Scientists against God

* 09 December 2006

* From New Scientist Print Edition. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.

Many ironies are well highlighted in your coverage of the atheists’ jamboree in La Jolla (18 November, p 8). I would like to add two more.

The first is that the scientific enterprise in the form we know it today, with journals, scientific societies, empiricism and specialised techniques, was started largely by people of deep religious faith in the 16th and 17th centuries. In the writings of Newton and Descartes, the very notion of scientific law was derived from the Christian idea of God’s laws. Atheists might wish to reflect a bit more on the fact that their scientific disciplines wouldn’t even exist without the impact of such ideas.

The second is that “a-theism” is defined by what it denies, rather than by what it explains. What is denied is very varied and in a constant state of flux, so atheism always allows others to set the agenda. For example, I am an atheist with reference to the god of thunder Thor, and equally with reference to the straw man that Richard Dawkins portrays as God.

From Benjamin Beccari

Creation science is nothing more than Christian belief dressed up as science. It is ironic, then, that a symposium entitled “Beyond belief” is atheistic belief dressed up as science.

What we as scientists need to guard against, and what many of these scientists have fallen prey to, is dogma. The dogmatic views put forward at this forum play into the hands of religious activists who preach that science is trying to destroy religion.

Throughout history it has been neither science nor religion that has caused the ills of the world, but those who spread their dogmatic view of either.

So what is the alternative to dogma? Here science does have a role, not in teaching people what to think, but how to think. Our morals, values and world view can be derived from religious belief, atheist or otherwise, so long as it is informed by scientific reason.

From Maya King

For scientists to declare unequivocally that God does not exist is to deny the possibility that, one day, technological advance may bring the capabilities to detect the presence of a spiritual being after all. If any kind of god were to exist, its presence would have to influence the Earth in a way that leaves some signature.

If that god—as religion suggests—regularly interacted with humans through answering prayers and giving guidance, then those effects should be both measurable and repeatable. How can scientists declare God does not exist without rigorous hypothesis testing?

From David Odell

Science forgets that it too is based on faith: in particular that the universe is an orderly place with rules; and that information received by our senses is true.

Do these scientists really believe the cosmos is a replacement for God? Atheists will look at the cosmos and realise, as my science teacher says, that our lives are so insignificant; a religious person will look to the cosmos and be awed by (God’s) creation. This is not a way to defeat religion.

Many scientific discoveries only make people more awed by their God. Why do scientists want to get rid of religion, when religion has driven scientists for hundreds of years?

From issue 2581 of New Scientist magazine, 09 December 2006, page 24

a. a lot of people are afraid of being seen as “hostile to people of faith” a.k.a. “out of touch egghead” a.k.a. “anti-salt-of-earth working people”

b. it’s usually not worth it to argue, easier to not stoop to stupid arguments

c. some people are actually conflicted about whether or not they believe in “something,” even if it’s not God, rather than nothing (me, mostly)

If that god—as religion suggests—regularly interacted with humans through answering prayers and giving guidance, then those effects should be both measurable and repeatable. How can scientists declare God does not exist without rigorous hypothesis testing?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prayer#Experimental_evaluation_of_prayer

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=11761499

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when ppl talk about how ‘dogmatic’ these nu-atheist scientists are- do they really think dudes would keep disbelieving god in the face of like ANY scientific evidence??

i was kinda about this too for a while, but the reason i find it obnoxious now is that dawkins presents really facile paradoxes posed as brilliant arguments — unstoppable force vs unmovable wall shit. like dawkins thinks logic puzzles will make regular church-goin folks freak out and start shouting like spock making that computer calculate the last digit of pi.

dude doesn’t know his philosophy, just hard sciences, and i feel like an educated theologist (not some strawman ted haggard idiot) could argue circles around him.

Dawkins is mining a rich vein of pointlessness. He can make a ton of money and get lots of attention while adding absolutely nothing to the canon of collected human knowledge about the world. It almost makes me wish he’d go back to writing one book after another about the extended phenotype and blah blah blah

My main problem with all of this is that it’s a waste of time. The problem is that we aren’t teaching anybody the fundamentals of empirical reasoning until they’ve already decided to go into a scientific field, and sometimes not even then. You can go to church if you like and whatever, our greater societal issue is that we can’t convince people how to not be complete fucking idiots on a day to day basis

well yeah thats kinda why i started this thread—plz link to educated theologists arguing circles around dawkins!!

i don’t think they care about engaging him for the same reason other hard scientists don’t bother to engage religious nuts!

the exception being the creation vs evolution debate, but i like to live in my fantasy world where biblical literalism is a tiny subset christianity.

our greater societal issue is that we can’t convince people how to not be complete fucking idiots on a day to day basis

with this statement, a new presidential candidate threw his hat into the ring today

There have been many other randomized, blind clinical trials showing statistically significant positive effects of prayer. One of the largest was a remote retroactive intercessory prayer study conducted in Israel by Leibovici. This study used 3393 patient records from 1990–96, and blindly assigned some of these to an intercessory prayer group. The prayer group had shorter hospital stays and duration of fever

Come on, this is ludicrous on its face—prayer actually changes the past?

“One study found” is a completely worthless phrase.

when ppl talk about how ‘dogmatic’ these nu-atheist scientists are- do they really think dudes would keep disbelieving god in the face of like ANY scientific evidence??

huh? who cares? the point is it’s not secular or scientific to state a disbelief, atheism belongs in its own church as much as theism does, it’s not a set of falsifiable theories and it pollutes the water to present it as such. running around making ted haggard get agitated is not actually helping people learn empirical reasoning.

running around making ted haggard get agitated is not actually helping people learn empirical reasoning.

this is very otm

it does make for funny youtube clips tho

i dunno, maybe if youre some 15 yr old kids whose parents go to a megachurch and youve never seen antagonistic criticism of religion only mealy-mouthed live-and-let-live centrism vs straight up fundamentalist horseshit i think dawkins could set you on the right path—these dudes are practically cheerleaders for the scientific method

i would think it would just intensify the built-in evangelical persecution complex

I think we should stop being so afraid of offending people with ridiculous beliefs. They certainly aren’t afraid of offending others.

But yeah, patiently explaining the scientific method is a better way of going about things than directly insulting them, I guess.

maybe if youre some 15 yr old kids whose parents go to a megachurch and youve never seen antagonistic criticism of religion only mealy-mouthed live-and-let-live centrism vs straight up fundamentalist horseshit i think dawkins could set you on the right path

you could also just listen to some fuckin Stooges amirite

nah, then yr just called condescending.

(xpost to hurting)

these dudes are practically cheerleaders for the scientific method

the scientific method is better served by practice, not preaching

If you can’t win, then why are they winning?

