Dawkin's God Delusion

[finlma]

(This has just been my experience of school. I apologise if anyone else has had children in schools where religion is compulsory. But I doubt such a place exists)

95% of primary schools in Ireland are Catholic and teaching religion is enforced. Its not that easy to opt out.

[Lionel Ritchie]

Woo! Check out the big brain on SoS.

The difference is this; Theology is not akin to astrology or the exegesis of Harry Potter novels.

Subjective. But go on...

... it is a study undertaken by serious people.

Serious or no -they're still barking up the wrong tree.

If people you respect in one area also appear to have a deep interest in something else, then it would seem to be the least one could do to pay the tribute of respecting that pursuit as sincere and un- ephemeral.

Respect or no -they're still barking up the wrong tree.

Anyone who reads Augustine or Origen or Aquinas - or more modern philosophers of religion such as levinas or Marion - will grasp immediately that, whatever the validity of the ultimate claims, we are in the presence of real thought.

Ah good ol' Tommy Aquinas "the world looks just great -therefore someone HAD to have designed it". There was nobody in the presence of real thought the day he thought up that nugget. He was a man of his time as we all are so I'll leave him at that -but much modern religious philosophy seems to about trying to shoe-horn the middle-eastern fairytales it obsesses with and of course derives from into the unfolding information we have about the universe.

Works such as Dawkins - and that of even more egregious figures such as the silly AC Grayling - play a loose game, equating a 'common sense' idea of rational with its philosophical counterpart, and assuming a match between the two. Actually, it is extraordinarily difficult to work out any definition of reason that isn't simply tautologous - and reason is of no more help in saying anything useful about 'truth' - as opposed to 'facts' - than religion.

(sucks biro) ...um ...could you repeat the ...um ...stuff about the things

[dahamsta]

I like this. From here. Think I'll buy the tshirt.

adam

[micls]

95% of primary schools in Ireland are Catholic and teaching religion is enforced. Its not that easy to opt out.

Regardless of whether schools are Catholic or not it is a constitutional right of every child to get 30mins of religious education every day. Therefore all schools (including Educate together multi denominational schools) are required to teach it.

Saying that in most Educate Together schools the focus of the religion time is moral education or educating children on different faiths and what others believe rather than telling them to believe something.

I will qualify as a teacher in a few months and the fact that i will more than likely be forced to lie to children is sickening.

[sonofstan]

much modern religious philosophy seems to about trying to shoe-horn the middle-eastern fairytales it obsesses with and of course derives from into the unfolding information we have about the universe.

such as?

Most modern religious philosophy that i know of doesn't do anything of the sort, but do tell.

BTW, since i seem to be getting hopped on here as the lone voice of irrationalism, can I ask those of you who appear to hold that science can explain everything to explain aesthetic experience - liking a piece of music or a movie - or your mood or whatever in some way that doesn't simply reduce the mind to a mechanical model stripped of the 'feel' of consciousness? All I've said is that scientific explanations of certain phenomena that matter to us are simply inappropriate because they remove all traces of freedom from descriptions of our actions and experience, and, even if it is true that we are robots, and free will is an illusion, it doesn't in the end matter because we act as if freedom were possible, and therefore explanations of actions and experience only make sense if described 'as if' we were free. Our language presupposes intentionality and free subjectivity; a language that would describe an entirely deterministic worldview would not be a recognisably human language.

[Macy]

The majority of schools are still owned by the catholic church.

They're not; they're controlled by the church. The state has built most of them, the state funds them, the state then hands over control to the Church to indoctrinate the children, to make moral judgements on whether they employ divorced teachers, gives over time to communion/ confirmation classes etc. All state funded schools should be non denominational, and should not have priests as decision makers on their boards.

[BohsPartisan]

such as?


can I ask those of you who appear to hold that science can explain everything to explain aesthetic experience - liking a piece of music or a movie - or your mood or whatever in some way that doesn't simply reduce the mind to a mechanical model stripped of the 'feel' of consciousness?

Most of these can be explained as evolutionary by products. I'll go into it in greater detail when I'm not so busy. (don't take this as being a determinist arguement)
Also I don't think Science can completely explain everything now. However there was a time when Science couldn't explain lots of things that were once unexplained and attributed to supernatural causes. I doubt human science will ever explain absolutely everything either because our limits are also science's limits. Again this doesn't mean that the supernatural is a substitute for the gaps in our current knowledge.

SoS,
any chance you would provide some arguements for us to actually refute because otherwise its like we're trying to shoot a bat in the dark here.

