Even being really good at [insert profession], doesn't make you non-stupid in areas outside of your expertise. It's not mutually exclusive. E.g., one can be a brilliant orthopedist, but can still be considered really stupid when it comes to forming a coherent general world-view.
I think Dawkins was hoping for a different world during his lifetime and is losing patience with those that oppose the change.
He's an extremely smart man, compared to him most of us really are stupid but that's not a reason to be judgmental about it, if anything that will just make things worse, for everybody.
For people to lose their religion is a very difficult mental process it ties in with the ego at a very basic level (it has to, that's exactly how it has been set up).
I know some pretty smart people that are deeply religious too and I've always found enough common ground in the 'smart' bits to to overlook the bits in the religion department.
I'm pretty sure they think the same way of me (well, maybe except for the smarts ;) )...
Yes, Professor Alister McGrath (Oxford) has come to similar conclusions. Dawkins et al had an expectation that religion would be swept away within their lifetime, and as this has not been achieved he has moved on to be much more direct and blunt as if to try to force it to happen.
That review completely weirds me out. Atheism does not have it's roots in the 9/11 attacks, nor is it 'new' by any definition. Sure, Dawkins wrote 'The God Delusion' chronologically after 9/11. But that doesn't mean his views were much different before then, he's been an outspoken atheist pretty much all his life.
As for the blatant attempt to tie all atheists to Nazism that's a first-order Godwinning right there.
I don't see any claim that atheism has it's roots in the 9/11 attacks. The reviewer states "[The rise of the New Atheists] to fame, McGrath suggests, begins with the attacks on 9/11 where radical Muslims turned commercial airplanes into missiles and managed to kill almost 3,000 people." He is referring to the 'rise to fame' of New Atheism. New Atheism and atheism are not synonyms of one another, the former is a member of the set of the latter.
McGrath doesn't tie all atheists to Nazism (as the review might himself be implying), but deals with how the basic arguments of the form "Religion is bad, look at all these religious leaders who have killed people" doesn't work very well for quite a lot of reasons including how it could easily be turned around.
In any case - I McGrath is a well respected intellectual in the UK (Oxford, along with Cambridge is our most prestigious university), and his writing is well worth considering.
what else would you call them? them : "who doesn't see presented/available evidence and just think that no matter what, their beliefs are true."
edit: Forgot to mention that, sometime these are the people who govern us, make law, treat us and in process of doing these things they try to enforce their belief OR have strong opposition towards anything which contradicts their belief.
The ability to see presented/available evidence depends to some extent on your frame of reference and how much time you've spent believing something and how deeply that belief is ingrained in your psyche.
Lots of scientists go to their graves defending pet theories in spite of lots of available evidence to the contrary.
This behavior has more to do with how much of the ego is invested in something than the ability to see or evaluate evidence as such.
In reply, i will just leave this quote from Carl Sagan:
"In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time someting like that happened in politics or religion."
Considering the focus on bountiful procreation that many religions advocate, I doubt they're going to die out.
There was a paper a while back focusing on abortion, which combined a bunch of statistics on who got them and what their political views were - the conclusion being that in the US, the Democratic party's ranks had been reduced as a result of their support for the policy.
The flip side for religious groups (who are generally anti-abortion) could easily be true.
Anyway, what with HN and humor it is probably good that this has been flagged off the homepage, but you may very well be right.
The religions we observe today are the result of - heavy irony here - an evolutionary struggle to survive, and simply because of that the religions that remain are pretty good at what they do, to spread and to remain. An atheist movement capable of competing with religion on sheer numbers alone would probably have to borrow bits and pieces from those very same religions in order to be successful in that competition.
You're still going to run into problems applying and adjective to people, since they can think scientifically in one area and unscientifically in another.
For example, Dawkins, presumably thinks scientifically in genetics. However, when it comes to religion being a cause of wars and other violence versus a pretense for wars and violence, Dawkins hangs onto the "cause" hypothesis despite data pointing to the "pretense" hypothesis.
The difference is important. If you get rid of a cause, you solve the problem. If you get rid of a pretense, people find another pretense. Robert Pape's data is consistent with the pretense hypothesis. Nonetheless, Dawkins devotes himself wholeheartedly to propagating the cause hypothesis. If he took a scientific approach, he would devote himself wholeheartedly to testing his hypothesis instead.
It's Dawkins "who doesn't see presented/available evidence and just think that no matter what, their beliefs are true."
You wrote that religion is merely a pretense, which I interpreted as religion being not harmful, since it never really causes anything. Dawkins presumably is convinced that religion is harmful.
Even if it is not the root cause for wars (which I can't comment on), I suspect it still enables wars, for example by paying soldiers with empty promises. Therefore I personally would have to agree with Dawkins.
You're certainly free to suspect what you like -- it's impossible to rigorously test every opinion. I would hope, though, that if you were considering making it your life's work to campaign for eradicating religion, you would do so based on more than a suspicion.
My suspicion is that if religion were eradicated, people who want to compel others to do war or terrorism would quickly find other pretenses and other empty promises. This suspicion is consistent with Robert Pape's finding controlling variables for increasing/decreasing terrorism that are not connected to religiosity.
Religion encourages people not to question things (including reasons for wars), which is reason enough for me to oppose it. That is just my personal preference, though, I'd like people to question things and generally be rational.
Of course it is possible to not question things and not be religious, which might explain the terrorism study. Also, of course there are sometimes valid reasons for wars, and clearly not all wars have anything to do with religion at all.
So maybe I am not campaigning against religion so much as for logic and rational thought. Religion just happens to be in the way.
I'm all for campaining for logic and rational thought. If Dawkins confined himself to the instances where religion (or at least religion-flavored politics) interferes with science and education, I would have no problem with it.
Religions are complex systems that can be used for good or evil -- it's the people that choose which. You can find justification for nearly every action in the bible -- but, to do that, I think, is a gross perversion of the overall spirit of Christianity.
Sure, the fundamental issue then maybe is, should humans be made to function according to some system? I seem to have some fundamental aversion against that, which makes me reject religion as much as communism.
I mean at least if said humans don't reflect on what they are doing. If they have come rationally to the conclusion that some action is the best, sure, go for it. But religion puts some authorities in charge of programming other people.
For instance, why not just drug everyone and make them docile slaves? I am sure such a society would function very well, so why not do it?
Nature of course doesn't care - a society running on religion is just another ant colony (mindless agents acting out a system). Maybe the system prevails, maybe it doesn't.
The harm I see is that religion prevents adaption and evaluation of new strategies, which might lead to peril in a lot of circumstances.
One could say that they are rational reasoners who have prior probability distributions that are not nonzero everywhere, if we rule out those with self-contradictory beliefs.
I still find it intriguing that Francis Collins, who in 1993 replaced
James D. Watson as head of the National Center for Human Genome Research at the National Institutes of Health, is a religious person [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Collins_(geneticist)#Re...]
I'm not judging anyone here, I'm just saying I find it striking, and slightly unimaginable.
Collins has written a book called "The Language of God" (referring to DNA) in which he explains how he reconciles his beliefs with his scientific understanding.
In it, he tells his own story and explains why he thinks Christians should accept evolution and why scientists should not be hostile to faith.
Weither the people in question truly are stupid or misguided wasn't the point of the question. I like how he answers about why he cares instead of mincing words.
In this quote I don't see anything about religion. He was just asked if he's bothered by stupid people and he stated that he's bothered by how stupid people influence children.
And even if the religion was implied by the original context then sure, Michael Faraday maybe was not stupid but his father might have been to some point and due this stupidity wasting his sons time.
I've got a problem with that viewpoint. I'm not sure if I'm able to articulate it properly but consider that without Michael Faraday's fathers religion his son might not have been born at all, and if he was he might have followed a different path in life, becoming a carpenter or some other mundane profession.
You don't get to play the same universe twice over with different pieces with a claim to knowing how that universe would unfold. All this stuff is inter-related and if you change one thing you may change more than you think you do.
Science and religion are to some extent in competition, both strive to explain things, the one through the supernatural, the other through reasoning and rigorous experiments.
I know which side my bread is buttered on but I'd never stake a claim on editing the past and saying that 'x or y not being religious' would have been good for science or the opposite. That's something that would be very hard to prove.
You're setting up a strawman there jgrahamc. Dawkins does not equate religious to stupid. Anyone that has listened to him much at all is fully aware that what he was getting at here is those people that continue to indoctrinate children with rubbish like Intelligent Design/Creationism when they have been presented, repeatedly, with hard evidence for the reality of evolution and the fact that it does not require a guiding force.
That willful ignorance is what he is appalled at, and quite frankly I don't know what else you can call someone that is willfully ignorant, if not stupid.
Right before that question from the interviewer Dawkins quoted a statistic that 40% of Americans think that Genesis is a true story and went on to say that 'they probably believe' that Lot's wife was turned into a pillar of salt.
You may be right that he's only talking about creationists directly but I still think name calling isn't the way to go. It's a bit like calling someone with a mental impairment 'retarded'. Doesn't help.
