Dawkins on Hitchens
Dean
Well, to no one's surprise, Richard Dawkins loved Christopher Hitchens' anti-religion book.
I've always been curious if folks like Dawkins have ever considered the possibility that religion is, in fact, an evolutionarily inborn trait and, if so, how futile it would be to try to browbeat people out of it--or why the trait would have developed in the first place. The notion that it's just rumors and myths strikes me as severely lacking (and is probably why I gave up on atheism myself).
Related Posts (on one page):
- Contra Dawkins
- Dawkins on Hitchens
Dawkins is a pioneer in evolutionary psychology and must have considered this possibility.
Another thing I have yet to see the theophobes address is the horrendously high body count stacked up by atheists.
For example, one can make a descent case that rape is an evolutionary inborn trait as well, and it is certainly something we try to discourage through a variety of means.
Now, I don't think that rape is at all like religion, indeed I don't even buy into the concept that religion is a negative effect, but the idea that 'natural' = 'good' has always struck me as very foolish. Mankinds triumphs are based upon overcoming natural limitations of all sorts, using intellect and communication to create methods of advancement that don't rely solely on evolution. I am probably not evolutionary speaking any different from my neo-lithic ancestors, but the social and technoligical framework that has been developed outside of purely biological evolution makes my capabilities far greater then theirs.
Elizabeth -- what they're shouting is not, "It's not true!" They're shouting, "You're so hardwired to believe it, you can't even tell if it's true!" And I think that's a coherent message.
But apparently never curious enough to actually attempt to find out that, yes, they have, at length?
Though things aren't so simple as "an inborn trait that can never ever be altered": it's more like a capacity and an inkling for forming communities and practices around mythical ideas. There's plenty of reason to think that people can be convinced that particular faith beliefs are unjustified, or that believing in unjustified claims willy nilly is a bad idea. Humans are pretty darn complicated.
Of course Dean, no matter what religion you are, you must admit that all the other religions are based on myths and rumors that aren't actually true: and yet tons and tons of people find them exactly as compelling and enlightening and empowering as those beliefs that you hold.
Maybe something to do with....? At least the origins of it. Not that I've any problem with religious beliefs at all, but the possibility is intriguing nonetheless.
I really wish that the current popularity of books discussing religion and atheism would draw forth someone who understands the benefits and comforts religious people derive from their beliefs and is able to take those beliefs seriously and talk about them respectfully *while simultaneously talking about why they're wrong*. I know a lot of atheists that don't think religious beliefs deserve respect, and I understand their point, but from a practical standpoint I can't imagine a derisive and contemptuous approach ever getting us anywhere.
There is a famous quote about confusing reality with... (you name it: facts, science, a computer program, etc.). I work at an college, and earlier today a student asked me about how an equation that models a system (based on a geometric progression) is used when the priniciple term in the system (or the equation) is 1 or more. Science is the common language we use to model reality, it isn't the actual reality. And it doesn't describe EVERYTHING.
Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind. (A. Einstein)
Agreed: but it does pretty handily debunk the "oh, there is just no other explanation for how sincere people could believe all these things unless they are completely true, and the yogi really CAN miraculously live for months without food or water" type arguments.
These things may not be true. Indeed, often they are not. Believing in them is still far preferable to the alternative however.
To only believe in that which is certainly true seems a very small cramped way to live.
Now to the attack. It is very telling of Dawkins' ignorance of the details of religion (not to mention Hitchens' as well) that he cheers Hitchens' gross error in stating that the Koranic punishment for apostasy and thus concluding that it is thus impossible for Muslims to conclude otherwise:
Apparently Dawkins has never read anything by any of these Muslims.
Finally, I must point out one of the things that bothers me the most about one of Dawkins' arguments:
So Dawkins would have you believe that he only believes in things for which there are evidence. But there are somethings we believe in that we cannot directly observe, such as neutrinos, mathematics, and yes, even evolution. If not available to direct observation, how do we know of (or at least come to believe in) their existence? By empirical and/or rational proof. Now, while it might be true that there are some holes in these rational proofs of God's existence, I am pretty sure that none of the arguments would also work to establish the existence of a unicorn or a flying spaghetti-monster.
