1. The Return of Religion

Comment #213564 by Verily on July 18, 2008 at 3:05 pm

Roger Scruton claims that 'human beings have an innate need to conceptualise their world in terms of the transcendental, and to live out the distinction between the sacred and the profane'. Personally, I can readily accept on the basis of my experience that while most people seem to need a religious belief a significant number do not. The trouble with coming at things theologically as Roger Scruton does here is that you cannot accept such pluralism. What you say either has to be demonstrably and universally true or its meaning evaporates. Consequently, if atheists state, as many do, that they have no need for a religion and lead fulfilling, interesting and contented lives without one, you are forced to conclude that they are either telling lies or deceiving themselves. The problem with this self-deception hypothesis is that when you observe intelligent, educated and thoughtful people around the world deceiving themselves by being atheists, you are obliged to accept the corollary that you yourself, as an educated, intelligent and thoughtful person, are no less likely to be deceiving yourself.

2. Is religion a threat to rationality and science?

Comment #172687 by Verily on April 29, 2008 at 10:37 pm

Salut, LaMettrie, je comprends votre problème. S'il ya quelquechose que vous voulez contribuer, je vous offre de faire mon mieux de le traduire, pourvu que ce ne soit pas trop long et, enfin, que j'arrive à le comprendre! Si cela vous intéresse, écrivez-le tout simplement, permettez-moi quelques jours et je m'en occupe.

3. Is religion a threat to rationality and science?

Comment #171999 by Verily on April 29, 2008 at 5:22 am

There are quite a few references to 'evidence' in this thread. Does it mean the same thing to those with a rational bent and those with a proclivity for the supernatural? Quite possibly not, but what would we really count as 'evidence' if we were up against the wall? Any fellow blogger who feels so inclined might like it walk through the following hypothetical.

Step 1 - You are facing a judge and a jury charged with a serious crime you didn't commit.

Step 2 â€" Make a list of the kinds of evidence you would like to see presented in your defence which would completely and decisively exonerate you from any involvement in the crime, and which any reasonable jury would find fully convincing.

Step 3 â€" The prosecution produces four witnesses:

The first is an experienced police detective. He says he knows your type, he has observed your face and manner and knows intuitively you are the kind of person who would commit this sort of crime.

The second is a statistician who works for the Motor Licensing Department. He states that a random number generating program on his computer produced the first four digits of your driving licence at about the time the crime was committed.

The third is a clairvoyant who says she saw you commit the crime in a dream, and that she knows it was you because you are wearing the same colour shirt in court as the one you were wearing in the dream.

The fourth witness is a neighbour of yours who tells the court he was praying in church and had a vision in which he clearly saw you on a video recording from a CCTV camera at the crime scene. But then â€" hallelujah! â€" he saw the Finger of God erase your image from the footage. This clearly showed, he says, that God loves you and that it is time to give your life to Jesus. However, he adds, he still felt it was his civic duty to tell the police about your presence on the recording before the Divine Deletion took place.

Step 4 â€" The jury believes the prosecution witnesses and finds you guilty as charged.

If I were the hapless defendant with a previously freewheeling notion of 'evidence' I think I might rapidly revise my notion of which is the best kind to underpin a trustworthy working knowledge of reality.

4. How can the Earth be so perfectly suited for life by coincidence?

Comment #170370 by Verily on April 27, 2008 at 5:36 pm

That the conditions of the universe are specifically designed for human life is basically the anthropic principle. It is difficult for humans not to perceive reality anthropocentrically. If I were a microbial organ with consciousness and language and could trace my origins back billions of years to ancestors very similar to myself, I would be saying that I was the most successful form of organic life on planet Earth and that all the parameters of the cosmology had evidently been designed around my interests and finely tuned in my favour. Not only that, I would be saying that I had out-survived millions of intervening species and would probably still be here as a form of life when humans had all disappeared. Much of the argument for the anthropic principle seems to depend on the uniqueness of the kind of evolved intelligence without which we could not even state or discuss it. But we prize and quarantine human intelligence because we have it. Charles Lineweaver discusses a similar kind of issue in Australian Science (Jan/Feb 2008): 'If you were an elephant, you might be interested in nose size and whether there was a trend in the fossil record towards increasing nasalization quotient (NQ)'. Tracing your evolution, you would discover that you now represented 'the pinnacle of nasality'. It is in the same way that we see ourselves as the pinnacle of evolved intelligence, and assume that all cosmological conditions combine to underpin our self-image. However, as Lineweaver suggests, this would be 'a foregone conclusion without meaning simply because you have chosen to examine your most extreme feature'.

5. Is religion a threat to rationality and science?

Comment #169823 by Verily on April 26, 2008 at 10:44 pm

Although this brief duel is only a preview, it is still surprising that Lord Winston would think that much could ride on the dog-eared Pascalian wager, a piece of arcane reductionist logic which treats belief in God as the optimal choice in a cost/benefit analysis. If religion, as he claims, is hard-wired into cognition, it is difficult to see how it could require justification through an appended accountancy audit. In any case, his focus on the Abrahamic beliefs leads one to suppose that he conflates religion and God. This is ironical, for while he questions the profundity of Dennett's research in matters of religion, his own focus appears to overlook the irrelevance of such a conflation to a religion like Buddhism, which counts atheists among its practitioners.