I’m not aware of anybody appealing to Dawkins’ authority to prove evolution. Dawkins himself certainly does not try to use his post as his cite when it comes to evolution. Dawkins presents his data and subjects himself to peer review just like any other scientist.
Now, people may refer to credentialed experts as a kind of short hand, but that refernce is never really to authority alone since the person has to have already proven what they’re saying.
I have yet to see anything Dawkins says which is logically “sloppy” when it comes to refuting arguments for sky gods.
I think he’s wasting his time when he goes after religion as an institution, but in the pure EOG debate, there’s nothing sloppy about him.
Sez you. But it’s a standard Christian view, dating back centuries. If Dawkins is going to engage theism, he should deal with the views they actually hold. He could have, thus, spent a measly paragraph on it. One suspects, though, that he wasn’t even *aware *that this is a view held by many religious philosophers and theologians.
I’m not even close to a philosopher, and I can tell you right now that these replies are lame. They basically say, “God exists, therefore these objections to his existence are wrong.”
And Dawkins only wrote one book on atheism – supplemented by plenty of articles and interviews, but only one book. The rest are about biology.
Finally, as Diogenes said, you don’t need to argue for atheism, anymore than you need to argue against unicorns, or fairies, or invisible teapots orbiting the sun. Until there is evidence, the default is that they don’t exist. In this way, the existence of Bigfoot, UFOs, etc, are all more plausible than God, because they at least have a modicum of evidence (however poor) in their favor. And I’m afraid you are mistaken if you think the existence of evil and natural laws are the ONLY arguments against God.
Ever since I read “Principia Ethica” I have hated the so-called naturalistic fallacy. Possibly I hate it because for me it is associated with moral realism, but, whatever. Its the sux0rs. Even if you don’t approve of the refutation, do you know a good source that would discuss this? Doesn’t have to be online. Thx.
Actually, I seem to remember that he does argue that a god as defined in Abrahamic tradition is necessarily complex, since he must have knowledge of everything that’s going on in the universe, thus every event needs some representation within god’s mind (though I’m not actually sure if that’s in The God Delusion or from somewhere else, it’s been a while since I read it).
Anyway, pretty much all such refutations (as, coincidentally, Aquinas’ proofs as well, and generally all forms of pleading for a special status for god) only work, I think, because they assume a contradiction, as Indistinguishable has pointed out pretty much at the start of this thread – by claiming that every physical object is subject to certain rules, yet god isn’t; everything that follows is then trivial. Spelling this out a little, assuming that ‘every thing that has existence has property x’ and ‘there is one thing that has existence that doesn’t have property x’ – which is IMO what’s being done here, in asserting that god doesn’t need to be complex, while ‘everything else’ would have to be – means that you can show everything to be true.
Of course, you’ll know this already, so I guess I’ve probably made a blunder somewhere in my argument, but again – this is just the kind of thing I’d like to be shown; I always seem to hit kind of a brick wall when trying to follow this argumentation through.
Sure, although I might not get a chance to look until I get back to my office on Sunday.
You may be right; I read the book when it first came out, and so have lost a lot of the details, too. I don’t specifically remember that argument, though (which doesn’t mean it wasn’t there, of course).
Yes, you’ve made it clear that you don’t see such things. Personally, I agree with Michael Ruse, one of the foremost atheistic debaters of our time, when he says,
“It is not that the atheists are having a field day because of the brilliance and novelty of their thinking. Frankly - and I speak here as a nonbeliever myself, pretty atheistic about Christianity and skeptical about all theological claims - the material being churned out is second rate. And that is a euphemism for “downright awful.” [. . .] It is simply that it (and the other works, some of which I have gone after elsewhere) is not very good. For a start, Dawkins is brazen in his ignorance of philosophy and theology (not to mention the history of science). [. . .] Dawkins misunderstands the place of the proofs, but this is nothing to his treatment of the proofs themselves. This is a man truly out of his depth.”
Again, this is taken from Ruse’s review in the aforementioned review of ISIS.
