dartagnan wrote:You're constructing a straw man based on your own preferred concept of religion, using your own preferred concept of rationality and evidence. What might be good evidence for some, isn't good enough for others. Evidence to someone like you is only evidence if it is something that is evident to a scientist in a laboratory. You have no objective standard for evidence so don't pretend that you do. If said evidence is something only some humans perceive, then for you it can only be evidence of delusion and "danger."
No, I'm using a common definition of religion: organized structures that base their authority and veracity on supernatural claims. My claims for rationality and evidence are in the mainstream: I speak of valid reasoning based on observable fact.
I doubt that you're advocating for a pure epistemological relativism, but it kind of sounds like you are. What do you think would be an appropriate epistemology for grounding public decisions?
Humans know only what we perceive through our senses. That is the only way we obtain knowledge. We see things, we hear things, we taste things, we smell things, and we feel things. Religious people claim to obtain knowledge through spiritual means which cannot be falsified or tested to your satisfaction, thus you dismiss it altogether as self-induced delusion. Some claims can be and are falsified, but virtually every form of systematic theology recognizes that communication with the divine is not an exact science. What really matters is that they all share one common denominator: the knowledge that God exists. Often our emotions get in the way of our perception of God, but this is true for just about any type of knowledge.
Sure, everyone's logic is vulnerable to emotion, but supernatural claims have an added drawback of having no check on this sort of thing: they're not being independently verifiable, and therefore when people get off the tracks, it's impossible to correct them using that framework (and depending on their degree of fanaticism, even using other frameworks won't help). If a scientists incorrectly uses statistics to say that some races are mentally inferior to others, other people can correct him on this ratiocinative level. If a priest thinks that God told him that other races are inferior, there's no analogous chance for redress. When I speak of the danger of supernatural thinking, this is precisely what I have in mind.
Accepted by whom? Themselves, that's who. Their entire argument from rationality is one of preference. It is designed specifically to exclude those who offer reasons they don't like. Take the dictionary for example. To act irratonally simply means to act without reason. What is reason? Reason is simply defined as a basis or cause for belief. Religious people have that. What you're essentially saying is that their reasons aren't good enough for you, therefore they can't be considered reasons at all. Again, the epitome of arrogance at work.
Then let's see it. Again, you seem to be taking a completely relativistic stance toward epistemology. What if a deranged person broke into your house and announced that God told him to kill you? If you accept that supernatural experiences are a valid public epistemology, you have
zero grounds to impugn his rationale.
See what I mean? You use a selectoive definition that suits your agenda. You had to add that qualifying end which is totally subjective. Who gets to decide who is "doing it well"? Atheists? Certainly not scientists, since roughly half of them are religious people who do not consider their faith irrational.
It's not as if there's a panel that decides what's right and wrong -- this isn't the MLA. Reason, and reason alone, will decide who's doing it well. If your logic is incorrect, and I see that, I'll try to show you. You should do the same for me.
Religious people generally don't claim reason isn't important. In fact most apologists argue in favor of it. This is just another popular straw man you've borrowed from the new atheists.
Religious people DO claim that reason isn't important when it comes to their supernatural claims (although I admit that the vast majority of them find reason valuable in other aspects of their lives). That's the respect in which I'm trying to correct religious people.
Sigh.. I am speaking of Popper's rationale for turning the deifinition of science on its head. Who gave him that authority? What makes the claim that black holes or multiple universes exist, rational, and the belief in a divine creator irrational?
Scientists don't believe in black holes and multiple universes in the same sense that religious people believe in God. There's actually a significant amount of evidence in favor of black holes, unlike the God hypothesis. I admit that the evidence for multiple universes is basically non-existent, but cosmologists don't take their existence to be a non-negotiable point of dogma -- they posit it and see what it would explain, and under what conditions it could be expected to exist, etc. It's not the weak, tentative belief in a creator that's so irrational -- I think the Enlightenment Deists were doing a good job with the information they had -- but rather the dogmatic insistence, based on a supernatural epistemology, that a specific conception of God exists.
This is precisely the sophomoric attempt to appear informed that I am talking about. These are the kinds of caricatures you have to rely on, because you need them. And I am referring to what other atheists on this forum have argued in the past here. I was told that science was the only means to obtain knowledge. Philosophy and religion didn't count. I am also referring to their repeated appeals to falsification as the definitive standard by which all things religious or scientific must be judged.
As someone who majored in philosophy, I can take your side on this one and say that the atheists who think that philosophy isn't a valid method of obtaining knowledge are full of crap. There's a big difference between religion and philosophy, though.
Yes, the four horsemen are perfect examples. Dawkins is a moron on the subject and he has to revert to obscure and discredited 19th century concepts of religion to make his straw man work. Anyone who would say religion is inherently dangerous simply doesn't understand what religion is- even Will Durant agreed that these wars were not because of religion. War wil always exist and forces will use whatsvere it is at their disposal to rally their armies. Religion serves that purpose at times. Isn't it interesting that sociologists haven't been singing the praises of Dawkins and his little hit squad? They're idiots on the subject.
