No, I'm using a common definition of religion: organized structures that base their authority and veracity on supernatural claims.
Hence, your problem is your understanding the word, which you arbitrarily refer to as "common." This is the kind of definition used by the radical atheists like Dawkins, and it is used strictly for polemical purposes as it suits their straw man agenda. The fundamental definition of religion is simply a system of beliefs that are adhered to in a religious fashion. As has been noted to you and others so many times before, religion need not even refer to theistic beliefs at all.
My claims for rationality and evidence are in the mainstream:
This is just another argument via assertion. You would either have us believe the tiny of minority of atheists represent "mainstream" America or that the majority of theists readily admit that their faith is irrational. In either case, your argument amounts to little more than "it is because I say so."
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?
I simply corrected your misunderstanding of the terms in question. If one cannot grasp the basic meanings and applications of the terms, then bad conclusions are expected. You essentially build the evidence to fit a predetermined conclusion, and when words don't mean what you want you think, then you adress the problem by simply redefining them with a wave of the hand.
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).
What makes this different from the claim that black holes or mutiple universes exist? At least with spiritual claims, the individual claims to have had personal experience. What personal experience or verifiable framework makes the multiverse theory rational? Nobody questons if they are rational because they do not pose a threat. Only theists can pose threats.
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.
And the examples one could provide are endless, but if the history of religion proves anything, it is that it changes as people question it. I have already proved that religion changes which is a bane to your premise that it doesn't. But anyone who believes blacks are inferior simply because a preacher says so is not following the proper tenets of any major religion I'm familiar with. Rational theists, especially those who accept the Bible on some level, will use the Bible to refute this kind of nonsense. God is the ground of all truth, not another man dressed up in a robe. Having said that, thanks to science, we know there are differences in the anatomy of races that will serve to create the divisions necessary for discrimination. Blacks are not good swimmers because their muscles are more dense, hence they don't tend to float well. Their achilles tendon is significantly longer than those of other races, thus they are able to jump higher, run faster, and perform better on the atheletic level. Biologically, we know sickle cell anemia only attacks those who are black, and caucassians are far more likely to contract skin cancer, etc. Religion is not needed to create divisions.
But the question was whether religion is "inherently" dangerous. You haven't even begun to make a compelling case that it is. You begin by misunderstanding basic terms and then integrating them into a convoluted framework designed to produce the conclusion you want - the Dawkins method. Science today, along with the philosophy of materialism, produce the same kind of devout, blind following as do many screwed up theistic religions. This is essentially a religion itself and it is ironic because Dawkins and co. don't even realize it. It has all the fundemantal aspects, none of which require supernatural belief.
Take for example Dawkin's dumbass claim that Einstein was an atheist. In the church of academia, Dawkins is considered an authority so his words are to be taken for granted. I've heard atheists argue along these lines left after right, but only after Dawkins published his book. He started the first chapter with this nonsense, and his followers simply accept what he says, despite the fact that Dawkins is not a historian. Dawkins used a book by Jammer, who actually quoted Einstein as saying, "I am not an atheist." But Dawkins failed to mention this in the first chapter of hs book because it didn't suit his agenda. So he is intellectully dishonest. So like a nimrod preacher, Dawkins also expects people to believe what he says, even if it isn't true.
After reading the first chapter it becomes appallingly clear that Dawkins doesn't like the idea that any scientist could believe in God. He becomes an apologist by psychoanalyzng what Einstein and others must have meant when they alluded to God.But this is hardly surprising. Dawkins is the same jackass who blackballs scientists today for expressing any kind of belief in God. He actually accuses them of lying about it because he simply cannot swallow the idea that educated scientists genuinely believe in God. The notion disrupts his worldview.