You know, like if beliefs are beliefs and there’s no point in arguing, then why did most of Europe go so atheist while America went so religious?

because our schools blow

terry eagleton doesn’t like richard dawkins:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n20/eagl01_.html

(i haven’t read it all yet, and i don’t give TE a whole lot of respect altogether.)

yeah there was a lame dawkins-baiting review in harpers too

it seems like lrb/tls/nybooks/harpers types are jumping over htemselves to distance themselves from this & i still havent figured out why

a. a lot of people are afraid of being seen as “hostile to people of faith” a.k.a. “out of touch egghead” a.k.a. “anti-salt-of-earth working people”

damn dude pay attention

Sometimes I think academic defenders of theology are almost as out-of-touch with religious people as its critics.

built-in evangelical persecution complex

Yeah, that’s part of the thing. Militancy does nothing but further ossify both sides, so guys like Dawkins coming out like assholes only reinforces the corresponding assholes on the opposite side re: the bullshit dichotomy between God vs Science.

but just saying “bullshit” does not make it so! that is the crux.

xpost: cos the theology is weak? i have to go on hunches here but i’m assuming the book IS a little hamfisted. there’s a difference between an atheist theologian or philosopher hashing out the big questions all over again, and a famous scientist with a big pop hardcover saying YOU ARE ALL MORONS. (maybe)

iirc. There was a “prayer and it’s effect on recovery” study (can’t for the life of me think of a reference for it) that showed prayer only seemed to have a benefit if the sick/injured person actually knew they were being prayed for/about.

file under: placebo

xpost Because they (the smart ones anyway) tend to get hung up on “awe of God’s creation” and “sense of wonder” and all that sort of stuff that sounds fuzzy and nice and that no one can really disagree with, and forget that people are making very bad choices in everything from medicine to foreign policy based on irrational beliefs.

i.e. Because their version of religion is beautiful and complex and educated and about as far from evangelical Christianity as atheism.

haven’t read this yet

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19775

people who say belief in god = belief in ‘love’ or ‘the universe’ or whatever are impossible to engage with

at least fundies make actual CLAIMS you can address

the god = the universe types remind of like crazy old cat ladies who refer to their favorite cat is their husband—yeah you can call it that but thats your own private definition & meaningless to anyone else

you can call it that but thats your own private definition & meaningless to anyone else

what’s the difference between that and the kind of atheism dawkins puts forward?

Maybe I’m just confused as to what’s trying to be accomplished here. Maybe Dawkins and his flock are actually pursuing an escalation, maybe he’s hoping he catches a bullet from a psycho one day and sets off another great religious war-down to posthumously vindicate himself

people who say belief in god = belief in ‘love’ or ‘the universe’ or whatever are impossible to engage with

but they don’t need to be engaged with. they’re harmless in every conceivable way. they’re not going to force yr kid to salute the bible or bow toward mecca. those people i have no problem with — and it’s arguably in alienating them that the hardcore dawkins types make their biggest mistake.

but anyway, i don’t have any problem with the militant atheists. they’re a predictable and healthy response to the militant theists. “moderate” “sensible” liberals like to deride the militant atheists because it makes them feel more comfortable with their place in culture-war politics. it reassures them that they’re not “extremists” just because they don’t like jerry falwell, because look, they think richard dawkins is intolerant too!

i don’t feel any great compulsion to read any of these books, but i enjoy watching them slug it out on the best-seller lists with bill o’reilly and rick warren.

Thing is, i think both sets of hardliners are such that the zealotry/vociferousness of their positions precludes any engaging with them. There’s the old line about how you can’t reason someone out of a position they never reasoned themselves into.

And hell, you even have one side that completely rejects debate and engagement out of hand as signs of mealy-mouthed weakness(whereas the other side can at least claim their stance coming from that tradition).

Part of it is that the louder figureheads of both sides command enough media attention to attack anyone coming out with actual sensible, normal positions(e.g. God & science tend to address completely different things) as facile capitulators and appeasers of the other side.

jaggers glorious crusader

FUCKS sake ethan, let go

i articulated my response to that article badly. our views are actually far more alike than you seem to be able to accept. for a start, i loathe libertarianism, for seconds, i agree that dawkins is essentially correct about most of what he addresses, and thirdly i read that article when in a fragile state; my initial response was an unthinking knee-jerk. i retracted it even before you had a chance to call me a ‘muslim-hater’, which for someone who doesn’t know me in the slightest is a fucking disgrace.

hurting’s ‘might as well be atheistic’ version of christianity is nonetheless that of a far more interesting, tolerable faith than the hardcore dinosaur idiocy we see far too much of in these not-so enlightened times. and don’t take me up on ‘hardcore dinosaur idiocy’; it’s not meant to be an argument, it’s meant to be an outburst.

my visceral response to militant atheists is very similar to the one I have when confronted with any other kind of totally ignorant citizen who vthe exact same way I do nearly 100% of the time—cf. Dr. Morbius

weird, that should be “votes the” not vthe, though that would maybe be a coog name for an autechre song

wow my keyboard sucks today

Atheist who are too bored by the argument to even read this thread REPRESENT!!!!!

I read it until LJ showed up. Kind of like Godwin’s Law, that.

God & science tend to address completely different things

neither religious types nor scientists agree with this, that’s the whole problem.

Dawkins responding to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alister_McGrath

“The only part of theology that could possibly demand my attention is the part that purports to demonstrate that God does exist. This part of theology I have, indeed, studied with considerable attention. And found it utterly wanting.

As for McGrath’s book, I read it with genuine curiosity to discover whether he had any argument to offer in favor of his theistic belief. The nearest I could find was his statement that you cannot disprove it. Well, that may be true, but it isn’t very impressive, is it?”

the last paragraph pretty much nails Dawkins as a senile demagogue. this is why scientists have a problem with him. and I think “nu-media savvy” seems to be a term that applies mostly to shit that sucks compared to the non-new-media savvy versions—but I’m a meme rockist

Dawkins refusal to acknowledge—in the face of overwhelming historical evidence—that science is religion’s angrier, snottier younger brother is rather sad and puts paid to any and all of his arguments about the virtues of spiritual disciplines.

it seems like lrb/tls/nybooks/harpers types are jumping over htemselves to distance themselves from this & i still havent figured out why

maybe some of them are religious? or find dawkins to be anti-intellectual?

or, you know, a total asshole?

maybe they don’t want this loony to be their public face?

if haggard hadn’t ordered dawkins off his property, he would have ‘won’ the encounter. which is saying something.

so ok it’s petty, reductive and bullying to lumber out there going “you people with your stupid fairy tales are idiots!” BUT when you have actual verifiable idiots trying to legislate their fairy tales into existence, i’m not sure it’s a bad thing to have some shock troops taking up arms. dawkins et al aren’t going to win any arguments with anyone, but they serve a sort of basic “give me a fucking break” function.

i mean, they are purely reactive, and i find the things they’re reacting against orders of magnitude more objectionable and alarming than their reactions.

an atheist john stossel, wonderful

dawkins et al aren’t going to win any arguments with anyone, but they serve a sort of basic “give me a fucking break” function.

this would be true if he were any good at it

i just think it’s a mistake — if not a deliberate fallacy — to see the militant atheists as militating against “belief” in general. even if that’s how they cast themselves. because, in context, what they’re really militating against is militant theism. nonmilitant theists inevitably get caught in the crossfire, along with agnostics like me, but i’m frankly not unhappy for there to be some crossfire since the barrage has been pretty unidirectional until recently.

agreed

agreed.

I think that the bit about the dangers of fundie policy makers(dudes like Senator Inhofe or at least half of the current U.S. Admin) is obscured by the noise of Dawkins coming out and going all Plan 9 on folks who would otherwise be allies, if you will.

I just think that the warnings/alarums raised against the theocratic authoritarian types would be better served without the antigonizing of those who’d already work against such types.