"Evidence" is a very squishy concept. He does not quite mean "direct evidence"; he can't. So then it is all a matter of what sort of deductive evidence you want to accept.
What he can't accept is that there is an "evolutionary," inborn desire to be able to do whatever you want without guilt. Religions frequently cause guilt because they say some of the things we want to do are wrong. So we write books about how the "real" inborn desire we should be ignoring is the one that tells us to seek truth greater than that produced by our own petty neurons, experiences and sensations and desires.
While it is true that you cannot prove a proposition by reference to the number of people who believe in it, I think there is a valid counter point to be made. If a proposition (or law or custom, or work of art, etc.) is incapable of being proved correct or incorrect (or good or bad, or beautiful or ugly, etc.), the persistence of belief in it across many places and time periods can provide proof in the utility to humans (in terms of survival and even flourishing) of believing in such a proposition. I suppose this sort of perspective is based on the writings of Hayek, who himself derived much of his reasoning from the British common law tradition.
well, natural selection can be tested in certain lab systems, such as placing fast-replicating bacteria under artificial environmental stress. the resistance of some bacterial strains to antibiotics is evidence of this sort of natural selection.
These are things we aspire to, not that we believe are "certainly true". You yourself say that you don't "believe" them!
"To only believe in that which is certainly true seems a very small cramped way to live."
That's not what anyone is advocating. What is being advocated is reasonable _honesty_ about what we know and what we don't know.
I think I understand your last point correctly. You're saying that the theory I propounded is essentially natural selection applied to human beliefs, customs, and institutions. That's correct, and Hayek recognized it as such in his book Law, Legislation, and Liberty. Now, you believe that the theory of natural selection is not falsifiable. Not being an expert on biology, I am not sure how correct you are about that. But I would refer you to the essay "The Two Dogmas of Empiricism" in which Quine uncovers two essential "ill founded" dogmas on which modern empiricism (including, by extension, its requirement of falsifiability) rests. He suggests that general scientic theories are usually overturned, not by a simple falsification, but by a shift that occurs with a reorganization of knowledge that follows a large enough accumulation of new experience:
It's a long essay, but well worth the read. It certainly punctures, with a rather sharp and logical sword, a number of the assumptions upon which scientific reductionism is founded.
Saying one thing and then another slightly different thing is a bait and switch tactic. First you are talking about Dawkins saying that evidence is important, but then you try to contrast this with this "observe" and you even seem to mean this in the sense of "see with eyeballs." This is not a contradiction you are pointing out, it's you being confused.
Eyewitness watching things is not particularly special in science: in fact, it's not even close to the most reliable methods of establishing evidential validity. "Observation" isn't even the step in the scientific process most people think it is ("observation is the step in which we basically take stock of the question or phenomenon we want to examine, not HOW we examine it!)
This obsession with eyeballs seems to be a common creationist misconception, i.e. "how can you know that the earth is old, WERE YOU THERE?" To which the best answer is "Yes, I WAS there: how can you claim I wasn't, WERE YOU THERE??"
"the persistence of belief in it across many places and time periods can provide proof in the utility to humans (in terms of survival and even flourishing) of believing in such a proposition. "
This is true, but as even you yourself note, sort of irrelevant to the question of empiricism.
Vic, I only meant that it would be a mistake to think that Dawkins only believed in things directly evident to the senses. And that's true, since he included electons along with trombones and pelicans in his list of things believed in with proof. That is, I was trying to show that Dawkins' view of evidence was more expansive than might be supposed, and most probably includes the kind of logical proofs that are used in mathematics as well as in establishing the necessity of God's existence.
thusimpossible for Muslims to conclude otherwise" (I left out the bolded words).Vic,
Can you point out where Dawkins (or Hitchens for that matter) claims that he has no problem with people believing in religions as long as they recognize the possibility their beliefs might be wrong? I think Dawkins goes much farther than that and says people shouldn't believe in religions at all. But of course I could be wrong ;)
Than perhaps you supposed, but perfectly conventional as far as science and empiricism go.
"and most probably includes the kind of logical proofs that are used in mathematics as well as in establishing the necessity of God's existence."
Mathematical proofs are deductive knowledge about math itself. Proofs of God's existence are legitimate attempts to establish knowledge, and I don't see anywhere that Dawkins says otherwise, but of course as with any argument, it depends on whether you think those arguments are convincing.
