151. The Dawkins Confusion: Naturalism ad absurdum

Comment #23578 by bitbutter on March 1, 2007 at 3:10 pm

Extreme populations interact with extremely small probabilities, such as the situation in which people try to guess the lottery numbers. After a time, someone (but not you) does guess the numbers. If you use the religious argument dismissing the anthropic principle, you have to conclude that each lottery winner was given the numbers because the chance of hitting by "random" is too "fined tuned." You won't hit the lottery, but someone will, and from the view of that someone, it's a miracle.

thanks quine: this is a useful 'down to earth' illustration of the mistake. I'll be using this lottery analogy.

152. The Dawkins Confusion: Naturalism ad absurdum

Comment #23556 by bitbutter on March 1, 2007 at 2:20 pm

Well, of course our universe would have to be fine-tuned, given that we live in it. But how does that so much as begin to explain why it is that [our universe] is fine-tuned?

[slaps forehead] Although he's certainly aware of it, this passage demonstrates a failure to come to grips with the anthropic principle; which is a shame because it's a beauty.

153. The Dawkins Confusion: Naturalism ad absurdum

Comment #23550 by bitbutter on March 1, 2007 at 2:09 pm

According to his definition (set out in The Blind Watchmaker), something is complex if it has parts that are "arranged in a way that is unlikely to have arisen by chance alone." But of course God is a spirit, not a material object at all, and hence has no parts.

Roll's sentiment seconded, i could hardly believe my eyes. this is a classic!

Explanations come to an end; for theism they come to an end in God.

.. and for those of us with less of a horror of uncertainty they come to an end in 'I don't know'.

154. Dawkins v. Collins Debate

Comment #23353 by bitbutter on February 28, 2007 at 4:40 am

@ mindrebel: as i (mis?)understand it; memes are necessary, inevitable and not the problem here (some memes will be more representative of the truth than others). As Dennet points out, words are memes too.

Dogmatic faith is what should be thrown out.

(edited to remove quote marks from around 'the truth' ;) )

155. Faith

Comment #23107 by bitbutter on February 26, 2007 at 11:38 am

nrvous:

Mouthalmighty: A hearty round of applause for your post #67 -- a neat and damning identification of a tendency I have often noted in theists but have never been able to articulate myself.

seconded!

156. Faith

Comment #23040 by bitbutter on February 26, 2007 at 2:50 am

Julia Neuberger

What I find really distasteful is not just the tone of their rhetoric, but their lack of doubt

'distasteful' lol!

There _is_ doubt expressed in TGD about the question of the non-existence of gods. Just the right amount of doubt: a vanishingly small amount. The same amount reserved for question of the existence of Thor, the pink unicorn etc.

No scientific method says that there is no doubt. If you don't accept there's doubt in all things, you're being intellectually dishonest.

yes; and if you pretend that the existence of a currently fashionable god is more likely than the existence of Thor or the pink unicorn you're also being intellectually dishonest.

157. Memo: Stop teaching evolution

Comment #22499 by bitbutter on February 19, 2007 at 11:40 am

gimlibengloin:

What he seems to be opposing is the stance that people like Dr Dawkins take which even other Darwinists find embarrasing. We see this in the God Delusion where Dawkins is quite adament about the folly of believing in a God we can't see, touch, or feel but is quite willing to state his belief in extraterrestrial civilisations.

There are no reasons to suppose there might be a god. There are good reasons to suppose there might be alien life.

158. Debate between Sam Harris and Reza Aslan

Comment #22010 by bitbutter on February 12, 2007 at 9:42 am

Again harris' is accused of overlooking the 'Shimmering ocean of nuance' and complexity of religion. The format of the debate was quite skewed against his favour, tag teamed! I was impressed by his cool headedness.

The 'Religions' being discussed by the speakers are (at least) two very different things. My conception of religion is the one harris is talking to. Simply put, institutionalised supernatural thinking. Reza seems to talking about Religion more as a living language or cultural record. But he never 'put his hand on the table' in a satisfactory way so its hard to tell.

On the one hand Reza says that people who believe in the literal truth of holy texts should rightly be ridiculed. But if we read holy texts as mere metaphors then they offer us no reason to 'believe' or be religious. On the other hand he seems to want to preserve respect for religious thinking. As i understand it it's not possible to be a (for example) Christian without believing at least some of the wild truth claims made in the bible, that Jesus is the son of god, for instance. Does Reza think this a claim that isn't deserving of ridicule?

I'm left puzzled by what his stance is. The conception of religion he seems to put forward reminds me of the "flabbily elastic definition" that Dawkins identifies. A nice safe position to take. You can't nail down jelly.

159. My critics are wrong to call me dogmatic

Comment #21967 by bitbutter on February 12, 2007 at 2:04 am

"THE Truth" is the province of fundamentalism; one of the defining characteristics of reason is that it is always ready to look at genuine new evidence.

Nicely put opposablethumbs!