I get the feeling that part of the reason Dawkins raises ire among other scientists is residual irritation toward The Selfish Gene. in addition to what’s already been said.

but they serve a sort of basic “give me a fucking break” function.

that seems true. I hate Dawkins because he’s one of those people who reveals his miniscule personality in his prose style, but the other dudes lumped in with New Atheism seem all right. although “New Atheism” as a moniker/movement seems smurfy to me. maybe just because I’m in grad school and there’s so much of that “New ______” in self-identifying as a hot school of thought.

the Wired article I read about it really didn’t have much of an argument against New Atheism, Dawkins included, just instinctive discomfort with its boorishness. which I’m sympathetic to.

and a discomfort with proselytizing, I guess. which I’m also sympathetic to.

residual irritation toward The Selfish Gene

It’s been 23 years and it’s basically a given now. But really the problem with the Selfish Gene is the same problem with the God Delusion, Dawkins is just naturally a prick and regardless of the merit of his ideas it bears repeating that nobody likes fucking pricks

what’s wrong with it, for the millionth time, is the same thing that’s wrong with people who go “can you believe people watch ‘pro’ wrestling, it’s completely FAKE!!”

yes, but what wrongs have pro-wrestling wrought upon the world?

triple-H, for one

“shakespeare’s play was very funny, but i didn’t understand the point. it didn’t explain anything, like how the raccoon got its tail, or why the moon has a face.”

I guess I was trying to separate out a scientific-conclusions-other-scientists-disagree-with reason wrt Selfish Gene from general nobody-wants-to-hang-out with Dawkins reasons. but I don’t really know enough about the different claims or remember enough about the book to identify them. scientists I have known and loved, though, have disagreed with his selfish gene theory in addition to thinking he’s an asshole.

but yeah, my personal distaste has more to do with Tracer’s literature analogy. there’s a kind of appreciation Dawkins has no aptitude for.

most nu atheist types have far more appreciation for religious texts as literature than their theist counterparts

If by “science is religion’s angrier, snottier younger brother” you mean that scientific “facts” are proven wrong (or at least un-refined) time and time again, I think you have a point. But, the idea that is being defended (or evangelized) is the scientific METHOD, which allows for the overturning of such dogma, as opposed to religious dogma, which is more, well... dogmatic.

I don’t know how productive Dawkins’ antics are, in terms of “converting” anyone, but it is somewhat comforting for me, as an agnostic who’s pretty darn sure there’s no god, to have someone out there who isn’t afraid to offend others with his reasonable beliefs.

fuck “as literature” more like “as photocomics where all the photos are LEGO dioramas”

I’m sure that’s true! but the way Dawkins...okay, the way he writes, really, if I’m being honest, makes me convinced he’s just...kind of off. this is why you’re essentially right, Ethan, I don’t have any kind of argument. just conviction.

xpost.

(sorry, I meant that new atheists have a literary appreciation for scripture is undoubtedly true.)

seriously, aren’t they doing themselves a disservice with the “new atheists” business? I feel like I’m sneering at them against my will just by typing it out.

That New York Review of Books article is good.

One major problem for Dawkins is that religion moved on a long time ago from the middle ages theistic proofs of God’s that he’s obsessed with battling.

Even from about William James onwards at the beginning of the 20th Century, the interest has been in (states of) consciousness and the sense of self. Even back in the late 50s, people like Aldous Huxley were able to say “It’s possible to be a mystic and at the same time an agnostic”—which Dawkins would probably find completely nonsensical.

His other problem is that he’s not a professional or sophisticated philospher and in areas such as ethics he’s really out of his depth.

it is somewhat comforting for me, as an agnostic who’s pretty darn sure there’s no god

that’s pretty much the reason gypsy mothra gave for defending Dawkins,et. al., right? that’s a good reason, I think.

If it’s reasonable it’s not much a belief, is it? I mean, anyone can believe in something reasonable, that doesn’t take much skill at believing. (xpost)

Even back in the late 50s, people like Aldous Huxley were able to say “It’s possible to be a mystic and at the same time an agnostic”—which Dawkins would probably find completely nonsensical.

Of course, so would many religious people.

religious texts function in a completely different way from ‘literature’ or ‘drama’!! how or why somebody would want to read isaiah as if it were a novel or epic poem is beyond me.

the american-indian-sees-shakespeare quote is supposed to illustrate that kind of difference; and also the difference between what dawkins appears to desperately want from religion and what it actually provides (it’s from a great sci-fi short story by a guy whose name i forget)

Actually, at a (completely secular) summer school i went to, our (completely atheistic) ‘lecturer’ gathered us all together and read us from the King James Bible the ‘My son Absolom’ extract from Samuel. It was absolutely riveting, tragic, moving, and worthwhile. King James Bible’s the essential version, though. Anything else = meh

a great sci-fi short story by a guy whose name i forget

god?

I have no problem with bible-as-literature or religion-as-philosophy, but neither of those things have much to do with fundamentalist religion as it is actually practiced and as it is actually influencing our cultural and political life. Criticizing Dawkins from a post-theist sort of standpoint is fine and perhaps warranted, but it does nothing to address the real ways in which religion is becoming a threat to secular, liberal society.

“If it’s reasonable it’s not much a belief, is it?”

Yes it is, it’s just that it doesn’t take a lot of “faith” to believe in it.

Secular humanists have their own set of faiths (that humanity will somehow find their way out of this mess, that it’s worth having children, etc.), but they don’t involve gods and magic.

X-post—and “Not For Use as Infant Nog” OTM

I’m not even entirely clear on how to read Isaiah as a religious text!

xpost, Do secular humanists really believe it’s worth having children? I mean, as part of being a secular humanist?

answer to thread question:

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22spaghetti+monster%22+site%3Aboingboing.net

how or why somebody would want to read isaiah as if it were a novel or epic poem is beyond me.

I’m not as familiar w/ Isaiah, but there is art and poetry to the Bible, as the KJV most easily points out. Guys like Joseph Campbell would talk about this and about folks who want to read the thing “literally”, as “if it were a newspaper.” Point being that doing so ignores the metaphoric beauty of the writing and the metaphors being written about.

what I remember thinking while reading Selfish Gene was that Dawkins couldn’t distinguish the sphere in which his findings were relevant from the spheres in which they weren’t. so I guess I suspect he doesn’t understand the fitness of a lot of things.

“What are your multiplied sacrifices to Me? I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams. I take no pleasure in the blood of bulls, lambs, or goats. When you come to appear before Me, who requires of you this trampling of My courts? Bring your worthless offerings no longer; their incense is an abomination to Me. New moon and Sabbath, the calling of assemblies ­ I cannot endure iniquity and the solemn assembly. I hate your new moon festivals and your appointed feasts. They have become a burden to Me. I am weary of bearing them. So when you spread out your hands in prayer, I will hide My eyes from you. Yes, even though you multiply prayers, I will not listen.” (Isaiah 1:11–15)

beefing with moderate/centrist/liberal theists because they provide cover for their extremist pals—its like the old lee atwater quote on the southern strategy

You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now that you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is that blacks get hurt worse than whites.

i think whether they know it or not all the supposedly useful liberal christians are enablers of intolerance & theocracy & all that, even if not actually supporting it—its the black republican/racism game

kingfish you berk i know there’s ‘poetry’ in the bible; there’s poetry in hank williams, too; but that doesn’t mean a coffee table book of his lyrics is a good idea

isaiah is also home to the call to ‘let justice roll down as waters and righteousness like a mighty stream’, made famous by MLK

it’s also chock full of prophecies that are later seen to be fulfilled by christ

also in america i dont think liberal/moderate christians have any voice in opposing the extremism of christianity compared to their atheist opponents

& yes before anyone says it i realize lee atwater & pals actually were real life racists and therefore dont map onto the benign liberal christians of the analogy

Isaiah is also the source of most of the OT quotes in Matthew, and thus the lyrics to The Messiah. (“For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon His shoulder: and His name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.” Isaiah 9:6)

it’s also chock full of prophecies that are later seen to be fulfilled by christ

back to the future 1 is chock full of prophecies later fulfilled by back to the future 2

Casuistry—I dunno. I’m just speaking for myself, I guess. I suppose you could be a nihilist secular humanist.

no, tell me what political/cultural debate is dominated by the... anti-atheists?

