Actually, now you are getting into distinctions where I have to say: Ask an actual believer. I can’t speak for them, because I’m not one. These sorts of distinctions will get down to what the individual believer actually thinks about it all, and it will vary from individual to individual.
Dawkins’ joining in the attempt of atheists to re-label themselves “brights” was one of the most utterly clueless and downright stupid things I’ve ever seen.
He also said we should’ve kept Saddam alive so we could study his brain and find out why SH was so evil.
BTW, Hanson’s a registered Democrat. But he did vote for GWB.
Yea, I gotta say the “brights” thing was exceptionally clueless. Dawkins is an extremely [del]bright[/del] intelligent guy but he really missed the boat on this one.
I think it was more skeptics than atheists, in particular, wasn’t it? Otherwise I agree wholeheartedly.
I see no real use in re-labeling atheists. Even if you call yourself a “bright,” you’re still saying “Well I don’t believe in God and instead value things like reasoned logic and physical evidence,” in which case people would see through it anyway. It might be easier to just say you’re a skeptic.
I always thought the “bright” thing was silly. It’s pretentious and gives religion far too much credit; you don’t need to be “bright” to see though religion, or even of average intelligence. It’s no harder to see the falsehood of religion than it is to see the falsehood of Santa Claus; any adult who isn’t outright mentally disabled can do so if they want to. People remain religious because of irrationality, not because they are stupid.
Yeah, but that’s if you believe there is a connection between explaining natural phenomena on the margins of our understanding and things like the question of evil, what happens when we die, and why we are here to begin with. Religions whose primary schtick is explaining nature have, for the most part, retreated and died out. People just don’t believe that Zeus causes storms anymore.
The universe still is full of weird stuff. I don’t know how well past results can be good guides to future predictions. I personally don’t think we are going to find God as we get better at quantum physics, but I kind of wouldn’t be surprised if we did.
Obviously. In this case, we have the equivalent of dead bodies drained of blood. We are surrounded by constant, enormous questions to which we have no answers. Some people want these questions to have answers. We do have evidence: personal religious experience, scripture, observation of miracles, etc. Whether this evidence confirms or disconfirms belief in God depends on your prior beliefs. Likewise, the presence of war, disease, and evil drives some people to abandon religion and others to take it up with abandon. Ontological arguments convince believers and invite scorn from unbelievers. The evidence is never neutral. How you feel about it depends on how you felt before you observed it.
A prior belief that God exists is not logically inconsistent with anything we know about the universe. It even has some advantages because it can allow you to answer questions that lack of belief can’t. My personal answers to the big questions are much poorer than believers’. But if you have a strong prior that no god exists, then it is going to take a hell of a lot more to convince you than someone with a weaker prior. But all priors are pretty much equal. The more interesting conversation between theists and atheists is how they formed their prior in the first place.
I think the name “Brights” was a poor choice for a lot of reasons, most notably needlessly insinuating intelligence into the issue.
What I like about it is the politics of it. I think Dawkins gets maligned primarily because he is committing the sin of publicly speaking ill of religion. There’s such a great sense that we need to be quiet about religious practices and beliefs. “Respecting” them appears to mean never even politely questioning them or their role in our lives.
So you end up with Dawkins being characterized as malicious, even by atheists who haven’t even read him. They seem to have the attitude that if you don’t believe, you should sit quietly alone in the corner. They’re uncomfortable even suggesting that something might not be right about religion.
Look at Kimstu here. Her objection to Dawkins, in my opinion, is that she feels he did not start out with a big enough IMHO at the start of the book. As I recall, he spent a great deal of time establisbing that there may exist a God that cannot be tested empirically, and making clear that considering such a god would be fruitless (the intangible silent dragon in the garage bit). He makes clear that the God hypothesis pertains to a person interactive god exactly like that which nearly every believer concerns themselves with.
I think that efforts to bring organization to atheists are doomed to fail. Atheists are not joiners. It’s probably got something to do with why they are not religious; many religious people are not believers, but are comforted by joining.
Yeah, once you understand that the Earth has a roughly elliptical orbit while the sun remains essentially stationary, one no longer needs to believe in Helios. Sorry, I realise that was scientism. Once one adopts an unquestioning and unwavering principle of naturalistic objectivity and empirical hegemony, one opens oneself to fallacious and demagogic arguments, propounding orthodox heliocentric dogma. Equivocal enough? Or should I throw in some conciliatory nods to non-overlapping magisteria, post-modernism and solipsism?