I don't. Comparing them to empirical evidence for, say, evolution or electrons or neutrinos simply isn't comparable in terms of how convincing the evidence is.
"Can you point out where Dawkins (or Hitchens for that matter) claims that he has no problem with people believing in religions as long as they recognize the possibility their beliefs might be wrong?"
I'm not sure what you mean. I think these guys would argue against any claims and arguments they think are flawed or unjustified, and they have argued that factualized faith is wrong and should not be legitimated. Certainly Dawkins does think that most religious beliefs are unjustified and argues against them. I'm not sure what you mean by "no problem" though: none of these guys have done anything more than arguing and criticizing: it's not like they have called for not living amongst religious people or something. If you've ever seen Dawkins in interviews and discussions with fellow religious academics, he's pretty unfailingly polite on a personal level even if he does think their beliefs are silly or unjustified.
He implied there was as much evidence for God's existence as there is for "unicorns," "leprechauns," "Thor with his hammer," for "Ganesh the elephant god," implying he doesn't seriously consider the rational proofs of God's existence, which I have argued (and still do) are of a similar nature to proofs in mathematics. As I said before, there might be some imperfections in these proofs, but to go as far as to suggest that there is as little proof for the existence of God as there is for unicorns is just silly in my opinion.
I was responding to your response to Dave Justus, who suggested we may be justified in having faith in some things we cannot prove:
You suggested that Dawkins did not take issue with such a statement
But I can change my words "have a problem with" to "argue against." My question is, does Dawkins argue against having faith in God, which I take to be something different from claiming that it is proven that God exists. I take the answer to be "yes." That is, I think Dawkins argues, contra Dave Justus, that we should not believe in propositions of which we cannot verify the "truthiness."
I don't get your point: yes, in form, ATTEMPT to prove things in such a way is legitimate, but that doesn't mean that one has to agree they are successful in practice. Dawkins doesn't disregard the attempts: he argues specifically why he thinks they are bunk in practice.
"As I said before, there might be some imperfections in these proofs, but to go as far as to suggest that there is as little proof for the existence of God as there is for unicorns is just silly in my opinion. "
Well, that is indeed your opinion. Not everyone shares it. Some people think there is conclusive proof of Bigfoot: that doesn't mean that their evidence is in the least convincing or that everyone must agree it is so.
"My question is, does Dawkins argue against having faith in God, which I take to be something different from claiming that it is proven that God exists."
Well, in practice, others don't make that distinction, especially when people with faith beliefs so often talk as if they were simply obvious facts. And I agree that it's quite clear that Dawkins and Harris are arguing that faith period is a bad idea, not something to encourage or give special respect to (I'm not aware of them doing arguing that anyone should do anything about it other than try to argue people away from doing so).
I think you may have not gotten what I was responding to in Dave's post. I objected to the idea that rejecting faith means not "believing" in the sorts of things he had just listed: i.e. having hope, being passionate about love, caring about things, etc.
But if we reject faith, doesn't that include not only faith in God but also faith in love? I thought Dave was trying to draw an analogy between the two types of faith.
And CONSERVAPEDIA on evolution? Quoting Popper but then not quoting him later saying that he was wrong: that he had been misinformed? Is that really the sort of dishonest scholarship you want to celebrate and recommend?
If so, then it was a false one: based on the rhetorical fallacy of equivocation (i.e. using two different meanings of a word by treating them logically as if they were the same usage).
Good Shabbos!
One is faith in the sense that you believe something to be true in a factual matter even though you don't have a reason to believe it. The other is faith in the sense that you trust or find great value or have conviction in the character of something or someone.
For instance, when someone says that they have faith that God exists, they really mean that this is a true fact about the world. When someone has faith in love, though, they aren't making a statement about over whether love exists or not, but rather that they have come to trust love as a guide in relationships, that they value love over other things, etc. This trust is more like an expression of loyalty that it is a claim of something being factually true or false. As was said, even people with the most passionate faith in love don't mean that they are claiming that love always works out. They just trust it more than anything else.
No one is suggesting that the latter sense of word is bad.