“the natural world” = “science”, though, ethan, by definition.

and our understanding of it is as all fule kno, valid only after a certain point, before which all matter in the universe was contained in an area the size of a grapefruit.

(some physicists now say that’s wrong, and it was actually the size of a baseball)

fuck a baseball or even a ping pong ball. even a speck of dust is as miraculous as anything else for the simple fact that it exists.

swollen rhino testicle

but more to the point, in a society in which “all that is solid melts into air” as a result of the relentless changes wrought by the ravenous appetites of capitalism it’s natural that reactionaries will flourish. for so many evangelicals, christianity isn’t much more than a group therapy session and for others not ,uch ,ore than a cult; you can sub in any number of things for god here and these people would still be reactionary and intolerant; none of the substitutions quite do the trick the same way god does for them though and it’s possible we should be grateful for that; the alternatives could be worse (straight up, unmediated ethnic nationalism for instance)

tell me what political/cultural debate is dominated by the... anti-atheists?

yr kidding, right?

or you really need to get out of nyc more, one or the other.

ok i just dont see the comparison between expecting an entirely possible or likely outcome and irrationally believing made-up impossible stuff. tracer i know youre from the ‘useful myths’ school, or like some next-level interpretation that everyone actually knows none of this is true but it somehow guides them anyway... this just isnt how religion works for 99.9% of its adherents. and i think objective mistruths are harmful regardless of defensive subtleties or positive short-term effect.

xpost realpolitik like ‘alternatives could be worse’ is what im saying needs to be opposed here

comparison between expecting an entirely possible or likely outcome and irrationally believing made-up impossible stuff.

this just isnt how religion works for 99.9% of its adherents.

that percentage is a little high (90%? 80%? 75%?), but basically, otm. and i think in their bull-headed way, dawkins et al are addressing religion as actually, currently, politically practiced in the public arena.

i think objective mistruths are harmful regardless of defensive subtleties or positive short-term effect

cf every single person on this thread arguing either side of the issue.

There is a misunderstanding of which idea of god is the bad one. Or if it’s all of them, in which case that hypothesis is no more falsifiable than the theist alternatives, and just as crap.

DO. YOU. SEE.

third_eye_opening.gif

were there raptors on noah’s ark (predator ship)?????????

and at any rate the xtian fundamentalist idea of God that Dawkins takes the biggest issue with is the wrong angle of attack, as I discussed above the problem is how these people are taught to think about the world, and that’s a bigger category problem than the relatively simple belief or disbelief in the bible as completely accurate historical document

xpost:

kent hovind (the creationist guy who founded that dinosaur creationist theme park) told me that dinosaurs were too big for the ark. hence their extinction. i didn’t ask him about raptors, though. raptors weren’t very big. you’d think if there was room for elephants they could’ve taken some raptors. (also, apparently nessie and the dragon that st. george slew were descended from stray groups who did survive the flood. which seems kind of careless on god’s part, leaving dinosars lying around.)

The very same stories that seem to be telling made-up impossible stuff are metaphors for totally different ideas which are completely lost on mindless followers of tradition. The Bible is not actually talking about a personal creator God in the least. Any more than we are to believe Padmahsambava actually popped out of a lotus as a 7-year old boy. We can thank ridiculous translations and inappropriate appropriation for the insane circular logic that a Bible proves a creator God. The ancient rabbis tore their clothes in grief when the Old Testament was originally translated for a good reason: it’s not translatable, just as they said. It’s really not. The first letter holds the same meaning as the first word and the first sentence, which gives some indication of how incredibly complex it really is! Today, few people read it how it was intended and those who do are usually considered extremist, regardless of their scholarly qualifications. The Bible in many instances makes no damn sense taken at face value. (Uh, Noah got drunk and hung out naked in front of his kids and then cursed his 4th son that didn’t even barge in on him to cover him up? What?) Believing in fairy tales that make no damn sense is likely to cause problems. But, properly understood, these nonsense fairy tales are amazing, actually, and much more advanced than generally realized.

so like, is it ok when the dea told kids that like smoking weed INSTANTLY KILLS YOU??? who cares if its true right?? i mean thats never happened, but like, it could, right??

ugh, this thread....

to go back several hundred posts, when I referred to religion as science’s “angrier, snottier, younger brother” I was alluding to the fact that the scientific method, Western rationalism, etc. owe their entire existence and system of thought to religion and religious institutions. In every scientific culture in the world, science grew out of religion. Dawkins’ viewpoint is essentially ahistorical, it denies the fundamental continuity of humans attempting to formulate a way to accurately describe the world. And it denies historical evidence in the service of a preconceived agenda—the antithesis of the scientific method.

When Dawkins argues that religion is the most harmful element in human society, in a way he is invalidating the very foundations of his entire system of thinking. No Catholic church = no preservation of Greek/Roman culture and science. No European religious institutions = no place where men sit around doing nothing else but thinking about stuff, writing, conducting experiments. No alchemy = no chemistry. Ad infinitum. He makes no allowance for pre-scientific method achievements that were inextricably bound up in religious institutions and practices: astronomy, brain surgery, metallurgy, breeding mutations, etc. He blames religion for society’s ills, seemingly unaware that the greatest threats to human existence as a whole have been developed in the last century or so, and owe their existence almost entirely to scientific rationalism (see the nuclear bomb and global warming).

In addition to this, as has again been alluded to upthread by other posters, Dawkins is apparently entirely unaware of the last few hundred years’ deconstruction of scientific rationalism—from Spinoza to Derrida to Althusser to whoever. This model he has of an objective reality that can be described in language universal to everyone is a construct as equally ludicrous as a literal white-bearded God-father in the sky. Dawkins does not take into account any of the problematic definitions he relies on to make his arguments—he doesn’t bother to consider that things like “consciousness”, “existence”, “intelligence”, “life”, or “death” have no clear-cut definitions that can be reproduced or sufficiently described via the scientific method. To say nothing of more problematic and abstract concepts like “God”, the “soul”, or an “afterlife”.

I think this is where the basic problem comes in—Dawkins really doesn’t understand language. The stance he assumes is essentially one where there is no room for metaphor, nuance, allegory, allusion, etc. where every word should and must be interpreted literally—eg, if someone says “God”, they are referring to an all-powerful sentient being resembling a human in various ways—even though this runs counter to pretty much what the majority of religions literally DO say about God (God as infinite, unknowable, beyond human comprehension, etc.—stuff like this is what comprises the majority of theological writing in almost every religion). Dawkins constructs a strawman of people who take religious writings literally (fundamentalists), and then proceeds to “disprove” their thinking by showing how the literal interpretation is demonstrably false. This essentially achieves nothing besides “proving” that being overly literal does not accurately describe the world—something ancient mystics or Derrida or any number of average people could tell you.