What was apparent to me is that Dawkins was critiquing the fact that the monks in question (if they really existed at all - the capybara thing is true at least) were circumventing the spirit of the law in order to adhere to the arbitrary letter of the law. The dipping wasn’t an act of sacrifice, it was ceremonial and compliant. The humour revolves around the fact that they weren’t explicitly trying to fool God, they just made up an arbitrary method to appease him.
This is unrelated to the philosophy of science, it’s a cogent critique of the cosmological argument that was also summarised by Russell and has never been satisfactorily answered. If a creator can be posited without physical evidence, infinite regress can be posited without physical evidence. Arguing otherwise amounts to special pleading. I’m fairly sure this is explicitly written in the book itself.
Actually under Popper’s conception, the opposite method is used. If a theory does not have a criterion for disproof then it is held to be “not even wrong”, which I believe is the origin of the phrase. This way we do not need to assert the non-existence of entities, merely say that we see no reason to believe in them and offer the person making a claim the opportunity to provide their evidence.
Dennett did as far as I’m aware. I wouldn’t say that it was his central argument. Perhaps the most novel argument contained within, the book covers a lot of ground, including introducing the concept of the “Evolutionary Stable Strategy”, which I first read within and then picked up “The Selfish Gene” to understand a little better. There are still theists who posit that empathy is unaccountable given the fact of evolution.
Philosophy is a noble and interesting subject. I’m busy reading Aristotle now. (Sexist pig 
) But philosophy is about questions and religion is about answers. Philosophy can ask about what happens when we die and why there is evil. Religion tells us.
Religion claims to be able to tell us about these hard to verify subjects thanks to some connection to the Answerer of all questions, that is God. Oddly if there was a god, different religions, each claiming some sort of connection, give different answers. How can we tell which to believe? By checking out how they do on their verifiable claims. And here they all fail miserably. Since it is not required that there must be one correct religion, we can be forgiven for thinking that none of them are correct.
Sure the more reasonable religions have given up their claims to scientific knowledge instead of saying, as the fundamentalists of all stripe do, who ya going to believe, me or that fossil or that telescope? But that also means they should be giving up claims to special knowledge. Religion departments should be split and moved to History and Philosophy. If all religious people accepted this, we’d be in much better shape. I don’t think there is a block of followers of Kant in Congress trying to limit reproductive rights.
Past results are excellent guides to the future. Where I work the people who got the last semiconductor process right get to predict how the next one will work. Not a perfect one, though, we still run our test chips and tune like crazy. But it mostly works.
People have been expecting to find God in the next scientific advance for over 200 years. That was why so many ministers were amateur scientists in the early 19th century (and good ones also.) The attempt to find God failed miserably. In any case, what would God discovered by quantum physics even look like?
It fails a little bit earlier than that.
Like at step 1.
Necessary existence concerns existence under all possible scenarios and conditions - just because God hypothetically exists under the condition that the proof assumes it, doesn’t mean God necessarily exists because it doesn’t say anything about whether God would have existed if God didn’t exist.
But the funnest part is the “existence is greater than nonexistence”. Actually one possible universe is that in which incredible evil is allowed to occur and God does nothing about it, I’d say a God that didn’t exist under that situation is greater than a God that did.
But the humor is when you assume that a God that created the universe and all the majesty within is the greatest of all. Actually, a God that created the universe and all its majesty while simultaneously not existing is even greater!
Wow! Just plain wow! That’s a keeper!
I always fell down on the “greatest entity imaginable.” Okay, I’m imagining the “greatest entity imaginable.” And now I’m imagining this entity growing two inches…
But I never took it to the degree you just did! I wish I were wearing a hat, so I could take it off to you!
His God goes to 11
In defense of Dawkins, atheism, by definition has no theologians. He has never really claimed to be a theologian. what he has done is point out the logical fallacy that god exists, which just about anyone with a degree in science can do in their sleep. hell, I have a degree in fine art, and I can get a theist talking in tautologies in a matter of minutes. When you talk in tautologies, you might as well shut up because you are using a whole lot of words to say exactly nothing. Dawkins just wants to see the separation of myth and science.
Unfortunately, I didn’t come up with that line. Although a line that’s that great while also being written by me would be even greater