"Right before that question from the interviewer Dawkins quoted a statistic that 40% of Americans think that Genesis is a true story"
And did he then go on to say that he considers those 40% to be stupid? Or is it more likely that he considers those 40% to be the unfortunate childhood victims of the 'stupid' people? I think you're reading your own prejudices into his statement.
The next question immediately after that was the one that brought up the word stupid (as posted on my blog). You may be correct that I am influenced by my own prejudices. It wouldn't be the first time.
For Dawkins to continue with the conversation, there had to be a way to refer to the collective and the interviewer already used the word, "stupid". Why stop the discussion just to reassign the group to a new word? In the context of the interview, those people are considered to be stupid and for clarity, they should be called stupid. They may be smart in other areas, but their willingness to not see evidence makes them stupid in this particular arena.
He could have done a lot of things to embrace cultural marxism, but he didn't because he's not trying to beat around the bush or avoid hurting the feelings of the easily offended.
It is not Dawkin's job to make you feel good about yourself. His life's work isn't about your, or anyone else's, comfort. It's a search for truth in the hope of a better future.
I don't know what cultural Marxism is, but if Dawkins wants those 40% of Americans to change their beliefs or even just question them then the point of my blog post is that calling them stupid is unlikely to be the right angle to persuade them of a different viewpoint or to even hear what he has to say next.
I fully agree. A lot of people grow up in a religious bubble (I did) and sometimes it requires bold statements to jar them into doing a little introspection. Defaults are powerful and it takes something equally powerful to cause a person to abandon them. Calling them stupid may seem childish, but it forced me to think about it. After that it only took a day or two to realize how stupid I actually was.
That's an interesting counterpoint to my argument that calling people stupid would cause them to stop listening and not consider what's being said. Thanks.
Seems an unnecessary clarification to me since it doesn’t add anything. I’ll admit, however, that I am particularly fond of his boldness because it’s a good way to create awareness - which I think is his intention.
I know a few young earth creationists (who are much less common in the UK than the US I believe). I wouldn't say any of them were stupid or rationally impaired. Most of them are quite intelligent, but they are often uninformed scientifically about evolution.
The impression I get is that in the US there is quite a lot of anti-evolution 'information' put out by the YEC organisations, some of which /looks/ scientific. To those who are not properly trained in such things it will be hard to tell the difference. Also for most religious people (in the UK at least) it's not a big issue so they have not put any time in to looking in to it.
I work at a biological research institute in the UK, and my former group leader (an atheist) was extremely angry on one occasion about Dawkins. When I asked him why he said it was because Dawkins tries to use science to advance his atheism, leading to religious people feeling that they have to choose between science or religion. While for some they will choose science and become atheists, more often this leads to people rejecting science, and he was annoyed that Dawkins turns so many young people from religious families away from science.
Of course not. But it does show that there intelligent rational people who are at the top of their field (science) do not believe them to be incompatible.
Evolution is guided by the environment. For example, if customers always choose the best-looking pumpkins to take home and eat, and the ugliest ones end up being used for seed, the genes of ugly pumpkins will have more successors in each generation, and pretty soon your crops will consist of ugly pumpkins only. That's the complete mechanism of evolution right there. Would you say the customers unwittingly acted as a guiding force in evolving your population of pumpkins toward ugliness?
The easiest way to think about it is this: if evolution has a guiding force, in which direction is it guiding? And before answering that question, think about where most of the biomass of the Earth is found (hint, it's not in us humans).
Another strawman is the idea that the theory and model of evolution should be retrofitted all the way back to the beginning of time, a moment for which we do not have many data points, that the discussion should take place there, and that it should necessarily preclude any model of creationism derived from Genesis, and thereby preclude any investigation into the historicity of the Resurrection, an event of 30 lifetimes ago, for which we have many data points, neutral, opposed and biased.
... continue to indoctrinate children with rubbish like Intelligent Design/Creationism when they have been presented, repeatedly, with hard evidence for the reality of evolution and the fact that it does not require a guiding force.
Thinking about this used to make me angry, but I am glad it doesn't anymore since anger is a negative emotion and is not productive. What I realized is that people who "willfully indoctrinate" their children into a religion often do so not out of hubris ("I am smarter than those godless atheists") and not out of ignorance ("I don't care what others have to say"), but out of the following: "I have no idea how to raise children properly, therefore I will raise them to be religious because from among the people I know, most 'good, proper' people are religious, and because if you follow the ten commandments/whatever you cannot really be bad".
So ultimately the indoctrination of children into a religion is no so much something particularly malicious (hubris/ignorance), but more an admission of defeat (i.e. "I have no idea how to teach children morals if I don't tell them the story of Jesus"). People are scared that their children will turn into anti-social monsters if they are not indoctrinated. They see sensational stories on TV of parents being murdered by their own children and they think that if they raise the children to be religious, something similar will never happen. Fear is a powerful force.
Perhaps someone should come up with a popular atheist's guide to how to raise children, and a part of that religious indoctrination will go away. Unfortunately, if you look around, most of the people publishing such books are religious zealots and most of the outspoken atheists are busy attacking the zealots instead of being occupied with something more productive.
Dawkins' treatment of religion seems to me to a bit shallow. He seems to argue far too much about how true religious dogma is or isn't, but that can only give a superficial treatment of religion.
It might seem, especially to a scientist, that a religion is based on its core beliefs. But it is easy, especially for trained theologians, to get to whatever conclusion they want from some dogmatic starting point. Religion is not mathematics, where starting from an axiom will inevitably lead to a particular conclusion. So arguing about the untruth of the religious axioms is missing the point.
Further to this, I've found this excerpt from Richard Feynman's "Is Electricity Fire?" in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!:
And then one day—I guess it was a Saturday—I want to go up in the elevator, and there's a guy standing near the elevator. The elevator comes, I go in, and he goes in with me. I say, "Which floor?" and my hand's ready to push one of the buttons.
"No, no!" he says, "I'm supposed to push the buttons for you."
"What?"
"Yes! The boys here can't push the buttons on Saturday, so I have to do it for them. You see, I'm not Jewish, so it's all right for me to push the buttons. I stand near the elevator, and they tell me what floor, and I push the button for them."
Well, this really bothered me, so I decided to trap the students in a logical discussion. I had been brought up in a Jewish home, so I knew the kind of nitpicking logic to use, and I thought, "Here's fun!"
My plan went like this: I'd start off by asking, "Is the Jewish viewpoint a viewpoint that any man can have? Because if it is not, then it's certainly not something that is truly valuable for humanity... yak, yak, yak." And then they would have to say, "Yes, the Jewish viewpoint is good for any man."
Then I would steer them around a little more by asking, "Is it ethical for a man to hire another man to do something which is unethical for him to do? Would you hire a man to rob for you, for instance?" And I keep working them into the channel, very slowly, and very carefully until I've got them—trapped!
And do you know what happened? They're rabbinical students, right? They were ten times better than I was! As soon as they saw I could put them in a hole, they went twist, turn, twist—I can't remember how—and they were free! I thought I had come up with an original idea—phooey! It had been discussed in the Talmud for ages! So they cleaned me up just as easy as pie—they got right out.
"Is the Jewish viewpoint a viewpoint that any man can have? Because if it is not, then it's certainly not something that is truly valuable for humanity... yak, yak, yak."
This isn't really true for Judaism. There is no "Jewish viewpoint". Jews believe that they are the chosen people, and they have to live by a different set of rules to other peoples.
It's not immoral for non-Jews to perform works on Saturday, simply because they don't have to live by that rule.
His treatment is indeed shallow, and he knows it. This is demonstrated by his unreasonable reasons for not debating William Lane Craig on this very issue:
I'm being downvoted but Dawkin's fellow atheists have also criticised him on this matter:
QUOTE
"Some of Prof Dawkins’s contemporaries are not impressed. Dr Daniel Came, a philosophy lecturer and fellow atheist, from Worcester College, Oxford, wrote to him urging him to reconsider his refusal to debate the existence of God with Prof Craig.
In a letter to Prof Dawkins, Dr Came said: 'The absence of a debate with the foremost apologist for Christian theism is a glaring omission on your CV and is of course apt to be interpreted as cowardice on your part.
I notice that, by contrast, you are happy to discuss theological matters with television and radio presenters and other intellectual heavyweights like Pastor Ted Haggard of the National Association of Evangelicals and Pastor Keenan Roberts of the Colorado Hell House'"
/QUOTE
Why not believe his statement that he has no desire to support Mr Craigs self promotion?
It just goes to show that the issue won't be resolved by logic (arguing logically about religion, which is the epitome of irrationality, seems doomed from the start anyway).
My main gripe with Dawkins has actually always been that he spends too much time arguing with senseless counterarguments. I wish the evolutionary biologists would rather invest more energy into developing more insights, rather than arguing the same old tired arguments of their enemies again and again.
Edit: for what it's worth, I would actually be interested in what arguments Mr Craig would like to present. I checked his web site, but an article about "The God Delusion" that I found was behind a paywall (or at least "become a member wall").