When Freeman Dyson won a Nobel Prize for his work in quantum electrodynamics and gave an acceptance speech celebrating the achievements of religion (and criticizing its downside), Dawkins viewed this as an act of apostasy and betrayal, offering "an endorsement of religion by one of the world's most distinguished physicists." Then when Dyson later said he was a Christian who wasn't interested in the dogma of the Trinity, Dawkins said that this meant he wasn't a real Christian! He accused Dyson of lying about being a Christian: "Isn't that just what an atheistic scientist would say, if he wanted to sound Christian?" A real class act that Dawkins fella is.
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.
Is this your way of saying you cannot directly respond to dictionary-based definitions? The definition for rationality doesn't help you because it amounts to you saying little more than "I don't think your decision is a good one." That is a subjective claim, not based on objective truth. The theist simply has to respond with, "Well, I do think it is a good one." At this point what objective standard will you use to prove he's wrong and you're right? You have none. All the "rationality" jargon is just used to confuse naïve readers into thinking you've actually proved all spiritual claims are invalid. And your analogy above is absurd and it doesn't follow that I have zero grounds to impugn his rationale. It doesn't follow that one must accept all spiritual pronouncements as fact, anymore than they must accept all non-spiritual pronouncemens as fact. The validity of a method does not require success at every attempt.
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.
You're going in circles, refusing to address the problem in your argument. If reason alone decided the verdict, then you wouldn't have a case because the majority of the planet believes they do have reason to believe in God. In fact this goes al the way back to the Apostle Paul who essentially said the reasons are all around us. Theists generaly understand their faith as reason-based. Your argument amounts to telling them that their reasons aren't good enough becase they don't work for the tiny minority of atheists. That's it. That's where the arrogance comes in, and it certainly isn't science-based or logic-based. It is bigot-based.
If your logic is incorrect, and I see that, I'll try to show you. You should do the same for me.
But I am not the one telling you your reasons for rejecting God are irrational, even though I very well could since none of your reasons are based on science. They are based on inductive reasoning, which is the weakest form of reasoning there is.
Religious people DO claim that reason isn't important when it comes to their supernatural claims
There are crackpots everywhere, but no serious form of systematic theology, especially in Christianity, discounts reasoning as an evil thing. This was where McGrath truly pummeled Dawkins, as he tried to beat up one straw man after another. He didn't even understand the Christian concept of faith, and instead tore up this ridiculous cariacature based on his ignorance on the topic, along with his trawling the web for unverified soundbites.
(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
But strict reasoning doesn't necessarily lead to atheism. Antony Flew is a perfect example. So is Lewis, McGrath, Glynn, etc. All of whom started out as atheists until they began reasoning things out later in life. Their devotion to theism cannot be blamed on childhood brainwashing or what not and it can hardly be argued that they lack the mental capacity for reason.
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.
They accept it in theory alone (faith) not because it has been verified through a scientific method of any stripe. We haven't been able to experiment or observe them. We simply accept the theory that they are there becuse it just sounds too cool to ignore. The same goes for Neutron Star as another form of matter. Its the stuff that science-fiction authors appreciate because it gives them more fodder to work with.
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
And neither do most theologians. Religions change. The only common denominator shared by all theistic relgions is that they all believe in a supreme being reponsible for the design of the universe. Aside from that, anything else can pretty much change, given the gravity of sociological pressures. You seem to be grasping onto the rarest and worst case scenario in relgious history where someone would be excommunicated or maybe killed for refusing to believe in some ridiculous claim, while comparing it to meaningless, repercussion-free examples of blind faith in scientific claims. If you think a rejecton of some scientific principles do not pose a threat to the professions of some scientists, then go ask a scientist what would happen if he one day decided to write a book undermining Evolution. The same is true for all fields, especially Middle-East studies, where any critical scholarship condeming Islam is considered an act of bigotry and must be punished. Academia is an interesting social construct itself. It poses peer pressures of conformity in various forms, not unlike those which exist in most religions.
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 s***. There's a big difference between religion and philosophy, though.
Yes. Science along with the scientific method, is actually a philosophy. Philosophy is closer to religion than science, because science concerns itself with the absolutes of "what" and "how," whereas philosophy goes along with religion when it concerns itself with the "why."
