins-victor-davis-hanson-and-people-like-them/614708/187 "2012-03-05T23:00:39Z")
> [@Maeglin](#): > > W Prior beliefs about some things are silly because where they directly contradict things that we actually do know. But where we don’t know, it’s more or less fair game. The important thing here may not be having a rigorous epistemology all the time but being _right_ about the most material questions. 500 years ago religious beliefs for things we didn’t know were as reasonable as any. The non-religious explanations were equally shots in the dark, and equally as wrong. But don’t y think the fact that none of the explanations we did discover involved gods is a clue that it is unlikely that any of the explanations we will discover in the future will either? There appears to be a real trend, doesn’t there? A fan of the ether might say we can’t really rule it out (dark energy?) but that’s not the way to bet. So we can make some predictions about how things we don’t know will turn out. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [March 5, 2012, 11:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-richard-dawkins-victor-davis-hanson-and-people-like-them/614708/188 "2012-03-05T23:06:58Z")
> [@davidm](#): > > If you want to prove that God exists, this is not the way to do it. It doesn’t work, and telling someone who points this out that they’re theologically ignorant doesn’t fix the broken logic. It’s like telling them “Oh, I see your problem. The reason you don’t believe in God is that you don’t believe in God.” > > And I think you’ll find that a great many theologians have in fact abandoned the argument for this very reason. They also say that nothing we see happens without a cause, but because we don’t see God he can happen without a cause. You then show them quantum foam, and they refuse to believe there is no cause. Believer evidence shows that nothing (but God happens without a cause.) Scientist: Here is something that happens without a cause. Believer: But we know nothing happens without a cause so there must be a cause that you can’t see. There, I’ve just saved us about 50 posts. Not to mention they never explain what this supposed creator of the universe has to do with us. You’d think that the deity who did create the universe would have a clue about what went on when inspiring his Bible writers. Instead they wrote stuff expected of pre-scientific man. Maybe on some planet there is a god who got it right, but not this one. ---
**Author:** ![Cheshire\_Human](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/5f8ce5/32.png) [@Cheshire\_Human](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cheshire_Human)\ **Post date:** [March 5, 2012, 11:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-richard-dawkins-victor-davis-hanson-and-people-like-them/614708/189 "2012-03-05T23:15:17Z")
> [@FixMyIgnorance](#): > > As of your earlier post up there, I see where you’re coming from now and why you’d call it a strawman argument. > > You’re basically saying that he’s mischaracterizing Lent and that attacking people for trying to circumvent rule X is a waste because there’s no evidence that God cares about X at all in the first place. As such, Dawkins’ criticism does not convince people who view Lent differently than how he’s portraying it. > > Fair assessment of your stance? > > If so, then yes, I might agree with you here that the words could have probably been better-chosen. Either way, it’s a one-sentence point amidst countless books and interviews that make Dawkins’ stance clearer in context. There is no evidence _period_ for determining what God may or may not want. _All_ of the premises are arbitrary and manmade. We can _always_ move the goalposts and find exceptions to rules. Yes, this I can agree with. Completely. ---
**Author:** ![Cheshire\_Human](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/5f8ce5/32.png) [@Cheshire\_Human](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cheshire_Human)\ **Post date:** [March 5, 2012, 11:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-richard-dawkins-victor-davis-hanson-and-people-like-them/614708/190 "2012-03-05T23:20:25Z")
> [@Eonwe](#): > > How do we know God rewards self-sacrifice? How do we know what kinds of self-sacrifice God wants, and what kinds he doesn’t? What if I sacrifice by not playing video games, is it ok for me to eat whatever I want then? Is God cool with that? Is my religious community going to be hunky-dory with me coming up with my own rules to satisfy this apparent meta-purpose of self-sacrifice? > > The problem with theology is that it has little of use to say about evaluating the truths of a given religion against those of other religions, or against non-religious truth. The self-sacrifice bit ain’t my idea. I don’t defend it. I merely point out that calling the rules silly because you don’t get the point behind them is unconvincing to those who believe in those rules. If you want to know what rules are acceptable to any given theist, ask him. I don’t know. Or care. See posts after the one you quoted, answering others, for further details. ---