They're not; they're controlled by the church. The state has built most of them, the state funds them, the state then hands over control to the Church to indoctrinate the children, to make moral judgements on whether they employ divorced teachers, gives over time to communion/ confirmation classes etc.

My mistake. This is even worse!

[sonofstan]

SoS,
any chance you would provide some arguements for us to actually refute because otherwise its like we're trying to shoot a bat in the dark here.

All I'm trying to show is this; Dawkins' argument appears to rest - I'm open to correction - on the premise that religious faith holds certain things to be true that are verifiably impossible on the basis of scientific explanation, and therefore, people who profess religious faith are either stupid or dangerous or both. This rests on the further premise that scientific method is the only means of arriving at any kind of defensible truth.

My argument is this; certain features of ordinary experience, while explicable or potentially explicable scientifically, have aspects which are not open to such explanation, but which appear meaningful to us.

If this is the case, then either a) this apparent meaningfulness will disappear in the light of a future explanation - just as the portentiousness of comets and shooting stars was explained away one they became astronomically comprehensible, or b) there are certain aspects of our experience as rational, embodied creatures that can not be explained in terms of material causation; which further entails c) that, since our explanations of the world are, themselves, aspects of that world, then certain aspects of the world are not amenable to scientific explanation (at least to us). And since we are the only rational creatures we know of, we must either adopt a God's eye view and asssume that in the light of some, non- human reason, it all makes sense, or else admit that reason -or at least our reason - has boundaries. Neither position is comfortable.

If science is not capable of providing us -perhaps ever -with a total explanation of everything, then metaphysics remains at least a defensible human pursuit; it may be wrongheaded in many of its conclusions but it may not deserve the massive condescension of a Dawkins. And I remain an atheist and I have a fairly robust faith in science.

[BohsPartisan]

If science is not capable of providing us -perhaps ever -with a total explanation of everything, then metaphysics remains at least a defensible human pursuit;

Correct me if I'm wrong here. You seem to be saying that If we can't yet explain something scientifically then any fathomable fancy is a substitute for knowledge?
In that case Scientology is as valid a philosophy as christianity, or should I add the Flying Spaghetti Monster or the Invisible Earth Supporting Rooster. Perhaps the idea that all physical reality was created by Satan to defy God and thus should be destroyed is a valid position (And unfortunately that idea is not an invention of mine). Can you see where I am going with this? If its ok to make sht up, why not evil sht (evil used as a concept and not a universal value).

[John83]

Correct me if I'm wrong here. You seem to be saying that If we can't yet explain something scientifically then any fathomable fancy is a substitute for knowledge?
In that case Scientology is as valid a philosophy as christianity, or should I add the Flying Spaghetti Monster or the Invisible Earth Supporting Rooster. Perhaps the idea that all physical reality was created by Satan to defy God and thus should be destroyed is a valid position (And unfortunately that idea is not an invention of mine). Can you see where I am going with this? If its ok to make sht up, why not evil sht (evil used as a concept and not a universal value).

All hail the Invisible Earth Supporting Rooster.

[finlma]

They're not; they're controlled by the church.

Not true Macy - the Catholic Church owns most of the land that primary schools in Ireland are built on but the state (somewhat) supports the schools. I'm a primary school teacher and I detest having to teach religion - I try to teach morals rather than anything about a God. Have to give some extra tuition (also known as lies) to the kids on the days the priest or nun is coming in.

[anto1208]

Correct me if I'm wrong here. You seem to be saying that If we can't yet explain something scientifically then any fathomable fancy is a substitute for knowledge?
In that case Scientology is as valid a philosophy as christianity, or should I add the Flying Spaghetti Monster or the Invisible Earth Supporting Rooster. Perhaps the idea that all physical reality was created by Satan to defy God and thus should be destroyed is a valid position (And unfortunately that idea is not an invention of mine). Can you see where I am going with this? If its ok to make sht up, why not evil sht (evil used as a concept and not a universal value).

I think all he is saying is that we shouldn’t totally rule something out just because at the moment we cant prove / disprove it , as there are many many things that defy logic and cant be proven it doesn’t mean they don’t exist . collective consciousness ( I’ve no idea if that’s how you spell ) for example.

Or what I spend lots of time thinking about is where does the will to live come from , to explain it now you can say it’s a by product of evolution , but what made the very first bacteria want to survive ? why have tiny particles from an explosion billions of years ago joined together to create planets and life forms why does this keep happening if something isn’t either controlling it or pre-programming this to keep happening .

[Lionel Ritchie]

All hail the Invisible Earth Supporting Rooster.

Blasphemy!!! Ancient texts written 300 years after the fact then translated from aramaic into greek and from there into middle-German during the 16th century confirm it is NOT a mere rooster but a C0ck!!!