What erroneous definition of religion do you think Dawkins uses, and what definition would be better?
I've never heard sociologists sing the praises of
anything, so their silence on Dawkins et al does not surprise me. This is kind of an argument from authority, anyway, which I'm not really interested in. If sociologists really do think Dawkins is full of crap, what reasons do they give for thinking that way?
No he doesn't. You really should read some of McGrath to truly appreciate this man's stupidity. He has called Dawkins on numerous errors, some of which cannot be explained in ways other than intellectual dishonesty.
Great. What are these errors that undermine Dawkins' thesis?
Dawkins s a moron if he thinks he has proved God doesn't exist, so why do I need to prove he exists when most scientists admit this is beyond the realm of science?
Dawkins doesn't think he's proved God doesn't exist. That's why, on a theist-atheist scale of 1 to 7, he ranks himself a 6. What Dawkins thinks is that the reasons most people have for believing in religion are bad (which doesn't in itself make religion untrue), that facts about the world clash with the most popular conceptions of divinity, and that positing God doesn't explain a damn thing anyway.
Science says the universe has a beginning, and Stephen Hawking rightly noted that if the universe has a beginning, then it is reasonable to presume a creator.
Look, when Stephen Hawking uses the word "creator", he's most likely talking about the laws of physics, or a general theory of everything or something. He's most decidedly NOT talking about an anthropomorphic deity that hears your prayers, reads your thoughts, and demands worship.
If science says definitively that the universe has a beginning, it's probably overstepping its bounds. It's generally accepted that the laws of physics break down in the first 1 X 10^-trillion seconds "after" the big bang; why wouldn't the laws of causality break down, too? The basic fact is that the human mind, as it is currently situated, can't comprehend the idea of something being created
ex nihilo. This means that secular cosmologies are woefully lacking, but it's not a point in favor of supernatural ones, because they suffer from the same fate: where did God come from? If he has always existed, why couldn't the universe have this same property? Your argument here is a massive argument from ignorance (I don't mean that as a pejorative; I'm using the technical term).
That right there throws atheism out the window. It doesn't matter if one religion, or if any of the various religions are true. Theism remains a reasonable conclusion based on the cosmological evidence. Dawkins gets an earful from other atheists who disagree with him, and he deals with the more intelligent arguments by saying stupid things like, he just couldn't believe Stephen Jay Gould really meant anything he wrote in his book. LOL. Yea, truly engaging the arguments huh?
Dawkins engages the non-overlapping magisteria arguments Gould made.
And by the way, I have engaged his ridiculously stupid "meme theory" in a thread in celestial. Only he and Dennett think it is worthy of attention.
I think it's interesting, and logically valid, but I'm not so sure how well it relates to the real world of ideas, because the analogy between the replication of ideas and genes is imperfect. Dawkins and Dennett both realize this, I think.
Well, Hitchens said he admired Stalin for accomplishing this. Hardly surprising. And given all this rhetoric about how dangerous religion is, this is only a logical extension. Step one is to create a division. The four horsemen do that effectively by making all theists sound like idiotic dupes who don't deserve scholarly attention. That's their excuse for not providing any. The next step is to make you afraid of us, and that is precisely what this "religion is dangerous" rhetoric does.
Hitchens admired the end, sure -- what atheist wouldn't prefer a world without religion? -- but I'm going to have to call for references that Hitchens preferred Stalin's methods, and said that the ends justified the means.
Learn to comprehend. I am clearly referring to radical atheists, particular the four who have financially benefited as of late, from the anti-religious gullible. This is precisely the kind of agitprop that attracts them, and they eat it up uncritically because they don't know any better. EA asked me before what I meant by radical atheist and I said any atheist who is actually dumb enough to believe God has been disproved by science. I don't believe most atheists hold this view.
I've already discussed what I think about God and susceptibility to disproof, so I won't go on here.
So, let me get you straight -- you think that Dawkins and Dennett endorse Stalin's methods of ridding the world of religion?
No, he was trying to argue the contrary, and Dawkins commended him for his "research" and called the findings "surprising." Vox Day, author of the Irrational Atheist, made mincemeat of this argument and actually showed how the findings from that same data really backfired on Harris, if properly understood. But the simple fact that Harris thought this was a sound sociological experiment, is proof positive he's an idiot on the subject.
If this is true, then yeah, Harris was wrong, and should be ashamed for advancing such an illogical argument.
But it isn't sufficient t prove religion is inherently dangerous.This is what he has to do to make the world fear religion and theists. It is ironic that they would complain about religion creating divisions when they are unwittingly doing the same thing.
It's sufficient to prove that there are dangers associated with religion, which doesn't seem to me to be significantly different from being inherently dangerous.