1. It's ironic that you are asking us to invoke belief in a statement that is merely asserted and not demonstrated.
2. I agree that the issue won't be resolved by logic alone. However, based on Craig's previous debates, he will clearly define his terms and premises, and name the principles of logic used to reach a conclusion. To assert that such debate is "the epitome of irrationality" is itself irrational. You may disagree with his premises and definitions, but that is not the same as irrationality.
3. Dawkins has been asked again and again to debate Craig, and has refused again and again. As I've said before, other prominent atheists have criticised Dawkins on this matter.
1.) The whole thing is rather stupid, because it shouldn't be about belief. You can get Dawkins book and make up your own mind. Likewise (allegedly) for Craig's writing.
In that sense, what is a public celebrity match supposed to achieve? Will people decide according to the merit of the arguments (then why not just read), or according to the better haircut?
As for 4), I tried to follow a link to one of the transcripts, but it only lead to the "restricted to members" page again. Can't be bothered with Audio or Video.
So if 2.) is true, at least Craig should present an easily digestable resource with his arguments.
As for 3) as I said, I think Dawkings is wasting too much time with futile discussions already. I don't think refusing to discuss with anybody is an indicator for the merit of his arguments.
Edit: also, since I suppose Craig has published books, name one good reason why I should expect any interesting points in them?
I'll let you have the last word, but regarding the expectation of interesting points, I would ask that you peruse Craig's publications. Not all of the journals would impress you, but some will:
Craig is a serious philosopher with credible philosophical publications to his name. That is why he is worth reading (perhaps more his journal articles than his "popular" books, indicated by "P" in the above list). That is also the reason why Dawkins should take him on in debate.
I really so no reason why a debate would be remotely interesting.
Both have made their positions abundantly clear, both would be rehearsed and prepared and trotting out basically the same arguments and refutations and both are utterly closed minded on the matter.
So what you're left with is the intellectual equivalent of a bare knuckle fight - an unedifying spectacle, of interest to relatively few, which changes nothing and reflects badly on everyone involved.
I have no idea whether Dawkins' reasons for not debating Craig are honest. I can certainly see how Dawkins would think it beneath him - even if he weren't crashingly arrogant on paper he's on a level above Craig and Craig is a self publicist - though lets be honest, Dawkins is hardly a shrinking violet.
What I can say is that this debate not happening seems a pretty welcome relief from the bickering.
Good point. It is quite typical for atheists to argue logically about whether its rational to believe in the existence of God given current evidence and so on. But for most religions people, the attraction of religion is the social context, traditions and rituals and the feeling that things happen for a reason and there is a fundamental purpose for everything.
Some atheists seem to believe that people follow religions because of their belief in some of the religions dogmas - so if you can argue that the dogma is wrong or irrational, people will realize their folly and stop following the religions. But it is the other way around. People believe the dogmas because it is part of their religion.
Wait a minute, are you saying that Science and Religion are two different magesteria? Or that religious dogmas are neither true nor false? What do you mean by "religious axioms"? Are they any different from other religious beliefs? From any other belief? And most importantly, what point does arguing about the (un)truth of religious axioms miss?
The way I see it, "religious axioms" are beliefs about our world. Like any other, they each more or less match our world. And I do see the point of arguing about their truth. I mean, it would be a pity to forsake our souls by rejecting an existent God, or forsake our lives to an non-existent one.
What I was trying to say is that Dawkins believes that religious dogma is false, and he tries to convince people that religion is wrong by debunking religious dogma. But that does not work, see olavk's comment for the reason why I think it doesn't.
In other words, in this context, the truth behind religious dogma is irrelevant (which, if twisted enough, may qualify as neither true nor false).
And when I said religious axioms, I was trying to compare religious dogma to mathematical axioms, if such a thing makes sense, so I used the mathematical term.
Ah. I got it: belief in belief (thinking that faith by itself is a good thing, regardless of its truth), wishful thinking, rationalization, and social pressure. In other words, people believe things for reasons unrelated to their truths. That, we may want to address. Then, I suppose religious beliefs would just go away (you might want to keep the weekly meetings, though).
> [Religious dogma], if twisted enough, may qualify as neither true nor false.
That one I have a hard time with. Sure, we could imagine a situation where, say, Christianity is partially true (Jesus did resurrect), and partially false (virgin birth didn't happen); I assume however that you're not talking about that. Another possibility would be for religious beliefs to be incoherent enough to be "not even wrong"; that would be blocked by my bullshit filter all the same. Or we could muddy the very meaning of "truth"; that's plain cheating (and may corrupt your whole mind if you manage to convince yourself). Or, we could say that what is true for someone may be false for someone else; and that's plain false.
I can't think of any other twist, but my guess is, none would stand up to scrutiny.
I did not mean that religious dogma can be neither true nor false, that would indeed be bullshit. What I meant is that, in this context, if the question is "Is religious dogma true?", the answer will be neither "Yes" nor "No", it will be "That's irrelevant."
I understand both points here: JGC is correct that stupid is the wrong word for what Dawkins is talking about. Dawkins believes that there are a class of people who have shown themselves to be incorrigibly ignorant.
Someone who is stupid would be incapable of learning the facts involved. They should not be treated with disdain; it's not their fault.
Someone who is ignorant, doesn't know the facts involved. They should also not be treated with disdain; they don't know any better.
Someone who, despite repeated exposure to factual, repeatable knowledge chooses to remain ignorant… that's who Dawkins is disdainful of, and I don't blame him. And while I happen to agree with his view on the willful ignorance of Creationists, it is important to note that those selfsame folks would consider him willfully ignorant of the glorious truth of their god.
Ideally, Dawkins would leave out the name-calling altogether, but it's an awfully convenient shorthand to say that someone who is willfully and incorrigibly ignorant is, in fact, stupid. It just happens to be unnecessarily inflammatory and too much of a shortcut.
The part this article is criticising him for is a little out of context;
I care that people are being misled by those stupid people, because I think children deserve to know what is true and wonderful about the world into which they have been born, and it really is a shame that they are denied that; by ignorant and stupid adults, as you've described them.
The last part does hedge a little on if he would originally have actually chosen that definition. And still, it is certainly not an indefensible position to say that religious beliefs are quite stupid.
This is just further proof that any know it all can set up a blog, throw out logic, state a poorly formed opinion, and someone will jump on their band wagon.
Bayes lived in the 18th Century - pretty much everyone believed back then and it wasn't such an irrational view as the likes of DNA, cosmology, geology weren't as advanced.
There is a huge preponderance of "religious" people that have made great scientific discoveries. Dawkins' argument is the same as everyone else who doesn't believe in "God". So what? Dawkins is free to believe in what he wants as is everyone else.
This may be a bit of a tangent, but personally, I can't understand Dawkins' crusading attitude about religion.
If I believed, as he does, that there is no God, that all wonder and amazement and desire and love are merely chemical reactions, and that all consciousness will die with the universe, I wouldn't bother trying to convince others of it.
"You should believe this because it eliminates all meaning and purpose in life." Hey, great sell! I think I'd just eat, drink, and be merry before I died. Who cares what others believe?
If you're a Christian (as I am), you believe you've got good news to tell others. If you're an atheist, what's good about your news, and what difference does it make to tell anyone?
Your good news is that atheists are going to burn in hell for eternity.
My beliefs don't eliminate all meaning and purpose in my life -- that's just silly to think about atheists. I am trying to make a difference with my life, not because I expect some reward in the afterlife, but because of personal drive to make the world better.
When I see a person suffering, I don't think, "It's ok, because when they die, God will take care of them" -- I think: "Holy shit, we need to do something about this right now!"
Because Atheism is not a lack of ethics. My dad is an atheist and I'm a Christian but we're both concerned with the truth. Many atheists grew up in homes where the parents enforced a very strick household so they are trying to end what they see as a form of oppression.
Either way, I wish these types of discussions would stay off HN.
If you're a Christian (as I am), you believe you've got good news to tell others. If you're an atheist, what's good about your news, and what difference does it make to tell anyone?
The reason you think that is because you're only capable of seeing the world from your own perspective (as with anyone).
I'm not religious, and I've always found the universe a thing of great wonder. Nothing would interest me more than a better understanding of the nature of reality and conciousness. However, I find the answers given by religion unsatisfying and arbitrary - hardly good news.
Also, it's very well established that the driving force behind wonder, amazement, desire, love and pain are merely chemical reactions. It's only the subjective experience of those sensations (conciousness itself) that is not well understood.
Atheism doesn't necessarily remove all meaning and purpose in life. It just removes any divine purpose(s) in the process of removing God.
That said, I've never been impressed by reductionism. It seems presumptuous to assume you can use one form of intelligence (logic) to understand absolutely everything else about the world. You can describe the aesthetic sense via chemical reactions that take place in the brain, but that doesn't take you any closer in understanding it. In other words, we don't expect experts in processor microcode to tell us anything novel about functional programming, do we? Of course not: FP's concepts are implemented via the microcode, enabling FP to concern itself with much higher-level abstractions. And the things that FP 'thinks' about are quite different than that of a processor.
