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.
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 Hardly scientific, yes, but many of Linnaeus terms are now outdated too.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?)
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”.
I’m sure you’d rather not hear that you’re being silly.
So you need evidence for Vampires, but not for God. That doesn’t mark you as an exemplar of reasoned thinking.
God explains nothing. It is a throwing up of hands and saying, “That guy did it via magic.”
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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 ]”