1. Debate between Richard Dawkins and John Lennox

Comment #76466 by garbidz on October 6, 2007 at 12:28 am

It is embarrassing for the christian community if this is the best they can come up with. RD is so much further in his reasoning and his scope of knowledge that only the blind self-righteousness of a fanatic christian keeps from seein that the game is elsewhere.

For instance, the idea of good and bad and morals.
From cosmology, physics, biology, one cannot find right or wrong. It takes a human mind to define them. And, not surprisingly, the human minds all over the world seem to come up with similar ideas about them.

In religious thinking, it seems, it is next to impossible to see that there are things that exist in the outside world that have a presentation in our minds. Then there are things that exist only inside of our minds. Other than that, there are things in the outside of our presentations that we'll never have any idea about.

This seems to be one of the main issues.
"Since I have a believe inside of my head, there has to be a somebody who put it there". The craving for an antropomorphic willing subject as the primary force of things happening is understandable looking at our developmental background.

Only biologically oriented mind, however, can see it.
As well as a scientifically oriented mind can see the idiocy of the religious argumentation on the subject of man and his world and how they came about.

2. Do you have to read up on leprechology before disbelieving in them?

Comment #75033 by garbidz on October 1, 2007 at 12:17 pm

These leprechauns started bugging me as I did not have the faintest idea what they are.
Now I know.

I just wonder if there was I slight hidden here.
"They work on only one shoe, never a pair"

Now who are we talking about, really?

3. Dawkins's version of the deity does not exist

Comment #29539 by garbidz on April 3, 2007 at 10:50 am

I really do admire the clear presentations of Richard Dawkins and his perseverance in trying to chase ghosts -holy and less so- out of the machines of western thinking. He most certainly has done his share in bringing a scientific viewpoint to realms that normally belong to humanists, mysthics even.


Alas, he seems to be facing the Holy Edifices alone.

Here we have Mr. de la Bédoyère asking him to provide further references as to how a biological material creature becomes conscient and then, further on, moral.

I am sure that Mr. Bédoyère is as at least as capable as I am to go and do some récherche all by himself. It might come as a surprise that Richard Dawkins is not alone in his way of thinking. He is not an anomaly nor is he a delusionary dreamer.

Due to his readiness to stand up and say (and very clearly en plus) he has become the forefigure of the secular, rational and scientific thinking. I cannot think of another man who could have done a better job here.

But alone -by no means!

It is a bit too much asked for him to provide for example the neurophysiological correlates on "self" or "consciousness" or "conscience". There are other people working in these fields who seem to be getting along pretty well, having come up with hypotheses and ways of testing them.

One thing seems certain: None of the modern deities existed when moral behaviour first saw the daylight. So it is logically unsound to say that for instance the Christian God (or Jahve or Allah or Ahura Mazda) were its cause.

And as Richard mercilessly points out, our moral values are something quite different, something that cannot possibly be extracted from these writings. Ergo: Our moral values have evolved in spite of the black and the green books, not because of them.


To get a peek to how a biological system creates consciousness, self and conscience, it is very enlightening to read the works of Antonio Damasio, the Churchlands, Gerald Edelman and Giorgio Tononi. Crick and Metzinger are on the top of the list as well.

Richard Dawkins has done a tremendous job on explaining howwith only the help of chance and necessity you can climb the Mount Improbable and on the side paint the rainbows' colours deeper and more vibrant.

In my mind it is maybe asking too much that he should explain the achievements of the modern physiological psychology also in such a way that people would realize that the time of ghosts is just about to pass the way of elan vital in the realm of human psychology as well.


The problem with the texts available for the moment is double: There are people who really haven't understood who write well. Then there are people who really have understood (Like Edelmann and Tononi, Nobel laureates) whose writing is aimed at people who know, who share the same education. A layman stands dumbfounded.

But still I trouve Mr. Bédoyère's demand injustifiable. He should do his own readings and not baisser his ignorance sur Dawkins' epaules.

Richard Dawkins is the most brilliant locuteur, but he is definitely not the only significant scientist.

Fortunately, there are more on the way!

a short P.S. on the subject of "Free Will"
to me, it is a strange indication of mental insufficiency that none of the participants have never addressed the question what it is we might call a free will.

The term "Free" is a relative term. The objects of our volition can only be things that we are able to conceive. Another thing, the limits of our will are always set by our biological existence. We can of course compare our freedoms with a non-existent absolute. If one wants to give oneself a good whipping, the way to go.

But absolutes do exist only in the realm of Euclidian geometry and Newtonian physics.

We know that they have very little to do with the realm of life as it happens.


So there is very little point in making statements of the freedom of our will as compared to the absolute. But then again, we might consider what the free will of a human being might consist of in its purest form.

And we face the limitations of our biological and psychological machinery where the fact remains that most of the decisions we make have already been prepared by our non-conscious processes that when finally the time rises we have very little to add -consciously.

This is how we have been constructed and this is how it will be.

Still, in the scale of the freedom of choice as compared to other organisms, we are far ahead.

In my opinion, somebody should come up with a creature which really possesses the free will and then we could compare ourselves to him.

Until then, the discussion is fruitless.