**Author:** ![Mapache](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/58956e/32.png) [@Mapache](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mapache)\ **Post date:** [March 5, 2012, 11:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-richard-dawkins-victor-davis-hanson-and-people-like-them/614708/191 "2012-03-05T23:45:24Z")
Originally Posted by Maeglin , “Suppose a bunch of people turned up dead and completely exsanguinated. There are no witnesses. There is no forensic evidence. Nothing. But for whatever reason, you are curious about the world and maybe you care about other people and think this needs to be explained.” That’s kind of the point, isn’t it? People don’t “turn up dead and completely exsanguinated.” No one, except maybe a few drunks or schizophrenics, has seen anyone turn into a bat and fly away, or dry up and turn into a pile of ashes in sunlight, just as no one sees anyone rising from the dead, or turning into a swan to seduce a virgin, or fighting off an army of frost giants. And until they do, regularly and with repeatability, the basis for belief in gods or vampires is, I believe, rather shaky. ---
**Author:** ![Trinopus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/2bfe46/32.png) [@Trinopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trinopus)\ **Post date:** [March 5, 2012, 11:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-richard-dawkins-victor-davis-hanson-and-people-like-them/614708/192 "2012-03-05T23:56:33Z")
> [@FixMyIgnorance](#): > > I think Calculon assumes that atheists think they _know_ there’s no God or that they have an “active belief” that there is absolutely no God or something similar. > > No. Atheists simply _lack the belief_. God could possibly exist. But so could a huge variety of other entities. They’re all without proof. So we don’t believe in any of them until we have compelling evidence. Well… There are lots of different kinds of atheists. Some are positive and active disbelievers. One common form of this is the atheist who holds that one of the conventional definitions of God – the “omni-” version – is logically self-contradictory, and thus cannot exist. (Any more than a five-sided square can exist: impossible, because the terms of the definition contradict themselves.) I’m not mentioning this as a proof, just a note that some atheists think that they know there is no (specifically defined class of) God. I also have to say, without any joy at all, that when a guy says to me, “God spoke to me!” that is “evidence” of God. Paltry, weak, non-repeatable, non-verifiable, negligible evidence… But it is “evidence” in the strictest sense. ---
**Author:** ![Kimstu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ecd19e/32.png) [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)\ **Post date:** [March 5, 2012, 11:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-richard-dawkins-victor-davis-hanson-and-people-like-them/614708/193 "2012-03-05T23:56:51Z")
> [@Maeglin](#): > > All the same, whether or not what we observe confirms or denies our beliefs is a function of the beliefs we had before we made the observation. This is what makes the god story so appealing. God can explain all sorts of things about the universe, from moral behavior to the problem of evil to where we go when we die. For some people, answers to these questions are important. There is nothing currently known about the rules of the universe that rule out the possibility of god. This is partly because theists make it so and have revised god-ness over the centuries, but still. Physics has not yet proven that there can be no god. So if you start from the belief that there are things in the world that must be explained and that your epistemology admits to the existence of things you cannot see or test easily, then the very same evidence that hard-core materialists may think is stupid will confirm a theist’s beliefs. Obviously this makes communication hard. Exactly. This is why it’s so dangerous to go into one of these discussions assuming that one’s own epistemological premises are universal or necessary (e.g., something either exists **or** it doesn’t, or meaning **is** conferred by logic and evidence). Just because these ideas may seem self-evident and fundamental to us doesn’t make them universal or automatically true. ---
