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Is Richard Dawkins a good scientist?
- Thread starter paarsurrey
- Start date
Photonic
Ad astra!
....
I don't even know where to start. I think I'll let it be lol
There are no words for this.
McBell
Unbound
So you have been reduced to nothing more than copy/pasting the exact same post into multiple threads?
jarofthoughts
Empirical Curmudgeon
Storm
ThrUU the Looking Glass
I don't speak French or trust online translation. In English please?Je n'ai pas besoin de cette hypothèse.
Blind guess response to winking smiley: You're welcome.
jarofthoughts
Empirical Curmudgeon
Storm
ThrUU the Looking Glass
Oh, gotcha."I have no need of that hypothesis."
- Pierre-Simon Laplace
I'm seriously undercaffeinated, so forgive me if the following clarification is an gigantic case of 'well duh, Captain Obvious,' but I was mocking the idea that 'you can't be a good scientist without God in the equation.'
I just love how the English language lends itself to pretentiously expressing falsehoods.
Storm
ThrUU the Looking Glass
I really don't think you can blame English, or any other language for pretentious liars. That makes about as much sense as blaming atheism for gulags, or religion for suicide bombers.
PolyHedral
Superabacus Mystic
In natural, non-arbitrary units, the speed of light is 1, and therefore can be dropped from the equations. It's quite likely that Einstein was using such units in the original proof of his formula.
otokage007
Well-Known Member
I thought it was pretty clear and worldwide known that:
E=MC^2 means Emancipation = Mariah Carey ^2
E=MC^2 means Emancipation = Mariah Carey ^2
...
I was responding to your assertion that context was not important, and giving you examples why you are wrong. Care to go back and actually address that rather than expressing your outrage that I was "manufacturing reality" when I gave a hypothetical example?
jarofthoughts
Empirical Curmudgeon
Last edited:
work in progress
Well-Known Member
From the pov of a former atheist activist...but still an atheist, the attempts by those like Dawkins, Harris etc. who are attempting to build atheist movements around an atheistic humanist philosophy, are either unable or unwilling to acknowledge that they can't derive morals and ethics from a purely scientific process. To me, the faith in scientific triumphalism, along with the attached faith in techno-optimism to provide a future secular paradise on Earth, are indications that secular humanism is just as faith-based as any religious creed! They just aren't willing or able to admit it.
So, my foundational premise is a full embrace of nihilism because I don't believe that either religiously based moral systems or the new, supposedly scientifically based systems like Harris claims to have in his new book, can provide anything absolute to say about morality and ethics.
There are some clearly defined norms that can be applied, and that most people follow without giving much thought, because we are basically social animals, and we have had thousands of years of living in small, family groups to reinforce those social norms. So, murder and theft are bad, but the challenge for the last 6000 or so years has been how do we apply these principles to strangers! Religion tries to do this with varying degrees of success, while today's new atheists usually mouth platitudes about universal concern for others, but don't have any rituals or enforceable rules to make those principles apply as more than slogans.
So, the argument of Dawkins that religious beliefs invariably lead to harmful consequences and the unproven and unprovable assumption that they will be happier and better citizens after being freed of the religion viruses is garbage, and even a faith-based assumption coming out of the science and faith in progress that is the core of Dawkins's pseudo-religion.
When it comes to morality and ethics, we can only judge a moral system by how it is applied by the people who believe it and claim to be following it. Paraphrasing - there is a verse in the Bible that goes something like:"by their fruits, ye shall know them." And that makes the point as clear as can be that issues of ethics have little or nothing to do with how closely ancient religious texts adhere to scientific or historical accuracy. If a religion is really working for people, there will be indications that they are happier, have greater personal satisfaction and act better towards others than they did before. So, the record of the world's major religions is a spotty one, with both good and bad coming out of them. And, any religion that is really trying to be a force for good in the world will be progressive - in the sense that the religious leaders have to climb down from their absolute divine truth pedestal when necessary, and make a few adjustments or alterations when circumstances on the ground demand it.
A good example of where a religion needs to move the goalposts in recent years is how they deal with homosexuals within their groups. The consensus of scientific evidence over the last at least 30 years, is that sexual orientation follows a spectrum of sexual preference, and males especially, are almost certainly completely unable to alter sexual orientation later in life. So, all the fundamentalists are doing with their insistence that everyone has to be 100% heterosexual, is spreading misery and persecution, and what they offer as help - gay deconversion therapies, have been completely discredited as having no merits and only causing more personal turmoil for young gays in their congregations. So, this would be another one of those social issues, like race, women's rights etc., where fundamentalists will have to show some "relativism" themselves....whether or not they want to call it such. I don't care if they say it was a mistake, or they read their bibles wrong, or they were on the right side of history all along....whatever the excuse is, as long as they get on the right side of the issue, that's all that counts. And then it's on to the job of pushing back against the forces of darkness these days that are causing people and nations to become more hostile and insular, and reverse this suicidal trend and get back to universalism, and this time include the wellbeing of all life in the biosphere that the human race depends on for its own survival. Any religion that can advance these principles is alright in my book, regardless of what their doctrinal beliefs are.