Lastly, there are so many braindead assumptions made on this thread its hard to maintain any enthusiasm to participate—among many: an existence of an “afterlife” has not been disproven in any way shape or form, considering science currently has no working definition of what is “alive” or “dead” or what consciousness is. Similarly, the assumption that a mechanistic/hostile view of the universe is inherently atheistic and anathema to religion is also wrong—this is basically the worldview of Buddhists and gnostics, among others. Its appalling how dismissive atheists can be of religion without doing any of the research or investigation that a genuinely curious scientific mind would be obligated to engage in.

as I discussed above the problem is how these people are taught to think about the world,

who do you mean by “these people”? am i the only one on this thread who knows college-educated, professionally successful fundamentalists? the ones i know think about all other aspects of the world (economics, politics, sports, whatever) in the same reasonable terms as any other college-educated professional. there’s nothing obviously wrong with their critical thinking faculties. they scored very well on their SATs and whatever. they just, you know, believe the bible is the word of god.

like i said before, i think there’s more condescension toward believers on the part of moderate liberals attacking dawkins than on his part. at least he takes them seriously enough to argue with them.

i think objective mistruths are harmful regardless of defensive subtleties or positive short-term effect

I think that equating religion to “objective mis-truths” is too reductive. How is the statement “God is love” an “objective mis-truth”? I would guess there’s probably no objective way to prove or disprove it, but does that mean that it has no value as a moral ideal, inspirational philosophy, etc? Anyone who thinks that they only have beliefs that can be objectively proven or disproven is probably deluding themselves.

I’m laying down funny. (double meaning there, see?)

The first letter holds the same meaning as the first word and the first sentence, which gives some indication of how incredibly complex it really is! Today, few people read it how it was intended and those who do are usually considered extremist, regardless of their scholarly qualifications.

there’s nothing obviously wrong with their critical thinking faculties. ... they just, you know, believe the bible is the word of god.

Shakey Mo OTMFM.

It’s true!

BRAShITh—first word of first sentence (“in the beginning...” is a weak translation, but basically gets the point across)

Beth / Bayt—first letter (which is fully spelled out B I T, which is spelled out B I T, I O D, T I T, which is spelled out... etc...) Each letter has a specific general meaning (Bayt = “house”) attributed to it and various permutations become full of meaning.

Bayt, spelled “B I T” (Beth Yod Tav) would mean:

B—“house or container

I—held as in a grasping hand

T—world (cross, differentiation of matter, seal of completion on the ”seventh day“)”

Briefly, I’m sure how you can see the first letter of BRAShiTh is vaguely synonymous with the English translation of the first sentence, “In the beginning ”In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.“

T I T should be T A V, obv.

Munchausen’s example of the rabbis tearing their beards at the bible being translated is very apt, I think—the lesson there is that, like many other religious texts, there are meanings and codes and allusions and connections within these kinds of texts that don’t have anything to do with literal interpretations. Instead, they are ultimately concerned with stringing concepts together and conveying the most information possible within the most compact and durable format available, kinda like computer code.... if you read a bunch of PERL and tried to literally “translate” it, hey you’d get a bunch of nonsense! what a surprise!

I think that the materialistic, scientific view of the world that has no room for religion in it often proceeds from laziness and a failure to ask the difficult questions. If we ask the difficult questions of religion, we should be prepared to do the same with science. Despite its remarkable advances over the past century or so, the picture of the world provided by science still contains enormous gaps. Based on its acknowledged successes, there is a tendency to have faith that science will eventually be able to explain everything, but I think that as long as it continues to fail to adequately explain the most basic facts of the human experience, including consciousness, and the most basic facts of how we got here, such as the beginnings of life on earth, there is still room to doubt whether it will ever be able to offer a vision of the world that can fully replace the vision offered by religion.

tombot, i know. the wonders of cognitive dissonance. but i’m just saying it’s not that all “these people” were like homeschooled in bible bubbles. plenty of evangelicals are well educated, well traveled, well versed in art and literature (or at least as much as the average non-evangelical american), and so forth.

funny thing is, Dawkins “invented” the “meme” which is kinda interesting wrt John 1:1

haha yeah, i’ve never thought of that.

I’m talking specifically about making observations and testing hypothesis as a method of critical thinking, which even folks with engineering degrees and know five languages don’t necessarily understand. If you practice that then belief that the old testament is literal is basically a diagnosable neurosis.

so you’re establishing whether or not you believe in some supernatural god as a litmus test for critical thinking? i mean, i wouldn’t necessarily disagree, personally, but that’s a narrow definition. the more confusing reality is that lots of otherwise very reasonable people hold obviously unreasonable beliefs — and even recognize — and celebrate — the unreasonableness of them, as a mark of their faith.

NO THAT IS NOT WHAT I FUCKING SAID. I SAID IF YOU TAKE THE OLD TESTAMENT AS A LITERAL, ABSOLUTELY ACCURATE DOCUMENT, YOU ARE NOT THINKING CRITICALLY, AND IF YOU ARE REASONABLE ABOUT OTHER PARTS OF YOUR LIFE BUT NOT THAT PARTICULAR FACT THEN THAT IS NEUROTICISM.

FUCKS SAKE.

the dragon that st. george slew

Seriously, they incorporated this too into it all?

every idea of god and faith on this thread keeps being willfully misinterpreted no matter how specific people try to state it so I’m just going to give up and say Shakey OTM and leave it the hell alone.

Happy New Year all you crazy bastards, sorry I flipped out.

ok, so they’re “neurotic.” there are still an awful lot of them.

Seriously, they incorporated this too into it all?

of course! if you already believe there was an ark big enough for all the animals except the dinosaurs, then going on to believe that there was a real dragon fought by a real st. george is not really much of a stretch. in for a penny, in for a pound.

hey tom, are any of the handheld FF conversions any good? or are they just more-or-less straight ports of SNES carts?

then going on to believe that there was a real dragon fought by a real st. george is not really much of a stretch. in for a penny, in for a pound.

i think my amazement is more due to the specific inclusion of that beast. Out of all the possible iconic/mythological animals, they had to go for that one, especially notable as modern american fundie-ism tends to have xenophobia dominate so much to preclude even Anglophilia.

It’s like one of their staff members had a medieval/Anglo history class, or maybe got a copy of Bulfinch’s Mythology for Christmas one year, and felt an urgent need to fit that particular one somewhere into it all.

oh, kent hovind’s mom probably read it to him when he was kid or something.

i like how gustave moreau cast orlando bloom as st. george.

aw. my link don’t work.

well, it’s here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Stgeorge-dragon.jpg

or you really need to get out of nyc more, one or the other.

you realize how much of the country lives in the core or suburbs of nyc or roughly similar cities?

name me a single major media outlet, news or otherwise, that is dominated by a christian fundamentalist perspective. is attention to christian fundamentalism in the media motivated more by christian fundamentalists or “secular humanists”?

small-town monoculturism is going to exist as long as there are small towns, religion or not, though the internet among other technologies is changing what a small town is (and explains a lot of why christian fundamentalism is both more vocal and more apparent to non-christian fundamentalists).

here ya go:

Also, a correction: modern americna fundie-ism is just xenophobic, but also decidedly ahistoric. Thus my surprise that that one bit made it in there.

name me a single major media outlet, news or otherwise, that is dominated by a christian fundamentalist perspective.

you’re being wilfully obtuse. either that or you genuinely don’t understand the country you live in.