**Author:** ![Trinopus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/2bfe46/32.png) [@Trinopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trinopus)\ **Post date:** [March 6, 2012, 12:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-richard-dawkins-victor-davis-hanson-and-people-like-them/614708/194 "2012-03-06T00:03:24Z")
> [@Czarcasm](#): > > From the link: > (1) If God exists then he has necessary existence. > (2) Either God has necessary existence, or he doesn‘t. > (3) If God doesn‘t have necessary existence, then he necessarily doesn‘t. > Therefore: > (4) Either God has necessary existence, or he necessarily doesn‘t. > (5) If God necessarily doesn‘t have necessary existence, then God necessarily doesn‘t exist. > Therefore: > (6) Either God has necessary existence, or he necessarily doesn‘t exist. > (7) It is not the case that God necessarily doesn‘t exist. . . . Wait a minute… How is step 7 justified? I’d say that the kind of God being discussed definitely “necessarily doesn’t exist!” It’s like saying, “There is a perfect sphere somewhere on earth. It’s true because it has to be true, because it’s perfect.” Well, to me, that, in itself, precludes its existence! It’s like saying that I can lift myself to the moon by my bootstraps. In the real world, that specific kind of bootstraps doesn’t exist… ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [March 6, 2012, 2:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-richard-dawkins-victor-davis-hanson-and-people-like-them/614708/195 "2012-03-06T02:41:13Z")
> [@Trinopus](#): > > Wait a minute… How is step 7 justified? I’d say that the kind of God being discussed definitely “necessarily doesn’t exist!” > > It’s like saying, “There is a perfect sphere somewhere on earth. It’s true because it has to be true, because it’s perfect.” Well, to me, that, in itself, precludes its existence! > > It’s like saying that I can lift myself to the moon by my bootstraps. In the real world, that specific kind of bootstraps doesn’t exist… And step three leaves out _un_necessary existence. ---
**Author:** ![Snarky\_Kong](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a183cd/32.png) [@Snarky\_Kong](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Snarky_Kong)\ **Post date:** [March 6, 2012, 2:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-richard-dawkins-victor-davis-hanson-and-people-like-them/614708/196 "2012-03-06T02:47:11Z")
Even if you buy into any of the ontological proofs, all you’ve proven is that something exists. It just happens to be convenient for someone to label it “god” so that they can later trojan horse in all the other stuff that they associate with god, but doesn’t follow from the proof. ---
**Author:** ![Ludovic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/7ab992/32.png) [@Ludovic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ludovic)\ **Post date:** [March 6, 2012, 2:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-richard-dawkins-victor-davis-hanson-and-people-like-them/614708/197 "2012-03-06T02:57:34Z")
> [@Snarky\_Kong](#): > > Even if you buy into any of the ontological proofs, all you’ve proven is that something exists. It just happens to be convenient for someone to label it “god” so that they can later trojan horse in all the other stuff that they associate with god, but doesn’t follow from the proof. This is the hugest gaping hole in the whole MOG argument. The majority of times it has been invoked it has been all “hey! We just proved that something, which we called God, exists! Therefore, since God exists, He wants us to … [go to church | eat babbys | worship our half inflated dark lord]” ---
**Author:** ![DrDeth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b487fb/32.png) [@DrDeth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrDeth)\ **Post date:** [March 6, 2012, 3:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-richard-dawkins-victor-davis-hanson-and-people-like-them/614708/198 "2012-03-06T03:15:46Z")
Dudes, can you leave Religion to Great Debates and let us get back to Dawkins, and the OP’s questions? ---
**Author:** ![Snarky\_Kong](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a183cd/32.png) [@Snarky\_Kong](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Snarky_Kong)\ **Post date:** [March 6, 2012, 3:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-richard-dawkins-victor-davis-hanson-and-people-like-them/614708/199 "2012-03-06T03:21:58Z")
> [@DrDeth](#): > > Dudes, can you leave Religion to Great Debates and let us get back to Dawkins, and the OP’s questions? Nobody is stopping you from commenting on it. Go right ahead. ---
**Author:** ![davidm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/davidm/32/225_2.png) [@davidm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/davidm)\ **Post date:** [March 6, 2012, 3:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-richard-dawkins-victor-davis-hanson-and-people-like-them/614708/200 "2012-03-06T03:46:41Z")
> [@DrDeth](#): > > Dudes, can you leave Religion to Great Debates and let us get back to Dawkins, and the OP’s questions? It’s a little difficult to respond to an OP that consists of a bunch of straw men and unwarranted assumptions. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-richard-dawkins-victor-davis-hanson-and-people-like-them/614708.md?page=9) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-pit-richard-dawkins-victor-davis-hanson-and-people-like-them/614708.md?page=11)