What erroneous definition of religion do you think Dawkins uses, and what definition would be better?
This is how McGrath summed it up:
Definitions of religion are rarely neutral but are often generated to favor beliefs and institutions with which one is in sympathy and penalize those to which one is hostile, often reflecting little more than the particular purposes and prejudices of individual scholars. Dawkins deals with this serious problem by evading it, choosing not to engage with the issues that have famously destroyed previous attempts to generalize about the roots of religion. His analysis rests on the 'general principles' of religion he finds in James Frazer's Golden Bough - a highly impressionistic early work of anthropology first published in 1890. It is a highly puzzling strategy. Why on earth should Dawkins's theory of the roots of religion depend so heavily on the core assumptions of a work that is well over a century old and now largely discredited?
The rise of modern anthropology can be seen as a direct reaction to the manifest failures of Frazers Golden Bough. What were those failings? FIrst, it adopted what can only be described as n imperialist attitude to the cultural context of religion in order to generate universal explanatory concepts. Second, it totally lacked any serious basis in systematic empirical study. Dawkins seems to repeat both these errors, drawing ambitious theories about the origins of faith without any serious attempt to engage representatively with the large body of scholarly literature that reports and assesses the empirical evidence since Frazer, and instead making highly questionable generalized assertions about the nature of religion.
So why does Dawkins want to follow Frazer in reducing religion to some single universal trait, neglecting the mass of research that suggests it is much more complex and diverse, incapable of being forced into a simple set of universal beliefs or attitudes? The anser is clear: because by doing so, he believes it can be analyzed within the 'universal Darwinism' that represents his core belief system. 'Universal features of a species demand a Darwinian explanation.' But that is precisely the problem: it is now known that religion does not exhibit 'universal features' that Dawkins's preferred approach demands, and that late Victorian works of the anthropology of religion erroneously regarded as axiomatic. It is one of the many points at which The God Delusion depends on discarded 19th century assumptions to make a 21st century case against religion.
In short, Dawkins failed to act like a real scholar on this subject and ended up attacking a concept of religon that had been discredited for many decades. But of course, he knew his readers knew as much about religion as he did, and as their intellectual priest, they would accept his arguments at face value.
I've never heard sociologists sing the praises of anything, so their silence on Dawkins et al does not surprise me.
I didn't say they were silent. I said they don't support him. If what Dawkins says is true, then it turns a century of socio-religious theory on its head. Sociologists generally are experts on religion because religions are perfect case studies of humans interacting together. I would assume that if Dawkins were correct, then experts in the field would be out there thanking him for coming up with stuff that magically escaped their own findings. The obvious point is that Dawkins is no sociologist anymore than his is a psychologist or a historian, but he draws from each field with reckless abandon to make his arguments.
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?
Uh, because he is and they actually know something about the sociologiy of religion to make that judgment? So you have no problems assuming Dawkins is right until proven wrong? This is precisely what Dawkins expects from his readers. And exactly how many scholarly refutations of Dawkins have you read? Case in point. You haven't.
Suffice it to say, some of Dawkins's most vocal critics are atheists. Ruse, a hard core Darwinian, said that after reading Dawkins's book, he felt embarrassed to be an atheist. Those who aren't embarrassed are those I'm weary of.
Great. What are these errors that undermine Dawkins' thesis?
The before mentioned caricature of "religion" is a good start, but if that isn't enough, his ridiculous misrepresentaton of "faith" is another howler. The reason he had to use fabricated citations from Tertullian and misrepresent Martin Luther's statement on reason, is because he knew that without these, he'd have no case to argue that faith is irrational. Wait, I think, yes, I already mentioned this as well.
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.
His comments are ambiguous and hardly consistent. He's said religion should be abandoned and that it is merely a genetic virus passed through humans. He said, "there is almost certainly no God." He's said that eventually science will answer everything and then there will be no need for God belief. It is safe to say he believes science has or at least, will, disprove God definitively.
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.