Storm
ThrUU the Looking Glass
Nah. Never blame yourself for my coffee zombie ineptitude.
1robin
Christian/Baptist
That is very well said and I agree. I will add that if your system eliminates God and adopts one that can't produce morality then you have also eliminated the good morals and logical foundation for them at the same time. For example Stalin might have relented on his atrocities if he had a world view that included the sanctity of life. If Hitler had rejected evolutionary implications concerning race and adopted that all men are created equal then 50 million people would have survived. If southern planters had acted on the parts of their faith that declared that men have worth and dignity then maybe slavery would have never been practiced then. One even attempted to do so but was overruled. It was Jefferson and he originally freed all the slaves in the first draft of the declaration of independence. Even a morally neutral system results in moral nightmares if it supplants a true moral foundation for benevolence and justice.
What can be more absolute than an omnipotent God's moral requirements. There is no greater foundation for morality even possible. Of course application and recognition is a different matter entirely.
Murder is not actually bad without God it is simply not preferred. In our world we need justification for stopping Hitler's and Stalin's. Religion provides the only foundation that meets that need.
It is truly refreshing to debate someone who understands the issues. However society desperately needs a moral system that can't be found without God so what would you do?
That is true to a great extent but as has happened many times in the past. Every religion has been hijacked by tyrants who have misapplied it's teachings. They are who most critics use as examples of how religion is bad when the opposite should be the case. If you wish to evaluate a teacher do so by his committed students not his rebellious malcontents. It is the Christian hospitals, soup kitchens, and adoption agencies that reveal Christ not the crusades or the conquistadors.
No I disagree with this to an extent. If as we have Islam which makes many statements that suggest violence is justified, Christianity that states unjustified violence is wrong and violence in general should be resisted, and modern (Humanistic/relativistic/nihilism) that says abortion is fine and killing convicted murderers is wrong. How is the issue settled if you believe that a religions verification of its source and legitimacy is not reliable or thought important. I believe the Bible is the word of God and that means the other two choices are wrong. How could anyone along your lines make that choice which must be made? This is getting too long it will be continued.
Until I was convinced of this I do not believe that marriage (a holy institution) should be allowed for homosexuals. Beyond that the Bible does not require me to act further beyond my own behavior.
Again without belief in your premise I still consider it a sin but I also believe that all Christians sin. I think they can be Christians and I do believe they are free from my judgment apart from what I said above. In other words regardless of whether goal posts are moved the impact is extremely small.
I think in summary that you believe religion as valid a foundation for morals as any. However you believe that they should be pliable and adapt to new dichotomies or discovery. That is where the legitimacy of the religion comes in. If true then God is the arbiter of what is moral not our poor efforts at science and psychology. I believe God has changed many requirements over time. (Compare Leviticus to the Gospels). He has very good reasons for that and his requirements are both just and absolute. If I grant that you do not believe this then your statements are very logical and display a clear grasp of the issues. The difference is always in Satan's first lie to man. DID GOD REALLY SAY __________?
1robin
Christian/Baptist
I didn't say that context was not important. I said in the case of many statements context is irrelevant because it can't say anything but what it says. I do not remember if it was you but someone said they could not find the context but had invented one anyway that they thought would soften what he said. They did not realise that it didn't change the statement at all. That statement speaks for its self. It is accurate and does not prove evolution is false. It simply accurately says what evolution alone implies. In short I do not think any likely context (I know his religous debate work well) that he could have possibly used would have changed the statements implications.
1. His statement alone is complete, true, and does not require a context.
2. His statement like many would not be substantially altered by including any likely context.
3. His statement is used countless times in the same context and never to my knowledge in any other.
There fore it is very reasonable to believe it means what it says.
work in progress
Well-Known Member
The problem to me is that God, and the things that God wants, are communicated to people through the voice of people claiming to be prophets, and through the written words that are claimed to be from God by a vast, competing group of religious adherents. The problem for Christians claiming that their system can provide the answers for all moral and ethical dilemmas is that much, if not most of the Old Testament, derived from Judaism, has to be written off because (to put it charitably, only in a few later books did any prophets show any universal concern for others. To put it bluntly, if you try to find ways to justify killing of men, women and children, and plundering their wealth, and even in a few cases - sanctioning sexual slavery, then you can't hold up your Bible as being the timeless advocate for the sanctity of life.