which is not to say, of course, that america is in fact, in toto, dominated by fundamentalist christianity. it’s one of several competing ideologies. but it has done a good and smart job of more or less cornering the market on “faith/values/belief” rhetoric, to the extent that those mainstream news networks you’re talking about reflexively go to people like james dobson for the “religious” perspective. your apportioning of fundamentalist influence to cultural and demographic backwaters is way off the mark. they have dominated religious discourse in this country for at least the last generation. these books are part of a push back against that, is the ridiculously obvious point i’m making.

people that think they’re taking dawkins down at the knees because they’ve read derrida are point-missing idiots. you may not LIKE him because he’s basically a scientist moonlighting as a ‘serious thinker,’ but it’s pretty hilarious to think that anyone actually gives a shit that you read some philosophy in college (esp given all the dawkins as dorm-room truthiness insults). tipsy’s right: even if he is polemical, even if he’s a jerk, even if he’s a fundamentalist, it isn’t BAD or counter-productive that there’s a few best-selling books out there that are willing to make facile observations about how the bible didn’t really happen.

it means that people that aren’t as smart or as well-read as you jerks can have a bit of help articulating why it is they don’t believe the same stuff as their neighbors. so what if dawkins is a pompous asshole — so was derrida.

major media outlet: wal-mart

xp tipsy is owning you guys. gabbneb: you need to get the fuck out of new york or wherever. you and everyone else going to bat for theological deconstructionists are the reason that everyone in the west/midwest thinks you’re a bunch of ‘real-person’ hating fags (even though you’re just being thoughtful or something)

also, the argument that science was born from religion and either (a) ought to give credit where credit is due or (b) is inherently flawed in some way totally ignores the political/cultural climate. no one would even be talking about these books if blatant, god-killing atheism wasn’t so offensive to huge chunks of the country

i didn’t really make much sense there, or contribute anything. everyone, back to yr corners, i’ll get back to drinking

name me a single major media outlet, news or otherwise, that is dominated by a christian fundamentalist perspective.

Country radio.

It’s NOT about Dawkins “moonlighting as a serious thinker,” it’s about Dawkins IGNORING three centuries of scientific and theological discourse so that he can make fun of religious people. Dawkins isn’t an idiot—and he probably could make an OK “serious thinker”—but if he’s going to make sweeping claims about religion, society, and reason, it’d be nice if he’d read some 20th century “serious thinkers” who have some interesting and important things to say about those things. Oh, but Derrida is only read by college kids, right? So who gives a shit?

Look, Dawkins might be a useful counterpoint to Haggard or someone, but he doesn’t present himself as such—he acts like he’s entirely above those assholes when he’s just as much an asshole as they are. It’d be nice if he admitted it. You can actually be nice about telling people that Adam and Eve never existed.

Shakey Mo’s post is the longest, most interesting and most complex I’ve read in a while, and it nicely encapsulates things that he and others have been saying for a while.

So, here’s my 2 cents:

“when I referred to religion as science’s ”angrier, snottier, younger brother“ I was alluding to the fact that the scientific method, Western rationalism, etc. owe their entire existence and system of thought to religion and religious institutions. In every scientific culture in the world, science grew out of religion. [...] When Dawkins argues that religion is the most harmful element in human society, in a way he is invalidating the very foundations of his entire system of thinking.”

This implies that to deny something one has believed in the past automatically invalidates present thought (present thought is built on and dependent on past belief; therefore, the repudiation of past belief annihilates the architecture of present thought). Absurd! We can always repudiate the ostensibly “obsolete” thinking that allowed us to arrive at our present thought-state, and this doesn not necessarily compromise present thought in any way.

“In addition to this, as has again been alluded to upthread by other posters, Dawkins is apparently entirely unaware of the last few hundred years’ deconstruction of scientific rationalism—from Spinoza to Derrida to Althusser to whoever. This model he has of an objective reality that can be described in language universal to everyone is a construct as equally ludicrous as a literal white-bearded God-father in the sky.”

This has come up again and again, and I think it’s misleading. It reflects the inflated opinion that 20th century philosophy has of itself. Math problems are solved in precisely the same way in every culture in the world today. Water level and air temperature are measured exactly the same way in California as in Ethiopia. The scientific significance of a particle test will be interpreted in the same manner by Muslim, Catholic and even Buddhist physicists. The models that science constructs of objective reality really ARE universal and omni-lingual. While different cultures may perceive, interpret and use those models in different ways, the models themselves have no cultural component whatsoever.

Individuals and groups who are unfamiliar with or hostile to the scientific method, on the other hand, exist in EVERY culture. And while it’s true that every culture expresses its home-grown version of science-fear differently and with varying levels of popular/official support, the scientific method (as a universal system) is no more intrinsically alien to any one culture than another. No more so than tool-use or implied social contracts.

***

“I think this is where the basic problem comes in—Dawkins really doesn’t understand language. The stance he assumes is essentially one where there is no room for metaphor, nuance, allegory, allusion, etc...”

Agree wholeheartedly with this. Dawkins is a proud, unapologetic (BIGOTED) scientific literalist. His super-reductive argument goes like this: “What’s real is what we can physically demonstrate is real. Only idiots believe in stuff that isn’t real. If you can’t demonstrate proof of your beliefs on some tangible level, you are, therefore, an idiot.”

The problem isn’t that he relies on the universality of scientific models or even that he discounts the contributions of religion in the past, but that he stubbornly insists that pure scientific rationality simply MUST now be the ultimate arbiter of all meaning in human life. Which is just ludicrous on the surface, and almost entirely unsupported besides. As you and others point out, religion-like thought systems have probably benefitted humanity in fair proportion to their harm, and science (like all hermetic systems) cannot discount that which lies outside its purview.

i can buy that. i still think it’s better to have him around than not.

Country radio

what discussion of religion is there on country radio? or are you referring to the music? are you saying that contemporary country music is dominated by a christian fundamentalist perspective? do you listen to any of it? why did you mention country and not gospel?

you’re being wilfully obtuse. either that or you genuinely don’t understand the country you live in.

no, i think i understand it very well.

you and everyone else going to bat for theological deconstructionists are the reason that everyone in the west/midwest thinks you’re a bunch of ‘real-person’ hating fags (even though you’re just being thoughtful or something)

i’m not ‘going to bat’ for anyone. i’m saying that if you think that a) most suburbanites who go to church every week in a big rec hall with a good av system instead of a small new england church with a big white steeple are ‘fundamentalists’, or that b) pat robertson has more influence on american culture than britney spears, you’re a moron.

Not sure what yr getting at here, nuneb...

From a Socratic, argument-for-argument’s-sake standpoint, I think yr picking good targets. But if you have a point (other than that people tend to express their class prejudices when talking about religion), I’d be curious to hear it.

You can actually be nice about telling people that Adam and Eve never existed.

yes. you can also be nice about telling them that jesus christ is the way and the truth and the life. but if you spend a lot of time surrounded by people who aren’t nice about that at all — like my friend in tennessee, e.g. — then maybe you have an appetite for someone fighting fire with brimstone.

if you think that a) most suburbanites who go to church every week in a big rec hall with a good av system instead of a small new england church with a big white steeple are ‘fundamentalists’, or that b) pat robertson has more influence on american culture than britney spears, you’re a moron.

i don’t know about “most” suburban megachurches; there are megachurches of all persuasions, even unitarian. but a lot of them are evangelical, and they are the social and political core of american fundamentalism. and the point isn’t whether britney spears is bigger than god. what i said is that fundamentalists have dominated american religious discourse for a generation. now there is some pushback, but the fact that people like dawkins — or the few high-profile liberal christians like jim wallis — seem novel just points up how one-sided the rhetoric has been.

what i said is that fundamentalists have dominated american religious discourse for a generation

if that’s true, i think it’s a sign of the secularization of the country

yes, this secular country where i grew up consciously stopping myself from saying “under god” in the pledge of allegiance every morning because my parents weren’t christian and i felt weird saying “god”; where half the government meetings i’ve attended as a reporter have opened with an explicit prayer to jesus christ; where school boards and state legislatures keep trying to insert bible passages into science books; gays are legally discriminated against on the basis of scripture; courthouses post the 10 commandments; county legislatures pass resolutions recognizing the primacy of the christian god and begging him for mercy; government offices and a lot of businesses close on the major christian holidays; one of our senior military commanders declares us at war with satan; etc blah blah blah.

or i could just say,

oh come on.