If it were easily grasped and "morals" was not used as a tenuous rationale for their belief then Dawkins and Hitchens would not publish writings of this nature because people would do the "Christian" thing and not persecute Atheists for "not believing". This whole genre of writing and philosophy has spawned from the puritanical cult mentality that sprang forth from many sects of the Christian religion. A mentality that, if Christ existed I am sure he would be ashamed of. I think he needs to come back and show people that "fisher of men" concept again because the church is sure losing a lot of men.
All that said, my only hang up with Dawkins is he claims to be able to use science to disprove the existence of God. This is as absurd as the concept that you can use science to prove God exists. You cannot prove a conclusion of faith with science of any sort. Philosophy, Science, and Faith are three separate modes of human reason and they do not mix well. Philosophy is logic in essence, and the engineering of concepts which are tested for contradiction and such. In other words, "paper drafted". Science is the formation of conclusions based on observations and data. The testing of hypotheses. Faith is believing that your crack head cousin, who has never been reliable in his life, will take your 1000 dollars you wired him and by the medicine that will save your baby because he is the only one who can get it and he is your only hope. Science would say the conclusion that you would get that medicine is ill-conceived. However, your cousin did get the medicine. The only reason you gave him that money was faith and you have no other rationale for it. Thus, Dawkins is an asshole when he believes that science has anything to do with religion. Other than that I like him but that one point really irritates me. Otherwise, I would be surprised if the number of Atheists does not grow in the passing years for the simple fact that articles of faith no longer provide anything fruitful for most individuals. The fact they exist is because people are afraid, much like terrorism. Until religion finds it's center and refuses to condemn people who did little, and applaud actions like child molestation by the powerful in the church, then there is no sane rationale for religion by the normal person and fear only works for so long. Eventually, people are going to be more afraid of the church then they God they say exists and numbers of the "faithful" will plummet and people like Dawkins will thrive.
*SHRUG*
To move that code from the heavens and to the self makes the code subjective and, ultimately, ignorable. You are no better than I and what you say is right or wrong is no better than what I say is right or wrong because we're both human and therefore equal.
Until one removes himself from the center of his universe God cannot ever be an option.
Dawkins, Hitchens, and those that agree with them all suffer from that most ancient of sins: Pride.
As I've said before, I can respect agnostics. I have no respect and must simply shake my head at atheists. The systems they so worship (and yes, it is worship) themselves point to this one inescapable fact: They can never know for sure and to say they do removes them from science and into the realm they say is counter from that field - faith.
I count Dawkins, Hitchens and those like them amongst the religious faithful. It's the religion of self. They worship themselves and their on mental machinations. They are their own gods. Capable of no miracles, feats, or sound moral proclamations than anyone else on the planet.
I hope their god doesn't let them down.
That said, however, I have noticed that these two, along was Samuel Harris, err in three respects in their assault on religion.
First, they don't necessarily get to the core issue of whether a supreme being — be it a god, a divine watchmaker, a flying spaghetti monster, or a guy named Lou — really exists. They base a great deal of their arguments on the misbehavior of religions and the religious. This line argues against the inherent goodness of organized religion, but does not truly assault the supernatural.
Second, they almost deliberately take a one-dimensional approach to religious doctrine. In Letter to a Christian Nation, Sam Harris, in particular, takes a generalized figures about religious belief, links them to extremist theories — like, say, young-Earth creationism — then attempts to link all religious individuals to these theories. They also appear indifferent to doctrinal innovations, insisting that a person who is a modern Christian must also bear responsibility for outmoded biblical pronouncements on slavery, mixing fabrics, and dowries.
Finally, they tend to discount the good deeds that the religious commit, wheter you're talking about Martin Luther King Jr. or Mother Teresa. While I have seen a solid argument that these good deeds can be anchored in individual humanism rather than in any religious ideology, it strikes me that if you're going to assess religion as a humen social or political force, you have to examine both the good and the bad.
There actually is a school of thought that takes a middle ground, BTW. It's referenced in this op-ed from USA Today. Also of interest is this article from the New Yorker, which discusses the atheists' works in a social and historical context.
—|PW|—
PS. A theological question: If God is an inerrant creator, why did He allow shoelaces?