Everytime I refer to scientist pointing to God, you keep interjecting the point that they aren't talking about anthropomorphic God. Who cares? Theism isn't confined to belief in an anthropomorphic God. I don't believe in one either, so it isn't like you're actually refuting anything I've argued. The fact that a God is considered, means atheism is undermined. Now I brought up his comment not because Hawking believes in a creator. He doesn't. He's agnostic. I brought it up because Hawking admitted that it was at least reasonable to conclude a creator exists, if we begin with the premise that the universe had a beginning.
Here is the context:
"So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end, it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?"
He is certainly not referring to "laws of physics of a general theory of something." He is clearly referring to the general consensus (among humans) that a creator is responsible for designing our universe. Since science teaches us that the universe has a beginning, according to Hawking, theism is not unreasonable. That's the point I was making. Dawkins veers off the beaten path laid before him by notable scientists like Hawking and Stephen Jay Gould. Gould said that is religion and science were incomptible as Dawkins insists, then this means half of his colleagues must be idiots. Now what seems more likely?
If science says definitively that the universe has a beginning, it's probably overstepping its bounds.
But that is exactly how it is presented in classrooms. To question it means you're just a Bible-thumping creatonist moron. But aparently it is OK to question it if it turns out to support a creationist argument. Then something better must be sought after - which is, incidentally, what Hawking is trying to seek. He wants to be able to prove the universe always existed so the nagging God question will no longer bother him Talk about putting a conclusion first and forcing the evidence to conform with it!
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?
That's a deflection, really. This is like saying we can't accept evolution without knowing where life came from. Evolution doesn't tell us what came before the single cell organism, but that doesn't stop us from following the evidence to the point where it does lead us. The same with God. The evidence follows us to the point of acknolwedging his/her/its existence. Knowing what came before God is irrelevant to this acknolwedgment.
If he has always existed, why couldn't the universe have this same property?
We don't know if God always existed. We hardly know anything about him/her/it definitively except that he/she/it is an intelligent entity capable of arranging the cosmos and writing the universal laws of the universe.
Your argument here is a massive argument from ignorance (I don't mean that as a pejorative; I'm using the technical term).
Thanks for clearing that up, but it seems you misunderstood my intent with the Hawking citation. He makes it clear that belief in God is reasonable given the premise that the universe had a beginning. Since it is the general scientific consensus that the universe had a beginning, it can hardly be said that theism is irratonal.
Dawkins engages the non-overlapping magisteria arguments Gould made.
I'm referring to his statement that he cannot believe Gould meant much of what he wrote in his book, when he said science cannot answer questions about God and when he was eing too respectful to theologians. Yes, that's the easy way of addressing the arguments. Just say the whole thing was a giant mass of typos or maybe Gould was stoned when he wrote that part. Whatever helps Dawkins sleep at night.
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.
It is insane. He argues that memes literally leap from one brain to another, infecting people with religious belief. That is the best he can come up with. And like all viruses, of course, it needs to be eradicated.
Again, first you create the division, then you make people afraid of the "other", and then you argue that it poses a threat to society and must be disposed of. If religious people are contagious simply because they believe in God, then they are threats to society by their very nature. Get rid of Christian concepts of morality and replace them with some watered down secular concept based on utility, then it, well, it doesn't take a bright mind to figure out where this is headed. In the past two hundred years no theistic government has suggested killing atheists simply because they are atheists. Atheistic governments, on the other hand, have in fact killed those who were religious. Those they considered threats because of their religious beliefs.
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.
That isn't what I said, but the fact that he could even admire this much about it says plenty. Would it be appropriate to say Nazi's at Auschwitz should be admired because they gave us so much medical knowledge about what the human body can withstand? If you truly detest the means, there is little reason to admire the end. Sam Harris also referred to the Jews as the reason for their own plight.
So, let me get you straight -- you think that Dawkins and Dennett endorse Stalin's methods of ridding the world of religion?