All hail the C0ck!!!!






I don't like this religion anymore

I guess the rooster being a C0ck was one of those important things we don't want to know.

[BohsPartisan]

I think all he is saying is that we shouldn’t totally rule something out just because at the moment we cant prove / disprove it ,

But why just make something up to fill the gap in knowledge? Why not just say, we don't understand such and such at this point in time but we hope to understand it sometime in the future?
This wouldn't be such a big issue if there weren't so many people around the world believing things that they have never thought about why they believe them and if these beliefs didn't have such a hold upon billions of people.

[sonofstan]

Correct me if I'm wrong here. You seem to be saying that If we can't yet explain something scientifically then any fathomable fancy is a substitute for knowledge?
In that case Scientology is as valid a philosophy as christianity, or should I add the Flying Spaghetti Monster or the Invisible Earth Supporting Rooster. Perhaps the idea that all physical reality was created by Satan to defy God and thus should be destroyed is a valid position (And unfortunately that idea is not an invention of mine). Can you see where I am going with this? If its ok to make sht up, why not evil sht (evil used as a concept and not a universal value).

No I'm not. What I'm saying is that Metaphysics - by which I mean 'thoughts of a resolving closure between self and world' - are possible; such thoughts are as subject to Occam's razor as any other. If the self is not entirely explained by nature, and nature is not simply an idealist fantasy of the self, then some kind of ground which can explain both seems worth thinking about. Any such thoughts need to be internally consistent and it seems likely that - Occam's razor - law of logical dependence and inference, as well as physical possibility should hold for this ground - or for the relation between this ground and that which it grounds; part of which is the physical world. But you can have your rooster if you want.

[BohsPartisan]

All hail the C0ck!!!!

Aww now you've gone and turned it into yet another phallocentric belief system. Maybe I'll start worshipping the Mother Chicken instead. (The great prophet BP foresees a schism in his new religion based on the question of which came first, the chicken or the egg and simultaniously forsees the answer - the chicken and the egg are eternal beings co-existing seperately and in unity all at once)

[anto1208]

But why just make something up to fill the gap in knowledge? Why not just say, we don't understand such and such at this point in time but we hope to understand it sometime in the future?
This wouldn't be such a big issue if there weren't so many people around the world believing things that they have never thought about why they believe them and if these beliefs didn't have such a hold upon billions of people.

F**k knows why people do anything

[sonofstan]

Aww now you've gone and turned it into yet another phallocentric belief system. Maybe I'll start worshipping the Mother Chicken instead. (The great prophet BP foresees a schism in his new religion based on the question of which came first, the chicken or the egg and simultaniously forsees the answer - the chicken and the egg are eternal beings co-existing seperately and in unity all at once)

Time and space are forms of intuition according to Kant - they don't have any existence outside our understanding - if that's any help .....

[pineapple stu]

Similarly the idea of a giant invisible rooster holding the earth up can't be disproved and its just as valid as the idea of god.
I'll give you 100 Euro if you can disprove my rooster hypothesis.

I'm confused by the point you're trying to make with your rooster hypothesis.

We've been to space and looked back at the earth from afar (from the moon, for example), and can see that there's no rooster. We've also flown satellites around the earth for the past 60 years or so which orbit very regularly. If the rooster existed and were invisible, chances are one of the satellites would have hit him, which we would have seen. If he's big enough to hold up the earth, his gravity would also cause calculation problems as we know (from scientific fact) that gravitational can be calculated anywhere in the universe, which doesn't allow for the possibility of an earth-sized rooster sitting under our planet.

So it can't be seen, can't be felt and can't be detected using scientifically proven mathematical formulae. Sounds like he doesn't exist.

Can I PM you my bank details or would you rather send a cheque?

[sonofstan]

I'm confused by the point you're trying to make with your rooster hypothesis.

We've been to space and looked back at the earth from afar (from the moon, for example), and can see that there's no rooster. We've also flown satellites around the earth for the past 60 years or so which orbit very regularly. If the rooster existed and were invisible, chances are one of the satellites would have hit him, which we would have seen. If he's big enough to hold up the earth, his gravity would also cause calculation problems as we know (from scientific fact) that gravitational can be calculated anywhere in the universe, which doesn't allow for the possibility of an earth-sized rooster sitting under our planet.

So it can't be seen, can't be felt and can't be detected using scientifically proven mathematical formulae. Sounds like he doesn't exist.

Can I PM you my bank details or would you rather send a cheque?

Maybe he's light years away and he's holding us up by sheer will. Or he's actually a very small but very strong rooster.