The other thing that bugs me is often the new atheists are so angry on the Internet. Angry about how everyone won't change. Angry about how much religion has done. And it is justified anger, sometimes. But if we use their line of thinking, there's only one life to live -- why waste it in anger? Why try to convince everyone? You've already admitted they're all stupid, right? It seems like there's this reluctance to just let go of that which cannot be changed.
I've been angry for a good deal of my life, and I'm just writing this as a cautionary note. Be very careful. Humans don't seem to tolerate anger for very long without side effects.
It would be a lot easier to tolerate the religious people if they kept their thoughts to themselves and would not try to exert their morals over other people...
For me it is the other way round: belief in god would eliminate all meaning, wonder and purpose in life. After all with a god, everything would be arbitrary (whatever god wants). So what would be the point in doing anything, trying to understand anything? God could just change the thing I just understood in the next millisecond, and all my effort would have been wasted. Also, what would there be to wonder about, if the answer is always "god made it so"? And, presumably god would already understand the thing he created, so what would be the point in me trying to understand it - the puzzle would already be solved. It would merely be cruel of god to withhold the information from me.
It's a bit like modern Hollywood movies: computer graphics have enabled arbitrary visual effects, so they have become boring to me (the effects, I mean). I almost never wonder "how did they do that".
Also Dawkins wrote a lot about the issue you present, and he makes good points about the universe without a god being fascinating.
Being an atheist is not about "good news", it's about reality - or more precisely, the perception thereof. I'd personally rather be right than tell others fictional good news. There is a stereotypical misunderstanding hiding in your assumptions about atheism and religion:
> If I believed, as he does, that there is no God, that all wonder and amazement and desire and love are merely chemical reactions, and that all consciousness will die with the universe, I wouldn't bother trying to convince others of it.
For many people who don't believe in deities, the contention that our existence is based on "mere" chemistry is not necessarily denigrating. On the contrary, the chemistry of life is awesome and beautiful. A mundane and scientifically valid model of how the world works is not automatically a nihilistic act of sacrilege against the universe. You see, for those people who don't believe, the attribution of everything meaningful to an external (fictional) entity with an oppressive agenda is just as bleak and meaningless as your perception of a life without god.
> You should believe this because it eliminates all meaning and purpose in life.
Now we have crossed into pure flamebaiting. Atheism makes no statement about the meaning and purpose of life. If you don't believe in god, you're an atheist. Atheism is not a philosophy, it's the absence of religion. As such, it can't and won't make statements to the effect you're describing. Also, the phrasing here is extraordinarily inflammatory in its nonsensical twistedness. I can't imagine anybody, whether theist nor atheist, saying this phrase. It's a total non-sequitur.
Looking past the straw man into the underlying assumption here, I feel prompted to point out that atheism does not eliminate meaning. Atheists don't necessarily have any traits in common. Some may indeed struggle with depression and existential worries, but my perception is that most of them do not. You fail to understand that for (most?) Atheists the absence of a belief in gods is extremely liberating and it enhances the sense of wonder they feel towards the universe and their own existence.
That doesn't mean most people drop the belief in gods just because it feels better, instead they become atheists because it wouldn't make sense for them any other way. Where they go from there is entirely up to them individually.
Personally, I say this to you: whatever floats your boat is totally okay. Nobody should be telling you what to believe or what to not believe - and neither should you. I believe you inadvertently come across as hostile towards non-believers and that is also not good. How would you feel if I made the same untrue statements you made about atheism about your life choices? It doesn't solve anything.
I share most of Dawkin's beliefs on religion but abhor the way he chooses to communicate them.
I'm not sure if it's hit the US but in the UK we have a thing called the Alpha Course. It's a Christian run 10 week course that discussed the "meaning of life" with a slightly (but only very slightly) covert agenda of converting the attendees to Christianity.
My experience (anecdotal) of Alpha is that it does a good job of bringing lapsed Christian's back into the fold - that is people who basically accepted it but weren't practising. For anyone else - those of other faiths, atheists and so on, it doesn't seem to do much. There will be exceptions but that seems to be the general pattern.
I see Dawkins as generally the same for atheists. I doubt very much he has any sort of major influence on Christians (other than to annoy them), he just gives atheists and agnostics a cheer leader and helps them confirm what they're thinking.
Nothing wrong with that of course but he's not engaging in any way that's going to bring about the death of religion which is what he'd seem to like.
This is absolutely right. For any movement, there are those that take an uncompromising extreme view. This is not to appeal to the other side, but to move the goal posts as far in their direction as possible. Think Stallman, Nader, Ron Paul.
They serve a purpose to the movement -- providing arguments that can be crafted by those that seek to convert and making others seem less extreme by comparison. One attribute that they must have to perform this effectively is to never compromise, and instead to keep pushing the envelope.
There's something rational about looking at historical events and asking if it's unlikely, likely, or strongly likely that they happened at all.
For example, I have heard of a handful of Germans today who for one reason or another say the Holocaust never happened. In light of the thousands of eye witness accounts, is it sensible to say that?
Another example, there are atheists today who for one reason or another say the Resurrection never happened, and not necessarily because they have ever looked into the historical primary and secondary sources.
In light of the hundreds of people who died at Roman hands in the 1st century, refusing to recant that they had seen the risen Lord, is it sensible to label their testimony a delusion, or inherited from their parents, without any thorough investigation at all?
As for those who had seen Christ themselves:
"I passed on to you what was most important and what had also been passed on to me. Christ died for our sins, just as the Scriptures said. He was buried, and he was raised from the dead on the third day, just as the Scriptures said. He was seen by Peter and then by the Twelve. After that, he was seen by more than 500 of his followers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. Then he was seen by James and later by all the apostles. Last of all, as though I had been born at the wrong time, I also saw him. For I am the least of all the apostles. In fact, I'm not even worthy to be called an apostle after the way I persecuted God's church."
"And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead."
"But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the first-fruits of those who have fallen asleep."
Are the New Testament sources primary, accurate, unbiased, trustworthy? When were they written? Have they been corrupted or do we read them as they wrote them? How many sources are there inside and outside of the New Testament? Are they independent? Are they coherent?
Here are some people who have tried to address these questions:
"In light of the thousands of eye witness accounts, is it sensible to say that?"
Well, this is funny, because here's the issue on which Dawkins fails completely to apply the principles he advocates we all should.
Incidentally, so do you. You claim thousands of eye witness accounts. Well, how many of those have been independently verified? Furthermore, even the highly know and regarded ones are ridden with inconsistencies and outright lies (I'm thinking Elie Wiesel here).
And even if they were there remains the point that no hard proof whatsoever has been produced to support the claim that the Holocaust as is told today ever happened. No documents exist that don't require a double interpretation to support such claim. No gas chambers that differ any bit from standard delousing chambers used at the time, even in the US, have ever been uncovered. This could go on.
I'm not trying to advocate for one version or the other. That's not the point. The point is, that this issue is NEVER applied the same principles that are applied to a rational inquiry or scientific endeavour or even a case being judged in a court of law. If you don't believe me, well, go and check by yourself. But don't just limit yourself to the Yad Vashem because that's the same as reading the Bible and saying it proves itself (although there are plenty of inconsistencies in the Yad Vashem data curiously).
I admire Dawkins and his work, but the truth is, in the issue of the Holocaust he's as stupid as the people he accuses of being stupid. Even worse, I bet he would viciously defend his stupidity against anyone who would challenge him otherwise.
I'm sure you are more painfully familiar with the matter than I am.
I have an adopted Jewish aunt. Her mother and father put her on one of the last trains to leave Germany for England. At the last second her mother pushed her baby sister through the window to her. She never saw her parents again.
I have a Jewish friend who's grandfather was one of the last survivors of a concentration camp, and who walked to Israel and started repairing shoes on the streets of Tel Aviv.
I live across the road from the South African Jewish Museum, and I have seen the photographs. I am not a historian and I do not claim to be one, but I think it's sensible to say that something happened, and that hundreds of thousands of people died and were affected. Furthermore, anyone who would suggest these things never happened would have some "explaining away" to do.
There are mountains of evidence - in fact, mountains of bodies - that 'support the claim that the Holocaust as is told today ever happened'. That the Holocaust occurred is completely and utterly beyond question.
Next time you choose to post this sort of thing from an anonymous account, just write 'I'm an antisemite' instead. It'll save us all time.
I share your opinion on the rationality of looking at the likelihood of historical events.
Do Barnett and Bruce detail the evidence for the stories of hundreds of early martyrs? I wonder if those stories could have been created later in order to strengthen the apparent case.
I have read Barnett and am reading Bruce. They focus on the New Testament documents as sources and they touch on the martyrdom of most of the authors, especially Paul of Tarsus who had himself previously persecuted Christian men, women and children.
There is a temptation to explain these events away, each on their own, one event at a time, tackling one and moving on to the next, without ever tackling the combination of them together.