I don't think Dawkins et al want people to be afraid of theists; I think they want people to be aware of the dangers of religion. They're not trying to drum up fear for fear's sake, and they're not demonizing people of a certain group (there are some pretty charming depictions of theists in
A God Delusion) on some kind of essentialist grounds, as the people engaged in religious wars invariably do.
And about Dawkins on language, I'll look up the reference later, but suffice it to say Dawkins frequently corrects himself in subsequent publications.
Well, the text I quoted is from an interview that took place a few years before
The God Delusion was published, so if Dawkins did neglect to put that section in the first editions of the book, it's certainly not indicative of a systematic failure of his thought, as you so churlishly implied.
I haven't posted on this forum since a week and a half. Are you so full of yourself that you actually think I was hiding from you? Sue me for taking time out for holiday purposes. I haven't even read your last response, yet.
Where did I say you were hiding from me?
Here is a portion of McGrath's book dealing with Dawkins's book:
Faith is Irrational
There is, I suppose, a lunatic fringe to every movement. Having been involved in many public debates over whether science has disproved the existence of God, I have ample experience of what I think I must describe as somewhat weird people, often with decidedly exotic ideas, on both sides of the God-atheism debate. One of the most characteristic features of Dawkins's antireligious polemic is to present the pathological as if it were normal, the fringe as if it were the center, crackpots as if they were mainstream. It generally works well for his intended audience, who can be assumed to know little about religion and proably care for it even less. But it's not acceptable. And it's certainly not scientific.
Dawkins insists that Christian belief is "a persistenty false belief held in the face of strong contradictory eidence." The problem is how to persuade "dyed-in-the-wool faith-heads" that atheism is right, when they are so deluded by religion that they are immune to any form of rational argument. Faith is thus essentially and irredeemably irrational. In support of his case Dawkins has sought out Christian theologians who he believes will substantiate this fundamentally degenerate aspect of religious faith. In earlier writings he asserted that the third-century Christian writer Tertullian said some particularly stupid things, including "it is by al means to be believed because it is absurd." This is dismissed as typical religious nonsense. "That way madness lies."
He stopped quoting this now, I am pleased to say, after I pointed out that Tertullian actually said no such thing. Dawkins had fallen into the trap of not checking his sources and merely repeating what older atheist writers had said. It's yet another wearisome example of the endless recycling of outdated arguments that has become so characteristic of atheism in recent years.
However, Dawkins now seems to have found a new examples of the irrationlism of faith - well, new for him, at any rate. In the God Delusion he cites a few choice snippets from the sixteenth-century German Protestant writer Martin Luther, culed from the Internet, demonstrating Luther's enxieties about reason in the life of faith. No attempt is made to clarify what Luther means by reason and how it differs from what Dawkins takes to be the self-evident meaning of the word.
What Luther was actually pointing out was that human reason could never fully take in a central theme of the Christian faith - that God should give humanity the wonderful gift of salvation without demanding they do something for him first. Left to itself, human common sense would conclude that you need to do something to earn God's favor - an idea that Luther regarded as compromising the gospel of divine graciousness, making salvation something that you earned or merited.
Dawkins's inept engagement with Luther shows how Dawkins abandons even the pretense of rigorous evidence-based scholarship. Anecdote is substituted for evidence; selective Internet trawling for quote displaces rigorous and comprehensive engagement with primary sources. In this book, Dawkins throws the conventions of academic scholarship to the winds; he wants to write a work of propaganda and consequently treats the accurate rendition of religion as an inconvenient impediment to his chief agenda, which is the intellectual and cultural destruction of religion. It's an unpleasant characteristic that he shares with other fundamentalists.
He also went on to cite Dawkins on BBC rado telling the world that humans have outgrown the "cry-baby" phase of believing in religious concepts, so it should be abandoned. He referred to Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, suggesting humans are religious because they have it programmed into their brains from childhood. McGrath pulverizes this argument by pointing out the fact that humans don't start believing in Santa of the Easter Bunny when they are grown adults, as is the case with so many theists. He lists several notables, including himself, who found faith at University. Antony Flew was a notable example of an intelligent atheist who had led the evidence to theism while struggling with it in his eighties. Comparing religion to fairy tales is truly unscholarly, and is meant to strike a chord from a naïve choir.
1) Dawkins doesn't merely point to fringe religious lunatics as sufficient evidence that all religion is bad or irrational, so McGrath's counterargument here is a strawman.
2) Regardless of what Tertullian ever said, it's true that statements like "it is okay to believe in absurd things even without good evidence" are typical of religious thinking.
3) I think you and McGrath are right to castigate Dawkins for not really understanding the meaning of Luther's quote, but this one mistake does not undercut Dawkin's main idea, because that one quote from Luther was never central to the total argument.
4) I think you and McGrath are making the "Santa Claus :: God" analogy a lot closer than Dawkins intended.