I do take exception to this comment from Kevin D. I'm an atheist myself, though I don't quite practice it with the evangelical fervor of some of the Dawkinses and Hitcenses of the world. While I certainly went through a period where I considered myself superior to those who are religious, my own atheism now is not based on worshipping myself, as Kevin puts it, but on something different.
I've actually given a lot of thought to religion, to the world around me, to people, and to concepts such as good, evil, and the supernatural. My conclusion is not that I should worship myself, or even that I should worship anything. Rather, I believe, based on the evidence I have seen, that the existence of any supernatural entity -- whether you term it God, Yahweh, Jehovah, or anything else -- is unlikely. And because I find such a thing unlikely, I choose not to believe in a god.
That said, I really don't have a beef with the religious these days. Strangers who try to convert me -- and there have been a few -- get the cold shoulder. Friends who do the same receive a more polite form of theological fencing in which I try not to offend them, but still hold firm to my principles.
Is this worship of the self? Some hedonistic desire to be free of morals and rules? Hardly. It's just my own belief system, and I find that it explains the universe quite well -- for me, at least. And what other people believe is generally of little concern to me.
But, partly to pile some fuel on these theological fire, I wish to put forward one more thesis I have entertained on occasion. When one sees the amount of evil in the world and the harm inflicted, seemingly at random, by nature and by humans, is it not possible to conclude that if there is a god, that that god is evil?
--|PW|--
"These are things we aspire to, not that we believe are "certainly true". You yourself say that you don't "believe" them!"
I certainly did not say that. I said that I choose to believe them even if they may not be true.
It seems to me that the question 'will this love I an another person feel for each other last?' is indeed a question about fact. Either it will, or it will not. Our evidence for either proposition is generally weak, and statistically we would probably be forced to say that the best guess we could make is that it won't.
I don't see belief in God as being hugely different from belief in love, or the other examples that I mentioned. The only difference between the two that I see is that you have chosen to believe in one and not the other. Nothing wrong with that, but it doesn't necessarily tell us much at all about the difference between the two of them.
Unfortunately neither Dawkins nor Hitchens fall into that category yet their words serve the moment. Their writings will be old forgotten newpapers and fishwrap.
Yet, individuals like, Augustine, or Plato, and other great teachers religious or not will always be relevant.
Simply put, there will always be those who point the way.
-PW-
Asking what G-D is like is like asking what the unconscious is like. It cannot be approached head-on through the ego, nor via a flat plane of mere rational thought.
Kandinsky’s art attempts to present implicate reality beneath reality, i.e. that out of which explicate reality emerges. Notice he doesn’t destroy rational thought. He uses his beingness and his artistry to present a message that doesn't require a definition. .
The question is:
Does he point to any truths beyond rational thinking ?
Or are there any truths beyond rational thought ?
I think the basic premise is that evolution could be falsifiable if only we the technological means to test it. the claim that is equivalent to the thesis that "there is a unicorn in this room which will escape all methods of detection" is false, because evolution can be detected.
the basic idea behind the scientific theory is that there is a set of data including the fossil record, genomes (which feed into biological classification trees), as well as our own observations of those few model systems with time scales on the human level (bacterial and viral growth). even birth itself is a piece of data because of what we know happens with genes mixing between parents, and occasionally mutating or yielding unexpected results. thus, with all of this data, an explanation must be arrived at which is most parsimonious and most in accord with the preponderance of the data. to the current scientific community that is evolution. it presents a cohesive storyline which fits the data, and could be falsified given significantly advanced experimental protocol. for example, if there were a bacterium which required water to live, one could place it in a closed system and over an appropriate time scale (probably tens to hundreds of years but that is just a guess), slowly reduce the amount of water available to that bacterium, see if any new species emerge which can handle an arid environment.
saying no one has done such an experiment is one thing, saying it could not be done is quite another. but my field is physics, and i only dabble in biology, so i'm sure there are others who could correct me if i'm mistaken.