It’s funny but America was founded by people with such simple minds rooted in great faith that their guy-in-the-sky idealism literally changed the world for the (much) better, I think. If only American politicians had an inkling of the sort of faith-based idealism of our forefathers! (Bullshit Bush hypocrisy not counting, naturally.)

They held their religious morality to be “self-evident” and created a template for government based on liberty, equality and the opposition of tyranny. The “New Israel.” One [world] Nation Under God. Novus Ordo Seclorum. Annuit Cœptis. Numerological gematria (geometry [Masonry]) is all over the Great Seal, especially 13 (Love and Unity) and 26 (IHVH). Not to mention the pentagram, hexagram, Tetractys, etc. etc.

also maria says she hates assumption that religion has an overall negative effect, and yeah its easy to counter that with things like mlk, abolitionism, charity, ‘a love supreme’, etc. and my reply is- who cares?? if we really are at the point of encouraging ‘useful myths’ for societal control we might as well be goebbels.

I said you can not establish that religion has an overall positive OR negative effect, there are effects in both directions, so I wish that entire stupid argument would just go away. Also, there’s a big difference between saying religion is inspiring for some people, as individuals, and encouraging it as a “useful myth for societal control”. It’s useful for me, but the vast majority of my friends, even the ones I know through community service and activism, are atheists, and I would never try to “improve” them through religion..

Also, if you have a concept of God that’s not just him existing to fill in the holes science hasn’t gotten to yet, and one that isn’t scientifically provable or falsifiable, the “God clearly doesn’t exist, stop believing lies” argument is not nearly a good enough argument for why any belief in God is bad and destructive. I really don’t see what harm liberal Christians are doing by merely existing.

(xxxxpost)

Ignorance of whatever variety weighs about the same on an empty scale. The right equilibrium of friendship in our relation to other men is sometimes restored when we put a few grains of wrong on our own side of the scales.

(one of those sentences was not my own)

...

So long, friends!

and

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

...

“The right equilibrium of friendship in our relation to other men is sometimes restored when we put a few grains of wrong on our own side of the scales.”

Lock thread.

Goodnight kids, and God bless. Best in the new year. Not sure I can honestly say I love you one and all, but if I did, I’m almost sure I would.

xpost—no wait, take gabbneb with you

adam sez upthread: “This implies that to deny something one has believed in the past automatically invalidates present thought (present thought is built on and dependent on past belief; therefore, the repudiation of past belief annihilates the architecture of present thought). Absurd! We can always repudiate the ostensibly ”obsolete“ thinking that allowed us to arrive at our present thought-state, and this doesn not necessarily compromise present thought in any way.”

Right right, no disagreement from me about that—sorry I wasn’t being too clear here, but the reason I brought up the historical religious roots of western science was more to invalidate Dawkins’ claims about religion being the most harmful thing ever in human society (paraphrasing roughly here), not that science should cling to outmoded or invalidated beliefs. He can’t have it both ways—the very thing he’s decrying as holding humanity back basically established the theoretical and rhetorical framework he’s using to make that accusation. Its like a child saying their parents are the worst thing ever and that they’ve never produced anything worthwhile in their lives. Its, y’know, snotty and arrogant and displays a lack of self-awareness.

this idea of religion being the root of science is pretty much bollocks, though. the root of both is the impulse to make sense of the world, the human expression of which may or may be a function of emergent consciousness (i.e. we’re not sure to what degree we share that trait with other animals, but anyway). but the scientific instinct and the religious instinct are different forking paths off of that impulse, and the latter — which is primarily concerned with order — has spent a good portion of human history stifling the former — which is primarily concerned with information — whenever it became a threat to the status quo. and still does, when it gets a chance.

so don’t give “we owe science to religion,” unless what you mean by it is “we should be thankful the priests didn’t kill all the scientists.”

science didn’t arrive fully formed, though. it’s not like science just appeared one day and started duking it out with religion. though that would be kind of funny, science as a drunken stranger wandering into town picking fights. “WHATCHEW LOOKIN AT GOD BOY *HICCUP*”

It’s NOT about Dawkins “moonlighting as a serious thinker,” it’s about Dawkins IGNORING three centuries of scientific and theological discourse so that he can make fun of religious people.

I don’t believe Dawkins is ignoring that history, he’s simply concluding that the three centuries of discourse hasn’t improved anything and enough is enough—it’s itme to be militaristic. If you’re deal-brokering with religion then it’s a slippery slope to eventual contamination. It’s a Steve Ditko Mr. A story starring Dawkins as one of the talking heads.

Of course Dawkins picks easy targets... Ted Haggard, creationists, etc. I don’t see him going to an inner city AME, a Sanctuary Movement congregation, or anyplace where the local church is the only support network in town.

science didn’t arrive fully formed, though.

what did?

but the scientific instinct and the religious instinct are different forking paths off of that impulse, and the latter — which is primarily concerned with order — has spent a good portion of human history stifling the former

i meant that this makes it sound like science and religion were always distinct entities which were...ahhhh fugedduhboutit

the funny thing about all this is that most people posting to this proibably agree on most of the basic issues we’re addressing. it’s just a matter of whether you like dawkins’ way of approaching this.

ha, maybe that’s another reason he’s annoying, he’s more polarizing than enlightening.

...even among those who’d be his allies. but i guess the world does need its bastards. darwin had his bulldog (huxley) after all.

i meant that this makes it sound like science and religion were always distinct entities

of course not. they’ve been intertwined forever. but they represent different strands of the same instinct — to understand the world and why and how it is — and it’s a fallacy to say science somehow arises from religion. they arise from similar questions but have gone in somewhat different and periodically conflicting directions. a lot of people don’t have any great problem reconciling them. but as with any division, there are people and institutions that see gain in exploiting the differences.

what bothers some people about dawkins, i guess, is that he doesn’t seem interested in reconciliation — in coming back to the comfortable live-and-let-live position that a lot of people, religious and nonreligious, are happy to occupy, where we’re all willing to let science happen (as long as it doesn’t hurt anybody) and let religion happen (ditto). but he’s defending the Secular Science wing, which has been under sort of sustained assault lately and is likely feeling kind of lonely and unloved, and it’s expecting too much of the atheists maybe to also make some grand live-and-let-live gesture, because they’re not convinced that the people they’re up against are willing to do the same.

this idea of religion being the root of science is pretty much bollocks, though. the root of both is the impulse to make sense of the world, the human expression of which may or may be a function of emergent consciousness (i.e. we’re not sure to what degree we share that trait with other animals, but anyway).

Not necessarily true. Some theological movements of the Middle Ages and Renaissance were about negotiating the “barriers” between religion and reason.