Knowledge of philosphy and theology are irrelevant to debating the existence of God. Theology, in particular, is all made up and all stems from presuming the existence of god or gods in question. Protesting that Dawkins doesn’t know theology is like saying you can’t argue against the existence of vampires if you’ve never watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Exactly, I’m not seeing the real need to be well-versed in philosophy to understand that the claims like those found in the Bible are moronic.
And how on Earth do you describe yourself as “pretty atheistic” about Christianity? Either accept Christianity as is, or recognize that some guy getting nailed to a tree, two thousand years ago, then suddenly “resurrecting”, didn’t happen. He’s saying that there’s a chance this may have happened?
He does a lot more than “skirt a little close” with this. Half of what he says is blaming religion for one evil or another.
That’s true, but it’s not technically intended to be a refutation of arguments for the existence of God. Dawkins has two prongs: “There is no reason to believe that God exists.” and “Religion as an institution hurts society.” His first prong is solid,a nd none of his critics really even try to approach it. Every critique I’ve seen focuses on the second prong which is far more vulnerable, but defeating it doesn’t prove he’s wrong about the first prong.
Too many people think that a purely academic critique of religion would get them further by appealing to a religionist’s logic and reason than some well-timed attacks. Thats bullshit, religionists are irrational by definition. I like Dawkins and find his insults refreshing in a world where atheists are thought of as evil. I suspect that there is a great deal of people less enamored of his methods than his credentials and refuse to welcome him because he rubs people the wrong way. I read the God Delusion a long time ago and if he has missed arguments that he should have made, so what? No book fully encompasses the subject when the subject is as broad as religion. His included attacks on religion are sound, and his refutations of religion is logical
It’s not just the rigor or lack thereof in his arguments, it’s that he encourages militancy about it - in fact, I googled ‘militant atheism’ to see if the term had any use, and the second result was a Dawkins talk. He definitely raises the prominence of atheism with his methods, but it makes more enemies than converts. In particular, among his goals is to reduce the political and cultural influence of religion, but he apparently hasn’t figured out that mocking condescension towards religion is counterproductive, because most of the people in positions of influence over the subject aren’t atheists! The last thing atheism needed was a frontman who reinforces the aggressive anti-religion bogeyman stereotype.
But as for rigor and theology and such things, while it’s true that strictly speaking they aren’t logically necessary, presumably if he wants to expand atheism instead of merely preaching to the converted, he is going to be speaking to people of religion. Laying out why what a person believes is wrong has a chance of being convincing; comparing the whole business to space teapots and insulting the reader is not. The audience he’s appealing to now is only the audience that was already there.
I disagree. Religious belief systems still largely get a free ride in the sphere of public debate. Theist don’t feel any pressure to justify their position the way that other ideologies do.
I don’t think Dawkins intent is to convert anyone by mocking religion. Rather he’s trying to puncture the protective bubble that prevents religion from being openly debated and critiqued.
The teapot analogy comes from Bertrand Russell, not Dawkins (though Dawkins discusses it in his book), and there’s nothing insulting about it to anyone who understands it. Its absurdity is designed to make a point about unfalsifiable claims. It’s a perfectly sound analogy, not an ad hominem, and no theist interested in an honest debate should feel insulted unless they can actually demonstrate why their own unfalsifiable claims are more valid. People don’t get angry at stuff like the teapot and the FSM because they’re insulting, but because they’re so effective at highlighting the weaknesses of the religionists’ own assertions. Atheists are just supposed to accept that sky gods are less absurd than spaghetti monsters, but religionists never give a reason why. Until they can demonstrate a difference, they have no justification for saying they’ve been insulted.
So what specifically has Dawkins said that brings you to the conclusion that he promotes sloppy thinking?
Yeah, religious belief systems get a free ride, just like capitalism and democracy. You may argue that the merits are different, but (at least in the US) atheism is so obviously corrosive to so many people, and its proponents so morally inferior, that for a public figure to even suggest debating it is going to knock his credibility down a few notches. Dawkins is definitely not changing that.
I wasn’t referring to the teapot business specifically as being insulting, nor claiming that it was originated by Dawkins. (Honestly I had forgotten whether it specifically was even in the book, I was just using it as a stand-in for all such comparisons.)
But do you really not think Dawkins is insulting? Or were you just making a point about the teapot?