i also note another flaw in the conservapedia article where they state that the existence of wheels or magnets in nature falsifies evolution, since such structures would be "useless until perfect." this is untrue. evolution does not select for or against useless attributes. it only selects against actively disadvantageous attributes. thus it is fully within the realm of evolutionary theory for a bacterium to contain a small deposit of iron that is useless, and eventually develop a use for it that is advantageous, since having the iron in the first place does no harm to the bacterium even if it lays unused. since some bacteria do use iron deposits to align themselves with the earth's magnetic field and thus have some limited navigational ability, it is reasonable to suggest that such an event could occur. it is perhaps true to say that one could never re-create THAT EXACT EVOLUTIONARY SITUATION, as the bacterium evolved well before humans, but this is simple sophistry. little data in biology is strictly repeatable because living organisms do not obey deterministic equations. everything is stochastic and all data must be viewed within the context of a probabilistic universe.
in any case this is all quite far afield, because to my mind one's position on evolution has no bearing on their religious conviction or lack thereof. even if it were true that humans have an inborn proclivity towards organized religion, that doesn't mean that the religion is wrong.
Maybe the one thought in there that I can agree with is that it does make for a great story. The modern creation myth. But it clearly doesn't cohesively match the data, as even many ID critics are forced to admit these days. We haven't a clue how life and it's tremendous disparity came to be. But Darwinian evolution can explain some of the diversity within the disparity. Darwinian evolution happens, but what does it explain? That's where the dispute is at.
How convenient. If what I want to be considered "science" can't meet the guidelines, it must be granted a pass. But if what I don't want to be considered science can't meet the guidelines, that's just proof that it isn't science. That seems to describe the arguments of a good segment of the Darwinian establishment. If that persuades you, that's OK by me. For me, it just confirms the lack of intellectual underpinnings.
So if you feel embarrassed, like Vic, to see somebody else peeking out from underneath the intellectual burka that you feel most comfortable in, don't look. But others will continue to.
--|PW|--
If you argue that the practice of a thing is bunk, then obviously you disregard the attempt. Attempts are conducted through methods of practice. There's no such thing as the attempt without the method of practice.
All Dawkins has to do is tell everyone else, including you and I, how to go about it the right way, then we can all make the attempt the right way. It'll be easy, since he already knows all the wrong ways, he can just instruct us in the right. That's simple enough even for a modern scientist.
So have him explain the right way to go about these things to you, then you explain it to us, then we can all run our own tests based on this conclusive methodology to verify how right those methods of practice are. Then we'll all know what you guys know.
We'll be waiting.
And so will science.
You got a real chance to prove something big here. So best get cracking. Your place in history is calling.
By the way, and this is just totally my opinion, it ain't a fact like what you're talkin 'bout, but when you do become famous for proving to everybody else what the truth really is, and how you can get there from here, demand at least ten percent up front. Sure, royalties really stack up over time, I'll grant ya that, but you'll wanna make sure you get your cut before they plant ya. 5% of the the forever Truth about everything doesn't do a man much good if he's already too dead to spend it.
This is exactly the type of diatribe I expect from the blindly devout. The problem with this sort of diatribe is that it uses the logic that morals come from God and the lack of belief in a God is a lack of morals. Self worship? Atheism is the lack of worship. This would include the self. Saying you believe in a God is faith. Saying you absolutely do not believe in a God is not science, it is a lack of faith for your supreme being. That is it. It could not be any simpler yet for some reason "lack of faith" is construed as "believing only in science" by many of the faithful. This logic compounds on itself. "Science" becomes evil and people start saying the Earth is 4000 years old. That's when all of the circular logic starts to take hold and Kansas cuts evolution from their curriculum.
Look, Atheists do not worship themselves anymore than you worship them. This idea os self worship comes from the circular logic that; since Atheists don't worship God, and people innately are driven to worship something, then they obviously worship themselves!! People are not innately driven to be religious. They are also not innately driven to indiscriminately kill or be evil. Why would I say this? Because if that were the case, we would have died out long before we even had the chance to create the doctrines and scripts that people say are the divine word of God. People are not innately religious. They are innately wired to live in co-operative groups however.
Pride? What is prideful about believing something does not exist? Saying that it is pride is like saying that is it prideful to believe that monsters do not live in your closet.
It matters not. I believe in the invisible pink unicorn and nothing you can say will sway my faith that; even though it is invisible, it is pink. And the science that; since I cannot see it I cannot disprove it's existence.
umm...i'm not sure what to say to that. if you don't think probability is science then i don't know what to tell you. the entire underpinning of a quantum universe is that everything has an associated probability, and that when we make a measurement we are merely looking at one of many possible realizations. thus, the correct questions to be asked are what are the most likely realizations, what is the average value? that's science, i'm sorry if it's confusing to you.