“hey’ve been intertwined forever but they represent different strands of the same instinct — to understand the world and why and how it is — and it’s a fallacy to say science somehow arises from religion.”

I’m not talking about their theoretical or philosophical similarities, I’m talking about the actual physical people and institutions that developed science and the scientific method as we know it today, and I cited specific examples. The roots of western science go back to Greco-Roman (and by extension Egyptians and others) folks—Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras, etc.—and not only were all of these guys profoundly superstitious and inextricably bound up with the religious institutions of their day, it was religious institutions (namely the Catholic Church and Muslim theologians/scholars) that preserved that work and prepared it for its European revival centuries later. While Europe was busy being all filthy and ignorant in the Middle Ages, the Muslim theocracy was busy advancing and preserving the disciplines of medicine, astronomy, chemistry, math, etc. There were no non-religious-oriented scientific institutions pursuing these schools of thought in the West (or Islam, for that matter)—for the first few thousand years that science was developing, it was hand-in-hand and explicitly under the guidance of religion and religious institutions—priests with libraries, basically. This doesn’t have anything to do with whether the two are of similar intent or different strands of the same instinct, the fact is they were pretty much inextricably intermarried until a bunch of European scientists got fed up with kowtowing to religious politics.

(at which point science got all bitchy and antagonistic towards its progenitor and began a long arduous campaign of casting aspersions on its methods and intentions. I don’t think there’s any denying that religion precedes science, historically speaking, as a school of thought)

HE CITED EXAMPLES, PEOPLE, EXAMPLES!

Copernicus worked for most of his life at the Collegiate Church of the Holy Cross in Breslau—gosh, I wonder who funded that institution and paid for his studies. And who had a library where he would discover the heliocentric implications of Plato and Cicero...

Galileo—devout Roman Catholic, fan of St. Augustine...

Kepler = Lutheran theology student

Of course patronage (royal or church-based) was the main system of support for research and development for scholars and artists; autonomy in this regard did not exist until the 19th and 20th century, although many churches and kings did just let the researchers get on with it.

well you might as well call religion the source of democracy too, then, since religious authority was bound up with government for approximately 5,000 years or whatever. and religion is obviously the source of art too! or you could make the much more reasonable observation that all of these things — the search for knowledge about the world and our place in it, the establishment of social order, the pursuit of philosophy, art, etc. — are all features that have co-existed in various proportions in more or less every human civilization. to ascribe any or all of it to “religion” — to give religion credit for science, or art, or government — is ridiculous. it’s pulling one thing out of a matrix and saying “without this, none of the rest of it happens” — when actually all of it happens together. the whole idea of separating out these various spheres into discrete camps — religion here, science there, government over here — is a relatively recent development. so recent that it hasn’t even happened yet in some societies. saying that “religion” is somehow the causal element in the whole thing is just a fallacy.

but that’s one of the reasons religion is such a powerful and interesting force—its there at the origins of all the major institutions: art, language/symbol systems, social organization, as well as science. To make the “religion is the root of all evil” argument that Dawkins does requires that all of religion’s contributions to civilization be discounted while still holding it accountable for the wrongs committed in its name. This a deep internal contradiction in Dawkins’ condemnation of religion—to blame it for one set of things while refusing to give it credit for others.

I mean essentially I agree with the more holistic worldview you describe—where all of these elements exist and develop together—but Dawkins’ argument attempts to separate religion out of this matrix and blame it for society’s ills, which is what I have a problem with. Its like when atheists get all excited about blaming religion as the source of all wars throughout history or some such bullshit, its just myopic and simplistic and innacurate.

(still, this is something of a diversion—I think the real issue with Dawkins is one of language and an inability to correctly define terms)

the search for knowledge about the world and our place in it

Formerly known as “religion”.

religion is one aspect of that search. science, philosophy and art are others, like i said. they co-exist, and have been historically intertwined in complicated ways, but it’s not like we “invented” religion and then from it drew science and art. but i’m not disagreeing with shaky mo on dawkins’ reductiveness. broad statements about the good or evil of religion are as useless as similar statements about science (or art, for that matter).

my buddy forwarded this L.A. Times op-ed from Sam Harris out around on the day before Christmas:

10 myths — and 10 truths — about atheism

there are some very interesting posts on this thread and i’m sorry i missed most of it as it was happening. i was too busy celebrating this silly winter festival in my own non-believing way.

for me, it’s pretty simple: atheists getting “militant” on everybody’s ass is spectacularly unhelpful. what dawkins and others are doing—and they really don’t seem to realise the irony—is repositioning “atheism” as not just a lack of belief but as a belief system in itself: ie “i identify myself as a devout non-believer, and will angrily spout the following atheist dogma”.

jesus christ bloody hell for god’s sake ... er, look, fellow atheists. it’s not difficult. we’re meant to be the tolerant ones, remember?

kingfish there are so many inaccurate generalizations and assumptions in that op-ed... I couldn’t even get past point 3. (one of my personal faves is that an atheist by definition has “read the books”—meaning holy texts—this is hardly ever true in my personal experience. shit, half the ostensibly religious people I know haven’t actually read the books)

I mean come on, this: “it is not entirely clear that we can coherently speak about the ”beginning“ or ”creation“ of the universe at all, as these ideas invoke the concept of time, and here we are talking about the origin of space-time itself”—that is fucking Mysticism 101 right there. Define yr terms people.

“time”: a theoretical concept invented by humans in a (pretty damn good) attempt to rationalise something big and terrifying.

“god”: a theoretical concept invented by humans in a (pretty flawed) attempt to etc etc.

“the internet”: an etc etc etc.

eeth, i know fundies don’t think of themselves as reacting to the capitalist overturning of virtually every previous social and civic bond that has ever existed, but if you want us to all talk about this from WITHIN their mindset, well, actually, that would make a pretty hilarious thread. (for a second or two)

somewhere or other on my reading list

eeth you are really down with the whole “opiate of the masses” thing aren’t you?

maybe you’d like it better in RUSSIA where THEY DON’T HAVE GOD

(they do have pepsi though, i think)

happy new year you theocrazies

er, look, fellow atheists. it’s not difficult. we’re meant to be the tolerant ones, remember?

i thought agnostics were the tolerant ones. the perceived dogmatism of atheists is what keeps some of us agnostic.

Here’s a guy with a truly savvy take on all this:

http://salon.com/books/int/2007/01/02/numbers/print.html

“Q: Now, one thing I find curious is your own position in this debate. Your book ”The Creationists“ is generally acknowledged to be the history of creationism. You’ve also been very upfront about your own lack of religious belief. Yet, as far as I can tell, you seem to be held in high regard both by creationists and by scientists, which — I have to say — is a neat trick. How have you managed this?

A: Unlike many people, I haven’t gone out of my way to attack or ridicule critics of evolution. I know some of the people I’ve written about. They’re good people. I know it’s not because they’re stupid that they are creationists. I’m talking about all my family, too, who are still creationists. So that easy explanation that so many anti-creationists use — that they’re just illiterate hillbillies — doesn’t have any appeal to me, although I’m quite happy to admit that there are some really stupid creationists. ”

good interview

I saw this book in the bookstore yesterday. It looks kind of interesting:

The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God (Hardcover)

by Carl Sagan

http://www.amazon.com/Varieties-Scientific-Experience-Personal-Search/dp/1594201072/sr=8-1/qid=1167767176/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-9541001-0413728?ie=UTF8&s=books