What's wrong with taking one event at a time? For example, I would first want to see if there's evidence of independent witnesses to Paul's former persecution of Christians. If it's just Luke or people who read Luke, what confidence should I have in the event? How unsure of the event do I have to be before I decide not to look at it in combination with other events?
Well then I really think you would find Barnett's "Is the New Testament History?" to be a good read. He tackles the sources in and of themselves, and in conjunction. He also covers the credibility of Luke in detail. Furthermore, Luke is not the only source concerning Paul and his persecution of Christians in the 1st century.
Your question of whether the New Testament documents have in fact survived intact down the ages is of tremendous importance. In terms of textual criticism, one would amongst other things compare the number and antiquity of New Testament manuscripts with those of other ancient literature.
Daniel Wallace provides an overview:
"In comparison with the remaining manuscripts of any Greek or Latin literature, the NT suffers from an embarrassment of riches. It is almost incomprehensible to think about the disparity. When it comes to quantity of copies, the NT has no peer. More than 5,700 Greek NT manuscripts are still in existence, ranging in date from the early second century to the sixteenth century. To be sure, the earliest ones (i.e. through the third century) are all fragmentary, but they cover a substantial amount of the NT."
"And Greek manuscripts do not tell the whole story. The NT was translated early on into a variety of languages, including Latin, Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, Georgian, Gothic and Arabic. All told, there are between 20,000 and 25,000 handwritten copies of the NT in various languages. Yet if all these were destroyed, the NT text could be reproduced almost in its entirety by quotations of it in sermons, tracts, and commentaries written by ancient teachers of the church... How does this compare with the average classical author? The copies of the average ancient Greek or Latin author's writings number fewer than 20 manuscripts. Thus, the NT has well over 1,000 times as many manuscripts as the works of the average classical author."
F.F. Bruce provides another:
"Perhaps we can appreciate how wealthy the New Testament is in manuscript attestation if we compare the textual material for other ancient historical works. For Caesar's Gallic War (composed between 58 and 50 BC), there are several extant MSS, but only nine or ten are good, and the oldest is some 900 years later than Caesar's day. Of the 142 books of the Roman History of Livy (59 BC - AD 17), only thirty-five survive; these are known to us from not more than twenty MSS of any consequence, only one of which, that containing fragments of Books 3-6, is as old as the fourth century. Of the fourteen books of the Histories of Tacitus (c. AD 100) only four and a half survive; of the sixteen books of his Annals, ten survive in full and two in part. The text of these extant portions of his two great historical works depends entirely on two MSS, one of the ninth century and one of the eleventh. The extant MSS of his minor works (Dialogus de Oratoribus, Agricola, Germania) all descend from a codex of the tenth century. The History of Thucydides (c. 460-400 BC) is known to us from eight MSS, the earliest belonging to c. AD 900, and a few papyrus scraps, belonging to about the beginning of the Christian era. The same is true of the History of Herodotus (c. 488-428 BC). Yet no classical scholar would listen to an argument that the authenticity of Herodotus or Thucydides is in doubt because the earliest MSS of their works which are of any use to us are over 1,3000 years later than the originals. But how different is the situation of the New Testament in this respect!"
And Sir Frederic Kenyon:
"The interval then between the dates of original composition and the earliest extant evidence becomes so small as to be in fact negligible, and the last foundation for any doubt that the Scriptures have come down to us substantially as they were written has now been removed. Both the authenticity and the general integrity of the books of the New Testament may be regarded as finally established."
You may also be interested in the English reformers in Oxford in 1555 (martyred by their own Church of England), here is an audio of David Secco...
Ignoring Dawkins for a moment, I think those here naming Christian scientists as examples of how science and religion are compatible are missing the point. Science isn't about the people who practice it and it's not about beliefs. It's about the scientific method - theory tested by and derived from repeatable experimentation. And there are no Christian scientists who apply the scientific method to their own religious beliefs, for obvious reasons.
True, but surely the reason is not that there are no religious believers who have applied rational processes to the question of whether there is a God (or gods) and have concluded that there is - but rather that the scientific method is a method that is only suitable in certain domains.
It's easy to equate 'the scientific method' with any sort of 'rational' evidence based approach, but the term has a specific meaning.
We don't apply the scientific method to solve murder investigations for instance, or to solve math equations. Similarly historians don't use the scientific method to determine what happened in history.
It's not that the choices are the scientific method or ignorance -- it's that the scientific method is not applicable in many of the domains that intellectual religious people have mined to conclude that theism is more likely than atheism. Many Christians point to the historical evidence for Jesus for instance, see (former Prof) Richard Bauchman's 'Jesus and the eyewitnesses' http://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Eyewitnesses-Gospels-Eyewitness-... or Prof Licona's http://www.amazon.com/Resurrection-Jesus-New-Historiographic... 'The resurrection of Jesus - a new historiographical approach' or they have considered philosophical arguments (see what Alvin Plantinga has written for example).
This is not to argue that science and religion are Non-Overlapping MagesteriA (NOMA) as Gould argued, clearly there are overlaps (whether the first humans came in to existence along with the universe 6,000 years ago is a pretty clear example of overlap), but many of the arguments intellectual theists give for thinking theism is more likely are rational, just not scientific.
Meta comment: This post must be getting flagged a lot.
114. Dawkins' Stupid People (jgc.org)
34 points by jgrahamc 3 hours ago | flag | 76 comments
I also note that the comments are full of civil and intelligent discussion. I wonder to what extent the flagging helped it stay that way by keeping it off the front page.
110 comments
[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 95.0 ms ] threadHe's an extremely smart man, compared to him most of us really are stupid but that's not a reason to be judgmental about it, if anything that will just make things worse, for everybody.
For people to lose their religion is a very difficult mental process it ties in with the ego at a very basic level (it has to, that's exactly how it has been set up).
I know some pretty smart people that are deeply religious too and I've always found enough common ground in the 'smart' bits to to overlook the bits in the religion department.
I'm pretty sure they think the same way of me (well, maybe except for the smarts ;) )...
McGrath writes about this in his book 'Why God Won't Go Away: Is the New Atheism Running on Empty?' http://www.amazon.com/Why-God-Wont-Go-Away/dp/084994645X
Here is a review of the book to give you a flavour of what conclusions he reaches http://mcdanell99reviews.blogspot.com/2011/08/why-god-wont-g...
As for the blatant attempt to tie all atheists to Nazism that's a first-order Godwinning right there.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11332515
Ahteists are no more violent than religious people, I think they're people just like all the others, you can expect something of everything.
I hope the book is better than that that review lets on.
McGrath doesn't tie all atheists to Nazism (as the review might himself be implying), but deals with how the basic arguments of the form "Religion is bad, look at all these religious leaders who have killed people" doesn't work very well for quite a lot of reasons including how it could easily be turned around.
In any case - I McGrath is a well respected intellectual in the UK (Oxford, along with Cambridge is our most prestigious university), and his writing is well worth considering.
http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=library&...
I think that reviewer used the book to push his own viewpoints at the expense of the author, and does him a dis-service.
edit: Forgot to mention that, sometime these are the people who govern us, make law, treat us and in process of doing these things they try to enforce their belief OR have strong opposition towards anything which contradicts their belief.
Lots of scientists go to their graves defending pet theories in spite of lots of available evidence to the contrary.
This behavior has more to do with how much of the ego is invested in something than the ability to see or evaluate evidence as such.
"In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time someting like that happened in politics or religion."
But here is another quote to illustrate the counterpart:
"Die Wahrheit triumphiert nie, ihre Gegner sterben nur aus."
Rough translation: The truth never triumphs, its opponents simply die out.
That's by Max Planck.
There was a paper a while back focusing on abortion, which combined a bunch of statistics on who got them and what their political views were - the conclusion being that in the US, the Democratic party's ranks had been reduced as a result of their support for the policy.
The flip side for religious groups (who are generally anti-abortion) could easily be true.
Anyway, what with HN and humor it is probably good that this has been flagged off the homepage, but you may very well be right.
The religions we observe today are the result of - heavy irony here - an evolutionary struggle to survive, and simply because of that the religions that remain are pretty good at what they do, to spread and to remain. An atheist movement capable of competing with religion on sheer numbers alone would probably have to borrow bits and pieces from those very same religions in order to be successful in that competition.
You're still going to run into problems applying and adjective to people, since they can think scientifically in one area and unscientifically in another.
For example, Dawkins, presumably thinks scientifically in genetics. However, when it comes to religion being a cause of wars and other violence versus a pretense for wars and violence, Dawkins hangs onto the "cause" hypothesis despite data pointing to the "pretense" hypothesis.
The difference is important. If you get rid of a cause, you solve the problem. If you get rid of a pretense, people find another pretense. Robert Pape's data is consistent with the pretense hypothesis. Nonetheless, Dawkins devotes himself wholeheartedly to propagating the cause hypothesis. If he took a scientific approach, he would devote himself wholeheartedly to testing his hypothesis instead.
It's Dawkins "who doesn't see presented/available evidence and just think that no matter what, their beliefs are true."