Putting aside the fact that your claims about the nature of nature are anything but science, even if I grant you those assertions, Darwinian evolution fails miserably.
The probability arguments are a failed endeavor. And that's been known for a long time. Only recently have the ID proponents provided cover for skeptics challenging NeoDarwinism and its intellectual cousins. Stuart Kauffman, Marc Kirschner , and John Gerhart, amongst others, are venturing forth to assert that the Darwinian tale doesn't explain the life we see around us. We are missing some other important component. Why people are so afraid that our youth should learn of this is beyond me.
Your assertion that Darwinian evolution is compatible with unselected construction of key components is both technically true, and a dager through the heart of the appeal of Darwin's theory. If we can build complex systems without natural selection, who needs Darwinism?
As Dawkins said, it doesn't matter to him if what you're proposing is a theistic miracle, or a materialist miracle, a miracle is still a miracle.
Explain, please??
like I said, if you don't think that science in general and biology in particular is probabilistic then i can't help you. sorry to cut off the debate but you don't seem open to rational argument here.
It was just a thought experiment, searching for a response. I'll contact the author for reprimand.
Sorry, it wasn't a serious comment.
In response to your question:
...is it not possible to conclude that if there is a god, that that god is evil."
Strictly speaking, the answer is no. A thing is called evil if it lacks a perfection it ought to have...evil then is a privation and has no formal cause and cannot then be a first cause. All this stuff requires a lot of mental unpacking for which I am not prepared to deal with here.
You were well advised to use small case letters here, because the statement cannot apply to God (and a while back we had this discussion here -- to people who believe in God, it is offensive to use lower-case to refer to Him). God, as conceived by everyone who believes in Him (and thus, this is the only definition that matters if you want to talk about something meaningful), is the Creator, and the Source of life in this universe. It is axiomatic that He cannot be evil, because evil can only be judged in terms of a universe that God has put in place. Man cannot stand outside of God;s universe to judge Him (see the Book of Job); man's very faculty to judge good and evil, in fact, are placed there by God.
You may not "believe" this, but this is the definition of the God of Judaism and Christianity, Who is, for all practical purposes, the God you're carping about. So He cannot be evil. Maybe some "god" is -- indeed, evidently many of them were -- but who cares?
Don't holler at me, I only quoted the other person, and in fact didn't use the G-d word in my explanation.
With respect to evil as a privation, I am merely engaging in some Thomas Acquinas language, he who has delved into the matter to a degree.
So here we are on the internet looking a empty comboxes on blank screens attempting to explain something. One person is a professed atheist, another a former student of jesuit education and another, yourself.
So you ask:
"Maybe some "god" is -- indeed, evidently many of them were -- but who cares ?"
I suspect you answered your own question by simply commenting.
No one cares about straw-man "gods" who might be "evil," is my point. God, however, is a topic we can discuss. And, as I said, He cannot be evil.
People make the mistake of thinking that if God doesn't do what they want, they are right and He is evil. Young children do this with their parents, too.
But I did think you were talking to me when your brought up the Buicks. Its clearer, now.
So parents should tell their kids, evil is a privation and toss in a little Thomas Aquinas metaphysics and everyone will still be friends. That's my plan.
--|PW|--
Yes Theodicy is the most common practice in America next to being a follower with no spine. Theodicy is not the questioning of the goodness of God, but rather the pointless rationalizations made to justify why a benevolent being would allow his creations to suffer and indeed even cause their suffering. People say it is good if it created us. People create children. If people create a child and offer them no protection, abuse them or beat them, abandon them to suffer the harsh lessons of reality with no guidance, and punish the child for reasons they do not know. Imagine the child doing some random activity and the parents knock a lamp over and break the child's arm. The child cries and asks why and the answer "it is my will". Are these people good? By the logic presented here I guess they are.
Of course we all lose our tempers now and then. Dean freely admits to being imperfect in this regard, which is why regulars to this establishment will generally be cut more slack than people who we don't know very well.
Still: behave like an adult, or go find somewhere else to play. Thanks.