401. Danger ahead - there are good reasons why God created atheists

Comment #2441 by Janus on October 21, 2006 at 9:18 am

Hurray for double-standards! When believers do good, they do good _because_ of religion. But when believers commit evil, religion is being 'used'.

Nonsense. Religion, like all ideologies, is part of a believer's _identity_ if he or she truly believes in it. There's no such thing as 'using' one's religion to do anything, unless you're not a believer in the first place.
True, some ideologies are better than others. Secular humanism, for instance, is vastly superior to any Abrahamic religion.

The rest of this article is mostly nonsense as well.

- If the rabbi had read The God Delusion, he would know that Dawkins doesn't come anywhere close to claiming that getting rid of religion would get rid of all evil (or even the majority of it!).

- No ten commandments? And how is that a bad thing? The commandments are either so completely obvious they're not needed at all, or they're plainly outdated morality by modern standards.

- Using Nietzsche to construct a strawman of atheists as a whole. Puh-leez.

-The supreme virtue of Christianity and Judaism is humility? Only if you look superficially. At the basis of the Abrahamic religions is the belief that the creator of the universe himself actually _cares_ about humans, to the degree that the entire universe is merely a tool to give rise to humanity (at best), or an amusement park (at worst). Judaism is probably the worst offender, as it claims that God went as far as to pick one tiny tribe of desertmen as his Chosen People! The belief is excusable if you lived 4000 years ago, but that any modern adult could not instantly see the sheer arrogance, the incredible simple-mindedness of such a belief is truly staggering (and very depressing).

402. Rachel Maddow Interviews Richard Dawkins

Comment #2223 by Janus on October 19, 2006 at 8:56 pm

That was interesting, different from the interviews we've heard lately.

403. Alan Colmes Interviews Richard Dawkins

Comment #2207 by Janus on October 19, 2006 at 4:53 pm

If I didn't spend so much time at christianforums.com, I probably would have been horrified by the callers' ignorance. Dawkins did well to keep his cool, it showed how much more rational he is than the Christian nutcases.

It's really quite amazing that these people expect Professor Dawkins to explain things like the evolution of sexuality in 30 seconds. It's not only ignorance about evolution itself, it's ignorance about the _scope_ of science as a whole.


Prof. Dawkins, if I may make a suggestion, the next time a religious believer claims that God doesn't need a beginning because he's eternal, or outside of time, or transdimensional, or whatever, why not reply with the following:

"It is blatantly illogical to explain the complexity of the universe by saying it was caused by something even _more_ complex, which God must have been to design the universe. To assert that God is eternal/timeless/etc may explain away His existence _itself_, but not His complexity. The only way to explain complexity is by a gradual process of small steps starting from something fundamentally simple."

Well, or something to that effect, you're much more eloquent than I am. The point I'm trying to make is that practically all Abrahamic religionists don't realize that 'explaining' the _existence_ of God isn't enough, they also have to explain His high degree of organized complexity. They think that explaining the former means explaining the latter. The few who do realize it claim that _God_ is fundamentally simple, which is obviously nonsense if you realize that intelligence, by its very nature, cannot be simple.

While this doesn't disprove that an intelligent designer created _our_ universe, it does disprove the existence of an intelligent super-being who created _everything_. In other words, the best religionists can hope for is a God who is only an intermediate cause, as opposed to the First Cause (much like we humans are the intermediate cause of televisions, for intsance, not their ultimate cause).

- Simon

404. Stephen Colbert Interviews Richard Dawkins

Comment #2049 by Janus on October 18, 2006 at 11:03 am

Phenomenal job, Richard! As many have said, you did as well as anyone (and better than most) who's been on the Colbert Report.

As I've said on a few forums, I was a bit worried that this interview would go very badly, since it's obviously impossible to make well-supported, clearly-explained arguments in such a setting. I also expected you to be so stunned by the sheer inanity of Colbert's questions that it would look as though you were stumped for a few seconds.

But it turns out I needn't have worried in the slightest! _Colbert_ (or rather, his nutty persona) was the one who looked stumped. You had a quick, condensed answer to his every question, and that's the best you or anyone can possibly do under those circumstances.
You've also managed to make a few very important points, such as the fact that natural selection is anything BUT random. That alone must have shocked quite a few Christians.