Even if it is not the root cause for wars (which I can't comment on), I suspect it still enables wars, for example by paying soldiers with empty promises. Therefore I personally would have to agree with Dawkins.
My suspicion is that if religion were eradicated, people who want to compel others to do war or terrorism would quickly find other pretenses and other empty promises. This suspicion is consistent with Robert Pape's finding controlling variables for increasing/decreasing terrorism that are not connected to religiosity.
Of course it is possible to not question things and not be religious, which might explain the terrorism study. Also, of course there are sometimes valid reasons for wars, and clearly not all wars have anything to do with religion at all.
So maybe I am not campaigning against religion so much as for logic and rational thought. Religion just happens to be in the way.
I mean at least if said humans don't reflect on what they are doing. If they have come rationally to the conclusion that some action is the best, sure, go for it. But religion puts some authorities in charge of programming other people.
For instance, why not just drug everyone and make them docile slaves? I am sure such a society would function very well, so why not do it?
Nature of course doesn't care - a society running on religion is just another ant colony (mindless agents acting out a system). Maybe the system prevails, maybe it doesn't.
The harm I see is that religion prevents adaption and evaluation of new strategies, which might lead to peril in a lot of circumstances.
I'm not judging anyone here, I'm just saying I find it striking, and slightly unimaginable.
In it, he tells his own story and explains why he thinks Christians should accept evolution and why scientists should not be hostile to faith.
And even if the religion was implied by the original context then sure, Michael Faraday maybe was not stupid but his father might have been to some point and due this stupidity wasting his sons time.
You don't get to play the same universe twice over with different pieces with a claim to knowing how that universe would unfold. All this stuff is inter-related and if you change one thing you may change more than you think you do.
Science and religion are to some extent in competition, both strive to explain things, the one through the supernatural, the other through reasoning and rigorous experiments.
I know which side my bread is buttered on but I'd never stake a claim on editing the past and saying that 'x or y not being religious' would have been good for science or the opposite. That's something that would be very hard to prove.
His father could be killed or ostracized for being atheist and that would definitely harm science.
That willful ignorance is what he is appalled at, and quite frankly I don't know what else you can call someone that is willfully ignorant, if not stupid.
You may be right that he's only talking about creationists directly but I still think name calling isn't the way to go. It's a bit like calling someone with a mental impairment 'retarded'. Doesn't help.
And did he then go on to say that he considers those 40% to be stupid? Or is it more likely that he considers those 40% to be the unfortunate childhood victims of the 'stupid' people? I think you're reading your own prejudices into his statement.
For Dawkins to continue with the conversation, there had to be a way to refer to the collective and the interviewer already used the word, "stupid". Why stop the discussion just to reassign the group to a new word? In the context of the interview, those people are considered to be stupid and for clarity, they should be called stupid. They may be smart in other areas, but their willingness to not see evidence makes them stupid in this particular arena.
It is not Dawkin's job to make you feel good about yourself. His life's work isn't about your, or anyone else's, comfort. It's a search for truth in the hope of a better future.
The impression I get is that in the US there is quite a lot of anti-evolution 'information' put out by the YEC organisations, some of which /looks/ scientific. To those who are not properly trained in such things it will be hard to tell the difference. Also for most religious people (in the UK at least) it's not a big issue so they have not put any time in to looking in to it.
I work at a biological research institute in the UK, and my former group leader (an atheist) was extremely angry on one occasion about Dawkins. When I asked him why he said it was because Dawkins tries to use science to advance his atheism, leading to religious people feeling that they have to choose between science or religion. While for some they will choose science and become atheists, more often this leads to people rejecting science, and he was annoyed that Dawkins turns so many young people from religious families away from science.
It's clear that religion in general, and Christianity in particular are not obviously incompatible with science (and particularly evolution) given organisations like Bio Logos http://biologos.org/ and the Faraday Institute http://www.st-edmunds.cam.ac.uk/faraday/index.php
There are of course forces in nature, namely the laws of physics.
Thinking about this used to make me angry, but I am glad it doesn't anymore since anger is a negative emotion and is not productive. What I realized is that people who "willfully indoctrinate" their children into a religion often do so not out of hubris ("I am smarter than those godless atheists") and not out of ignorance ("I don't care what others have to say"), but out of the following: "I have no idea how to raise children properly, therefore I will raise them to be religious because from among the people I know, most 'good, proper' people are religious, and because if you follow the ten commandments/whatever you cannot really be bad".
So ultimately the indoctrination of children into a religion is no so much something particularly malicious (hubris/ignorance), but more an admission of defeat (i.e. "I have no idea how to teach children morals if I don't tell them the story of Jesus"). People are scared that their children will turn into anti-social monsters if they are not indoctrinated. They see sensational stories on TV of parents being murdered by their own children and they think that if they raise the children to be religious, something similar will never happen. Fear is a powerful force.
Perhaps someone should come up with a popular atheist's guide to how to raise children, and a part of that religious indoctrination will go away. Unfortunately, if you look around, most of the people publishing such books are religious zealots and most of the outspoken atheists are busy attacking the zealots instead of being occupied with something more productive.
It might seem, especially to a scientist, that a religion is based on its core beliefs. But it is easy, especially for trained theologians, to get to whatever conclusion they want from some dogmatic starting point. Religion is not mathematics, where starting from an axiom will inevitably lead to a particular conclusion. So arguing about the untruth of the religious axioms is missing the point.
And then one day—I guess it was a Saturday—I want to go up in the elevator, and there's a guy standing near the elevator. The elevator comes, I go in, and he goes in with me. I say, "Which floor?" and my hand's ready to push one of the buttons.
"No, no!" he says, "I'm supposed to push the buttons for you."
"What?"
"Yes! The boys here can't push the buttons on Saturday, so I have to do it for them. You see, I'm not Jewish, so it's all right for me to push the buttons. I stand near the elevator, and they tell me what floor, and I push the button for them."
Well, this really bothered me, so I decided to trap the students in a logical discussion. I had been brought up in a Jewish home, so I knew the kind of nitpicking logic to use, and I thought, "Here's fun!"
My plan went like this: I'd start off by asking, "Is the Jewish viewpoint a viewpoint that any man can have? Because if it is not, then it's certainly not something that is truly valuable for humanity... yak, yak, yak." And then they would have to say, "Yes, the Jewish viewpoint is good for any man."
Then I would steer them around a little more by asking, "Is it ethical for a man to hire another man to do something which is unethical for him to do? Would you hire a man to rob for you, for instance?" And I keep working them into the channel, very slowly, and very carefully until I've got them—trapped!
And do you know what happened? They're rabbinical students, right? They were ten times better than I was! As soon as they saw I could put them in a hole, they went twist, turn, twist—I can't remember how—and they were free! I thought I had come up with an original idea—phooey! It had been discussed in the Talmud for ages! So they cleaned me up just as easy as pie—they got right out.
This isn't really true for Judaism. There is no "Jewish viewpoint". Jews believe that they are the chosen people, and they have to live by a different set of rules to other peoples.
It's not immoral for non-Jews to perform works on Saturday, simply because they don't have to live by that rule.
William Lane Craig, Richard Dawkins and the Empty Chair: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1ldYmg0lpE
Edit: Digestible summary of the issue: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/8511931/Richard-Daw...
QUOTE "Some of Prof Dawkins’s contemporaries are not impressed. Dr Daniel Came, a philosophy lecturer and fellow atheist, from Worcester College, Oxford, wrote to him urging him to reconsider his refusal to debate the existence of God with Prof Craig.
In a letter to Prof Dawkins, Dr Came said: 'The absence of a debate with the foremost apologist for Christian theism is a glaring omission on your CV and is of course apt to be interpreted as cowardice on your part.
I notice that, by contrast, you are happy to discuss theological matters with television and radio presenters and other intellectual heavyweights like Pastor Ted Haggard of the National Association of Evangelicals and Pastor Keenan Roberts of the Colorado Hell House'" /QUOTE
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/8511931/Richard-Daw...
It just goes to show that the issue won't be resolved by logic (arguing logically about religion, which is the epitome of irrationality, seems doomed from the start anyway).
My main gripe with Dawkins has actually always been that he spends too much time arguing with senseless counterarguments. I wish the evolutionary biologists would rather invest more energy into developing more insights, rather than arguing the same old tired arguments of their enemies again and again.
Edit: for what it's worth, I would actually be interested in what arguments Mr Craig would like to present. I checked his web site, but an article about "The God Delusion" that I found was behind a paywall (or at least "become a member wall").
2. I agree that the issue won't be resolved by logic alone. However, based on Craig's previous debates, he will clearly define his terms and premises, and name the principles of logic used to reach a conclusion. To assert that such debate is "the epitome of irrationality" is itself irrational. You may disagree with his premises and definitions, but that is not the same as irrationality.
3. Dawkins has been asked again and again to debate Craig, and has refused again and again. As I've said before, other prominent atheists have criticised Dawkins on this matter.