But, even if he did; if he decided that the ends justify the means as our leaders are doing today with the so called War On Terror, then claiming to value the sanctity of life wouldn't have helped much! Most of the modern day conservative Christians wear the figleaf of opposition to abortion as their claim, while they argue out of the other side of their mouths for more aggressive military incursions abroad, extra-judicial killings, and speeding up the judicial process to get death row convicts executed.
No, that's not really the problem with Hitler at all! I don't know whether Hitler was a social darwinist....maybe he was, but then, so is Paul Ryan today by the same measure. What grinds my gears about historical revisionism is that Hitler was not created in a vacuum, and he did not act alone! If the German population and Christian church teaching for centuries had no advocated something similar to what Hitler tried to make a reality, the Holocaust would never have happened.
But what historical revisionists have done since the end of WWII is to ignore the role that the Catholic and Lutheran tradition of antisemitism played in Hitler's desire to remove and then to eradicate Jews. Martin Luther wrote a book several centuries ago which greatly influenced Hitler, according to his own writing in Mein Kampf, that advocated burning down all of the synagogues in Europe, and ethnically cleansing Jews from Christian territories, and killing those who remained behind for whatever reasons. The Catholic Church, up until very recent times, had a longstanding tradition that Jews were subject to particular scorn beyond other non-Catholics and even non-Christians, because they were "Christ-killers." Traditional Catholic theology of the Passion of Christ formed the basis of the Oberammergau -- a passion play that has been acted out in a southern German city for 300 or 400 years....and generates controversy every Christmas season nowadays because of the Christ-killer reference in the story.
So, if Hitler had accepted that all men (and women) are equal, it would more likely come from an understanding of evolution and common origins, than it would have from traditional Christian theology that tried to eradicate Jews, and considered darker races as inferior, claiming that they bore "the mark of Cain", and in some versions - the mark of Noah's cursed son - Ham.
And speaking of "the mark of Cain!" This is the problem with using the Bible as the textbook for morality and ethics....it's the great big book of multiple choice. The southern plantations originally began by using English and Dutch indentured servants or debt bondsmen as their source of cheap, menial labor. Under the deal, the debtors had the means to buy their freedom after several or many years of unpaid work in the fields. But, the prospect of eventual freedom made this slave labor force one that was easy to manage and control for the owners, and if and when the debtors were freed, they could blend in to colonial society because they were from the same race and culture. So why did the plantation owners turn to importing African slaves if they had all these advantages? One big reason - malaria! Indentured servants brought over from England and Holland in the 1600's to work the new plantations, came from lowland marsh areas where malaria had already spread, and was running rampant in the population. Malaria was also lethal for Northern Europeans, while Africans had developed a limited immunity to the disease and capacity to live with it.
So, American plantation owners needed cheap labor, and Africans became the preferred source for free labor. But, racial and cultural barriers meant they did not want them integrated into the white population. So, some contrivance had to be found to justify a life of slavery, and rule out race-mixing or any chance that they would advance their station in life....and they found all of the justification they needed right in their own Bibles! They could take the story of Noah's cursed son- Ham, and use that to justify everything from enslaving darker races to anti-miscegenation laws right up to the 1960's.
And, it needs to be set straight that the primal force behind ending slavery was not the Anabaptists or John Brown, or any other believers in universal brotherhood! It was the simple bread and butter issues of jobs and the value of work; because the industrializing Northern states viewed competition with the slave-owning, almost feudalistic South in much the same way we view losing jobs and closing factories to the outsourcing of manufacturing to places in the world with the equivalent of slave labor today.
Lincoln and the Northerners didn't demand the abolition of slavery because they read their Bibles for the first time, and decided that blacks should be freed and treated equally! No, on the contrary, many Northerners had a lower opinion of African blacks than the slave owners themselves. They just did not want to compete against slave labor, and wanted all of the Africans shipped back to Africa after the Civil War. Just because the Abolitionists found useful Bible verses for their strategies, does not mean that most or even the majority did it with pure intentions!
So far, I have been trying to demonstrate that Christianity's views on God and man have changed through the course of history, often motivated by circumstantial needs of a particular time and place. Christians living a hundred, two hundred or three hundred years ago, did not share a lot of what modern day Christians (liberals and conservatives) believe about their religion. Even if we go back more than 50 years ago, we would find that fundamentalist Christians had a completely opposite view of money and wealth and those possessing wealth, than the modern day fundamentalist preachers and followers do. Today's fundamentalists are alot like Paul Ryan....who can't seem to distinguish between the writings of Ayn Rand and Jesus Christ! They are pure social darwinists who believe that markets, not governments, should decide economic policy issues, and wealth is a sign of blessings from God, rather than the historical view of the wealthy as being unspiritual hedonists, only concerned with the material things of this world. There is even a strong case to make that fundamentalists in America have become so hyper-nationalistic with their obsession of their nation being "exceptional" and chosen for divine purpose, that they are creating their own, specifically American religion.