No, but theirs is a slippery slope in a philosophy that is just a couple of steps away from rationalizing such an event. I'm simply following the evidence from history that has a tendency to repeat itself. Again, if you scare the people enough, they'll commit to anything. In 2001 most of American was convinced they needed to support a war that they later realized was stupid. Incidentally, one atheist on this forum threatened to kill me, as he referred to a day when atheists and theists would do battle in the streets. He read the same kind of crap, about how religions in America are conspiring to impose a theocratic goverment. He bought into the usual "religion is dangerous" rhetoric. He said he'd glady be there to put a bullet in my head when that day came. It was an out of the blue, uncalled for comment where the context had absolutely nothing to do with what he was saying. He just didn't like the fact that I was defending theism and he felt it was necessary to share his feelings on the matter. Not a single atheist in the vicinity spoke up to say he didn't represent their view. Being in a relgious cult on this forum, I guess it would be an act of betrayal for one atheist to undermine another in the presence of an "other". Now in all my years in online religious debate, I can't recall a single theist ever making such a threat to me or anyone else. I joined these debates back in 97 and only recently have I been engaging with an atheist majority, and they are scarier than anything I've ever encountered in mainstream Evangelical America.
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.
It is significantly different when you consider the overall context of all things dangerous. Virtually anything can be called dangerous. Science gave us the Atom bomb, therefore science is dangerous. Technology gave us lower employment and higher crime rates, therefore techological advancement must be dangerous. Industry gave us polluted skies, producing lung cancer and infectious diseases, therefore industry is "inherently" dangerous? I don't see how something can be "inherently" dangerous unless it is always dangerous. Religion is rarely dangerous. More people die every year from rare diseases than they do for religious reasons.
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.
I don't think you understand them properly. When they are using terms like "virus" to describe the beliefs held sacred by billions of humans, and when they accuse scientists of lying about their theism because they cannot stand the idea of scientific theists, then this tells me there is something deeper and darker in their agenda. Can you imagine the indignantion expressed if atheism was referred to as a virus?
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.
They know exactly what they're doing, and it is nothing short of scare tactics, giving recent converts a sense of identity and made to feel special and smarter for following someone who is supposed to be an intelligent, respected scientist. They are creating the divisions by making all theists look like immature, cry-baby, myth swallowing idiots who have yet to free themselves of what they refer to as a genetic defect. This is why they are selling so many books. Their arguments aren't new, its the conclusions they allude to that get so many people interested.
Where did I say you were hiding from me?
If that isn't what you meant, then why bring up the fact that I haven't responded in nearly two weeks? I've been enjoying family time. In fact, my wife is probably going to wring my neck for sneaking in this post.
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.
Dawkins clearly presents any kind of fringe comments from non authorities, as mainstream and authoritative. This is what McGrath showed, and I remember thinking the same thing as Dawkins would pull out any kind of religious statement he could dig up to suit his agenda. He wasn't interested in representing mainstream religious thought on any serious level because he approaches the subject with contempt, and he considers it ripe for disrespect and misrepresentation. I mean it isn't like his readers are the kinds of people who are going to question him and check his sources, right? He doesn't even have a basic grasp of the Christian understanding of faith, nor does he understand the proper sociological concept of religion. This proves he has not researched the matter adequately enough and has no business pretending to speak as an authority on the matter.
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.
No it isn't typical, and if it were, then Dawkins wouldn't have needed to borrow fabricated sound bite. It is so atypical that he needed to dive 1800 years into the past to find something he could use, and even in this case it turned out to be bogus citation. The stronger point here is that Dawkins is supposed to an Oxford caliber scholar. What the hell is he doing borrowing crap from the secular web, and pretending to be an expert in fields he knows nothing about (history, psychology, sociology)
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.
Reread McGrath's refutation above, where the entire premise of Dawkins' concept of religion is rendered irrelevant. As a result, his entire argument is based on nothing sound.
4) I think you and McGrath are making the "Santa Claus :: God" analogy a lot closer than Dawkins intended.
How many ways can one intend to say it?