4. You can download a number of Craig's debates here: http://rfforum.websitetoolbox.com/post?id=2703927
In that sense, what is a public celebrity match supposed to achieve? Will people decide according to the merit of the arguments (then why not just read), or according to the better haircut?
As for 4), I tried to follow a link to one of the transcripts, but it only lead to the "restricted to members" page again. Can't be bothered with Audio or Video.
So if 2.) is true, at least Craig should present an easily digestable resource with his arguments.
As for 3) as I said, I think Dawkings is wasting too much time with futile discussions already. I don't think refusing to discuss with anybody is an indicator for the merit of his arguments.
Edit: also, since I suppose Craig has published books, name one good reason why I should expect any interesting points in them?
http://www.reasonablefaith.org/site/PageServer?pagename=publ...
Craig is a serious philosopher with credible philosophical publications to his name. That is why he is worth reading (perhaps more his journal articles than his "popular" books, indicated by "P" in the above list). That is also the reason why Dawkins should take him on in debate.
Both have made their positions abundantly clear, both would be rehearsed and prepared and trotting out basically the same arguments and refutations and both are utterly closed minded on the matter.
So what you're left with is the intellectual equivalent of a bare knuckle fight - an unedifying spectacle, of interest to relatively few, which changes nothing and reflects badly on everyone involved.
I have no idea whether Dawkins' reasons for not debating Craig are honest. I can certainly see how Dawkins would think it beneath him - even if he weren't crashingly arrogant on paper he's on a level above Craig and Craig is a self publicist - though lets be honest, Dawkins is hardly a shrinking violet.
What I can say is that this debate not happening seems a pretty welcome relief from the bickering.
Some atheists seem to believe that people follow religions because of their belief in some of the religions dogmas - so if you can argue that the dogma is wrong or irrational, people will realize their folly and stop following the religions. But it is the other way around. People believe the dogmas because it is part of their religion.
The way I see it, "religious axioms" are beliefs about our world. Like any other, they each more or less match our world. And I do see the point of arguing about their truth. I mean, it would be a pity to forsake our souls by rejecting an existent God, or forsake our lives to an non-existent one.
In other words, in this context, the truth behind religious dogma is irrelevant (which, if twisted enough, may qualify as neither true nor false).
And when I said religious axioms, I was trying to compare religious dogma to mathematical axioms, if such a thing makes sense, so I used the mathematical term.
> [Religious dogma], if twisted enough, may qualify as neither true nor false.
That one I have a hard time with. Sure, we could imagine a situation where, say, Christianity is partially true (Jesus did resurrect), and partially false (virgin birth didn't happen); I assume however that you're not talking about that. Another possibility would be for religious beliefs to be incoherent enough to be "not even wrong"; that would be blocked by my bullshit filter all the same. Or we could muddy the very meaning of "truth"; that's plain cheating (and may corrupt your whole mind if you manage to convince yourself). Or, we could say that what is true for someone may be false for someone else; and that's plain false.
I can't think of any other twist, but my guess is, none would stand up to scrutiny.
Wow, never was the uselessness of theologians more succinctly described.
I understand both points here: JGC is correct that stupid is the wrong word for what Dawkins is talking about. Dawkins believes that there are a class of people who have shown themselves to be incorrigibly ignorant.
Someone who is stupid would be incapable of learning the facts involved. They should not be treated with disdain; it's not their fault.
Someone who is ignorant, doesn't know the facts involved. They should also not be treated with disdain; they don't know any better.
Someone who, despite repeated exposure to factual, repeatable knowledge chooses to remain ignorant… that's who Dawkins is disdainful of, and I don't blame him. And while I happen to agree with his view on the willful ignorance of Creationists, it is important to note that those selfsame folks would consider him willfully ignorant of the glorious truth of their god.
Ideally, Dawkins would leave out the name-calling altogether, but it's an awfully convenient shorthand to say that someone who is willfully and incorrigibly ignorant is, in fact, stupid. It just happens to be unnecessarily inflammatory and too much of a shortcut.
I care that people are being misled by those stupid people, because I think children deserve to know what is true and wonderful about the world into which they have been born, and it really is a shame that they are denied that; by ignorant and stupid adults, as you've described them.
The last part does hedge a little on if he would originally have actually chosen that definition. And still, it is certainly not an indefensible position to say that religious beliefs are quite stupid.
"Perl [is] a biblical reference to the "pearl of great price" (Matthew 13:46)."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Wall#Accomplishments
"an English mathematician and Presbyterian minister, known for having formulated a specific case of the theorem that bears his name: Bayes' theorem."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Bayes
If I believed, as he does, that there is no God, that all wonder and amazement and desire and love are merely chemical reactions, and that all consciousness will die with the universe, I wouldn't bother trying to convince others of it.
"You should believe this because it eliminates all meaning and purpose in life." Hey, great sell! I think I'd just eat, drink, and be merry before I died. Who cares what others believe?
If you're a Christian (as I am), you believe you've got good news to tell others. If you're an atheist, what's good about your news, and what difference does it make to tell anyone?
My beliefs don't eliminate all meaning and purpose in my life -- that's just silly to think about atheists. I am trying to make a difference with my life, not because I expect some reward in the afterlife, but because of personal drive to make the world better.
When I see a person suffering, I don't think, "It's ok, because when they die, God will take care of them" -- I think: "Holy shit, we need to do something about this right now!"
Either way, I wish these types of discussions would stay off HN.
The reason you think that is because you're only capable of seeing the world from your own perspective (as with anyone).
I'm not religious, and I've always found the universe a thing of great wonder. Nothing would interest me more than a better understanding of the nature of reality and conciousness. However, I find the answers given by religion unsatisfying and arbitrary - hardly good news.
Also, it's very well established that the driving force behind wonder, amazement, desire, love and pain are merely chemical reactions. It's only the subjective experience of those sensations (conciousness itself) that is not well understood.
That said, I've never been impressed by reductionism. It seems presumptuous to assume you can use one form of intelligence (logic) to understand absolutely everything else about the world. You can describe the aesthetic sense via chemical reactions that take place in the brain, but that doesn't take you any closer in understanding it. In other words, we don't expect experts in processor microcode to tell us anything novel about functional programming, do we? Of course not: FP's concepts are implemented via the microcode, enabling FP to concern itself with much higher-level abstractions. And the things that FP 'thinks' about are quite different than that of a processor.
The other thing that bugs me is often the new atheists are so angry on the Internet. Angry about how everyone won't change. Angry about how much religion has done. And it is justified anger, sometimes. But if we use their line of thinking, there's only one life to live -- why waste it in anger? Why try to convince everyone? You've already admitted they're all stupid, right? It seems like there's this reluctance to just let go of that which cannot be changed.
I've been angry for a good deal of my life, and I'm just writing this as a cautionary note. Be very careful. Humans don't seem to tolerate anger for very long without side effects.
And it removes any right on the part of the divine to reveal itself.
I've run afoul of this myself, and the only thing I have to blame is my own pride.
It's a bit like modern Hollywood movies: computer graphics have enabled arbitrary visual effects, so they have become boring to me (the effects, I mean). I almost never wonder "how did they do that".
Also Dawkins wrote a lot about the issue you present, and he makes good points about the universe without a god being fascinating.
> If I believed, as he does, that there is no God, that all wonder and amazement and desire and love are merely chemical reactions, and that all consciousness will die with the universe, I wouldn't bother trying to convince others of it.
For many people who don't believe in deities, the contention that our existence is based on "mere" chemistry is not necessarily denigrating. On the contrary, the chemistry of life is awesome and beautiful. A mundane and scientifically valid model of how the world works is not automatically a nihilistic act of sacrilege against the universe. You see, for those people who don't believe, the attribution of everything meaningful to an external (fictional) entity with an oppressive agenda is just as bleak and meaningless as your perception of a life without god.
> You should believe this because it eliminates all meaning and purpose in life.
Now we have crossed into pure flamebaiting. Atheism makes no statement about the meaning and purpose of life. If you don't believe in god, you're an atheist. Atheism is not a philosophy, it's the absence of religion. As such, it can't and won't make statements to the effect you're describing. Also, the phrasing here is extraordinarily inflammatory in its nonsensical twistedness. I can't imagine anybody, whether theist nor atheist, saying this phrase. It's a total non-sequitur.
Looking past the straw man into the underlying assumption here, I feel prompted to point out that atheism does not eliminate meaning. Atheists don't necessarily have any traits in common. Some may indeed struggle with depression and existential worries, but my perception is that most of them do not. You fail to understand that for (most?) Atheists the absence of a belief in gods is extremely liberating and it enhances the sense of wonder they feel towards the universe and their own existence.
That doesn't mean most people drop the belief in gods just because it feels better, instead they become atheists because it wouldn't make sense for them any other way. Where they go from there is entirely up to them individually.
Personally, I say this to you: whatever floats your boat is totally okay. Nobody should be telling you what to believe or what to not believe - and neither should you. I believe you inadvertently come across as hostile towards non-believers and that is also not good. How would you feel if I made the same untrue statements you made about atheism about your life choices? It doesn't solve anything.