160. The questions science cannot answer

Comment #21634 by bitbutter on February 10, 2007 at 8:26 am

What sloppy pap!

Deep within humanity lies a longing to make sense of things. Why are we here? What is life all about? These questions are as old as the human race. So how are we to answer them? Can they be answered at all? Might God be part of the answer?

Richard Dawkins, England's grumpiest atheist, has a wonderfully brash way of dealing with this. Here's how science would sort out this muddleheaded way of thinking: everyone else just needs to get out of the way, and let the real scientists, like himself, get to work. They would have these questions sorted out in no time. His swashbuckling The God Delusion sweeps to one side "dyed-in-the-wool faith-heads", who are "immune to argument". Belief in God is just for those who are mad, bad or sad. Science has all the answers — and God isn't even on the short-list. Only science-hating idiots think otherwise. End of discussion.

Straw man. Nobody said science has all the answers. TGD makes it clear that people Dawkins holds in high regard include people of religious belief.

For Dawkins, things are dazzlingly simple. There is a cosmic battle taking place between reason (represented by science) and superstition (represented by religion). Only one can win — and it's got to be reason. Scientists who profess religious belief are appeasers, representing the "Neville Chamberlain" school.

Another Straw Man. TGD suggests that _Some_ scientists are appeasers, while acknowledging that others hold genuine religious belief.

This quick fix is ideal for those who like glossy, superficial spins on complex questions. But in the real world, things turn out not to be quite that simple.

really? sounds promising..

Two other interesting books appeared in the same year as Dawkins's. Owen Gingerich, Harvard University's distinguished astronomer, published God's Universe. Francis Collins, director of the Human Genome Project, brought out The Language of God. Both these scientists, with a long track record of peer-reviewed publications, made the case for belief in God as the best and most satisfying explanation of the way things are.

Instead of a proper rebuttal we're fobbed off with Appeal To Authority. Where's the substance?

So what are we to make of this? Perhaps Gingerich and Collins aren't real scientists at all. Maybe they are manipulative religious charlatans who are just pretending to be scientists to garner support for their mad ideas.

Straw Man

Or they might be well-meaning people who have been deluded into belief by that bullying "psychotic delinquent" (that's Dawkins-speak for God, by the way).

Well, the bullying delinquent doesn't exist. So it's clear that he's in no position to do any bullying work himself.

These answers might persuade some "dyed-in-the-wool faith-heads" of the atheist variety.

Sloppy. Nobody needs faith to not believe in the existence of gods.

But most thinking people, atheist or otherwise, will regard them as highly implausible.

Thats right. Because those answers don't make logical sense or are straw men. They don't follow from the arguments in TGD.

It is worth reminding ourselves that the hallmark of intelligence is not whether one believes in God or not, but the quality of the processes that underlie one's beliefs.

TGD never suggests otherwise. Of course intelligent people can also be deluded.

But what of that greater question: what's life all about? This, and others like it, Medawar insisted, were "questions that science cannot answer, and that no conceivable advance of science would empower it to answer". They could not be dismissed as "nonquestions or pseudoquestions such as only simpletons ask and only charlatans profess to be able to answer".

Why not? Some explanation of this assertion would be helpful. As it stands this is just another Appeal to Authority.

This deft analysis by a self-confessed rationalist casts light on why scientists hold such a variety of religious beliefs. [...] It also shows that it makes little sense to talk about "proof" of a world view, whether Christian or atheist.

Just because we can't know for sure whether a particular world view represents the truth doesn't mean that all possibilities are equally likely. The spuriousness Christianity's truth claims can't be obscured by woolly language.

In the end, as Gilbert Harman pointed out decades ago, the real question is which offers the "best explanation" of things. And as there is no general agreement on how to decide which of these explanations is the "best", the argument seems certain to run.

Atheism doesn't attempt to offer an explanation of things. Is there something wrong with saying 'we don't know (yet)'.

They know that they can't prove that God is there, any more than an atheist can prove that there is no God. The simple fact is that all of us, whether Christians or atheists, base our lives on at least some fundamental beliefs that we know we cannot prove, but nevertheless believe to be reliable and significant.

Disingenuously presenting the two stances as if they are equally tenable when they aren't. Occam's Razor, Burden of proof, Pink Unicorn.

We all need to examine our beliefs — especially if we are naive enough to think that we don't have any in the first place. It's one of the best antidotes against the ideological fanaticism that The God Delusion manages to deride and represent at one and the same time.

Another flat, unsupported assertion.

161. Send The God Delusion to your MP

Comment #18927 by bitbutter on January 23, 2007 at 5:14 pm

great initiative, pledged.

162. Noam Chomsky Interview on Faith

Comment #18458 by bitbutter on January 21, 2007 at 2:59 am

chomsky:

What I'm interested in is what [presidents] do, and as far as I know there's no correlation between what they do and any religious beliefs that they either have or are taught to profess

Either I'm misunderstanding or this seems way off. Aren't a number of the current American government's initiatives either inspired by religious belief, or pandering to religious beliefs?