Most importantly, (and I think you understood this) the Colbert interview was about improving your image in America. As you no doubt know, many if not most Americans who know your name think of you as 'that arrogant, bitter fundamentalist atheist'. I think it's safe to say that almost anyone who's watched the Colbert Show has had that preconception shaken to its core. Very well done.


_Justin Shannon says:_
_Richard says "well where did God come from?" And like most people, Colbert was stumped, and thus took the "easy way" out. However, look at the other side of the debate with the same argument. Well where did that original matter come from to create our universe? Matter cannot be created or destroyed, correct?_

Prof. Dawkins' argument was about complexity, not matter. Some kind of fundamental building blocks of some kind _had_ to pop into existence (or else they've 'always' existed), or else not only the universe but even a hypothetical deity couldn't exist. What needs explaining is organized complexity, such as bacteria, trees, and intelligent forms of life such as us, and this hypothetical deity. Saying that the first human just popped into existence wouldn't satisfy anyone, since the human body's organized complexity is simply too improbably to assemble itself in one single, giant step, and the exact same goes for God. If there IS a God, it must have been 'formed' by a gradual, step-by-step process such as evolution. But then, most people wouldn't call such an entity God. 'Extra-universal alien' might be a better word.

405. D.J. Grothe Interviews Richard Dawkins

Comment #1911 by Janus on October 17, 2006 at 9:34 pm

Agreed, Sri, this is without a doubt the best interview yet. I made some minor criticisms in a comment to another interview recently, but I must say that this one was perfect.

Well, almost perfect. I was surprised to hear Prof. Dawkins say that he didn't know where our so-called 'universal' morals (those morals that influence even religious believers) come from. Dawkins of course knows better than almost anybody else that natural selection has 'gifted' us with empathy and altruism. Society also has its role, as even Christian fundamentalists are influenced by the rest of their society no matter how isolated they are. I haven't read the God Delusion yet (it's on the way!), but I think Dawkins has written about society's moral progress. So, as I said, this was a bit surprising.

Nevertheless, an excellent interview. Keep it up, Professor.

406. Steve Kraske interviews Richard Dawkins

Comment #1785 by Janus on October 16, 2006 at 6:38 pm

A very good performance by prof. Dawkins.

His only flaw, as far as I can tell, is that he tends to spend too much time building the foundation for whatever point he wishes to make, and when the time comes to actually _make_ the point, to draw that final conclusion from the premises, it's usually done in only one or two sentences! I get the impression that it's a habit prof. Dawkins has gotten from communicating so much via writing.

In a book, or even a written interview, these kinds of highly detailed premises are fine, because it's easy, both for the author and the reader, to go back to them to remind themselves where the argument was going, but in a spoken interview, the speaker tends to lose track of the finer points of the argument, and it leads to confusion among those listeners who don't know in advance what point the speaker is trying to make.

Of course, pretty much everyone who frequents this website, and many others who've read prof. Dawkins' books and articles, can often quickly see where an argument is going even if they haven't come across it before, because we have a sense of how prof. Dawkins thinks. But for the sake of the much vaster audience comprised of people who've never head of Dawkins, it might be a good idea to cut down on the lengthy premises, and allocate more time to explaining and expounding on the conclusion(s).

- Janus

407. Misplacing science, displacing God: the fallacies of Dawkinism

Comment #1571 by Janus on October 13, 2006 at 7:51 pm

So many strawmen, mistakes, unsupported assertions, and outright lies that it would likely take more time and words to refute this article in its entirety than it took the author to write it in the first place.

Two sentences in the last paragrah struck me as particularly naive. In it the author apparently seeks to explain his earlier assertion that Dawkins and other atheists don't understand the concept of Christian (or religious?) faith:

"But the act of faith itself - responding to God as loving Creator - is a leap over reason's edge. This does not make it irrational, any more than falling in love is irrational."

I wonder, how many people does the author know who have fallen in love with someone they do not believe exists? The answer is obviously, not a single one. To love someone, you must believe this person exists. To respond to God as a loving creator, you must first believe God exists.
Christians may well think of their faith as a form of love, but this 'faith' is necessarily based on an unsupported belief in God's _existence_. And that is exactly the way Dawkins and other atheists define faith.

To use the author's image, faith isn't a leap over reason's edge. It's a clumsy stumble that leaves the believer exactly where he started.