I'm not sure if it's hit the US but in the UK we have a thing called the Alpha Course. It's a Christian run 10 week course that discussed the "meaning of life" with a slightly (but only very slightly) covert agenda of converting the attendees to Christianity.
My experience (anecdotal) of Alpha is that it does a good job of bringing lapsed Christian's back into the fold - that is people who basically accepted it but weren't practising. For anyone else - those of other faiths, atheists and so on, it doesn't seem to do much. There will be exceptions but that seems to be the general pattern.
I see Dawkins as generally the same for atheists. I doubt very much he has any sort of major influence on Christians (other than to annoy them), he just gives atheists and agnostics a cheer leader and helps them confirm what they're thinking.
Nothing wrong with that of course but he's not engaging in any way that's going to bring about the death of religion which is what he'd seem to like.
They serve a purpose to the movement -- providing arguments that can be crafted by those that seek to convert and making others seem less extreme by comparison. One attribute that they must have to perform this effectively is to never compromise, and instead to keep pushing the envelope.
Also, does stupid mean "genetically hardwired to low intelligence", or can stupid people be made more intelligent somehow?
For example, I have heard of a handful of Germans today who for one reason or another say the Holocaust never happened. In light of the thousands of eye witness accounts, is it sensible to say that?
Another example, there are atheists today who for one reason or another say the Resurrection never happened, and not necessarily because they have ever looked into the historical primary and secondary sources.
In light of the hundreds of people who died at Roman hands in the 1st century, refusing to recant that they had seen the risen Lord, is it sensible to label their testimony a delusion, or inherited from their parents, without any thorough investigation at all?
As for those who had seen Christ themselves:
"I passed on to you what was most important and what had also been passed on to me. Christ died for our sins, just as the Scriptures said. He was buried, and he was raised from the dead on the third day, just as the Scriptures said. He was seen by Peter and then by the Twelve. After that, he was seen by more than 500 of his followers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. Then he was seen by James and later by all the apostles. Last of all, as though I had been born at the wrong time, I also saw him. For I am the least of all the apostles. In fact, I'm not even worthy to be called an apostle after the way I persecuted God's church."
"And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead."
"But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the first-fruits of those who have fallen asleep."
Are the New Testament sources primary, accurate, unbiased, trustworthy? When were they written? Have they been corrupted or do we read them as they wrote them? How many sources are there inside and outside of the New Testament? Are they independent? Are they coherent?
Here are some people who have tried to address these questions:
Paul Barnett, "Is the New Testament history?" (http://www.amazon.com/New-Testament-History-Paul-Barnett/dp/...)
FF Bruce, "New Testament Documents" (http://www.amazon.com/New-Testament-Documents-They-Reliable/...)
Well, this is funny, because here's the issue on which Dawkins fails completely to apply the principles he advocates we all should.
Incidentally, so do you. You claim thousands of eye witness accounts. Well, how many of those have been independently verified? Furthermore, even the highly know and regarded ones are ridden with inconsistencies and outright lies (I'm thinking Elie Wiesel here).
And even if they were there remains the point that no hard proof whatsoever has been produced to support the claim that the Holocaust as is told today ever happened. No documents exist that don't require a double interpretation to support such claim. No gas chambers that differ any bit from standard delousing chambers used at the time, even in the US, have ever been uncovered. This could go on.
I'm not trying to advocate for one version or the other. That's not the point. The point is, that this issue is NEVER applied the same principles that are applied to a rational inquiry or scientific endeavour or even a case being judged in a court of law. If you don't believe me, well, go and check by yourself. But don't just limit yourself to the Yad Vashem because that's the same as reading the Bible and saying it proves itself (although there are plenty of inconsistencies in the Yad Vashem data curiously).
I admire Dawkins and his work, but the truth is, in the issue of the Holocaust he's as stupid as the people he accuses of being stupid. Even worse, I bet he would viciously defend his stupidity against anyone who would challenge him otherwise.
I have an adopted Jewish aunt. Her mother and father put her on one of the last trains to leave Germany for England. At the last second her mother pushed her baby sister through the window to her. She never saw her parents again.
I have a Jewish friend who's grandfather was one of the last survivors of a concentration camp, and who walked to Israel and started repairing shoes on the streets of Tel Aviv.
I live across the road from the South African Jewish Museum, and I have seen the photographs. I am not a historian and I do not claim to be one, but I think it's sensible to say that something happened, and that hundreds of thousands of people died and were affected. Furthermore, anyone who would suggest these things never happened would have some "explaining away" to do.
Next time you choose to post this sort of thing from an anonymous account, just write 'I'm an antisemite' instead. It'll save us all time.
It's painful that there is even the need to remind people of this.
Do Barnett and Bruce detail the evidence for the stories of hundreds of early martyrs? I wonder if those stories could have been created later in order to strengthen the apparent case.
There is a temptation to explain these events away, each on their own, one event at a time, tackling one and moving on to the next, without ever tackling the combination of them together.
Your question of whether the New Testament documents have in fact survived intact down the ages is of tremendous importance. In terms of textual criticism, one would amongst other things compare the number and antiquity of New Testament manuscripts with those of other ancient literature.
Daniel Wallace provides an overview:
"In comparison with the remaining manuscripts of any Greek or Latin literature, the NT suffers from an embarrassment of riches. It is almost incomprehensible to think about the disparity. When it comes to quantity of copies, the NT has no peer. More than 5,700 Greek NT manuscripts are still in existence, ranging in date from the early second century to the sixteenth century. To be sure, the earliest ones (i.e. through the third century) are all fragmentary, but they cover a substantial amount of the NT."
"And Greek manuscripts do not tell the whole story. The NT was translated early on into a variety of languages, including Latin, Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, Georgian, Gothic and Arabic. All told, there are between 20,000 and 25,000 handwritten copies of the NT in various languages. Yet if all these were destroyed, the NT text could be reproduced almost in its entirety by quotations of it in sermons, tracts, and commentaries written by ancient teachers of the church... How does this compare with the average classical author? The copies of the average ancient Greek or Latin author's writings number fewer than 20 manuscripts. Thus, the NT has well over 1,000 times as many manuscripts as the works of the average classical author."
F.F. Bruce provides another:
"Perhaps we can appreciate how wealthy the New Testament is in manuscript attestation if we compare the textual material for other ancient historical works. For Caesar's Gallic War (composed between 58 and 50 BC), there are several extant MSS, but only nine or ten are good, and the oldest is some 900 years later than Caesar's day. Of the 142 books of the Roman History of Livy (59 BC - AD 17), only thirty-five survive; these are known to us from not more than twenty MSS of any consequence, only one of which, that containing fragments of Books 3-6, is as old as the fourth century. Of the fourteen books of the Histories of Tacitus (c. AD 100) only four and a half survive; of the sixteen books of his Annals, ten survive in full and two in part. The text of these extant portions of his two great historical works depends entirely on two MSS, one of the ninth century and one of the eleventh. The extant MSS of his minor works (Dialogus de Oratoribus, Agricola, Germania) all descend from a codex of the tenth century. The History of Thucydides (c. 460-400 BC) is known to us from eight MSS, the earliest belonging to c. AD 900, and a few papyrus scraps, belonging to about the beginning of the Christian era. The same is true of the History of Herodotus (c. 488-428 BC). Yet no classical scholar would listen to an argument that the authenticity of Herodotus or Thucydides is in doubt because the earliest MSS of their works which are of any use to us are over 1,3000 years later than the originals. But how different is the situation of the New Testament in this respect!"
And Sir Frederic Kenyon:
"The interval then between the dates of original composition and the earliest extant evidence becomes so small as to be in fact negligible, and the last foundation for any doubt that the Scriptures have come down to us substantially as they were written has now been removed. Both the authenticity and the general integrity of the books of the New Testament may be regarded as finally established."
You may also be interested in the English reformers in Oxford in 1555 (martyred by their own Church of England), here is an audio of David Secco...
It's easy to equate 'the scientific method' with any sort of 'rational' evidence based approach, but the term has a specific meaning.
We don't apply the scientific method to solve murder investigations for instance, or to solve math equations. Similarly historians don't use the scientific method to determine what happened in history.
It's not that the choices are the scientific method or ignorance -- it's that the scientific method is not applicable in many of the domains that intellectual religious people have mined to conclude that theism is more likely than atheism. Many Christians point to the historical evidence for Jesus for instance, see (former Prof) Richard Bauchman's 'Jesus and the eyewitnesses' http://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Eyewitnesses-Gospels-Eyewitness-... or Prof Licona's http://www.amazon.com/Resurrection-Jesus-New-Historiographic... 'The resurrection of Jesus - a new historiographical approach' or they have considered philosophical arguments (see what Alvin Plantinga has written for example).
This is not to argue that science and religion are Non-Overlapping MagesteriA (NOMA) as Gould argued, clearly there are overlaps (whether the first humans came in to existence along with the universe 6,000 years ago is a pretty clear example of overlap), but many of the arguments intellectual theists give for thinking theism is more likely are rational, just not scientific.