He's trolling. It's not the first time.
Man, Derek, is your keyboard okay? I wouldn't be surprised if you wore out the Fallacious Anti-Atheist Cliches button with your recent posts.
Folks, let things go. Really.
Afraid I've got to head to bed early tonight for a long day tomorrow. I'll get back to this tomorrow night hopefully!
For the evolution discussion, that common cold is, technically, a disease rather than an organism. The particular organism causing the disease (let's say rhinovirus) will indeed mutate into more adaptive, resilient rhinovirus (microevolution). However, nothing's yet convinced me 100% on that rhinovirus becoming, say Penicillium candida (because I love me some Brie!), or later still a tsetse fly (macroevolution, at least as much as I have studied thus far). I'd welcome some specific direction to further research, however, as I always like to speak from a position of knowledge rather than supposition.
I'm hard pressed to figure out what part of the above was meant to be a joke and what was meant to be taken seriously (such is the peril of the Internet). I can only say that the issue is whether or not some strain of an organism can mutate to the point where it can no longer breed (creating fertile offspring) with other members of the same species. If it can do that, then everything else is inevitable.
And, frankly, I see no reason why it can't do that.
One of the best websites I have seen for educating yourself about evolution is talkorigins.org
This section details some speciation events we have observed, and this one explains why nearly every biologist in the world subscribes to the idea that life on our planet evolved from a common ancestor.
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I've read in various places on the trusty ol' interwebz (occasionally this very thread!) that Richard Dawkins is a jerk. My exposure to his work & writing is limited so he may be, for all I know, a raving lunatic that spews forth offensive drivel on a continual basis. Can someone please be specific about any comments he's made or passages he's written that is especially rude? Hopefully any examples will be kept in context of the entire message, rather than a sound bite extracted and twisted to prove a point*...
*Not sayin' that anyone here has/will done/do this, just that some folks on the internet don't know how to play nice!
I’m adding this post to the religious thread as from what I’ve heard, when it comes to biology, Dawkins really knows his stuff and communicates it very well. But when it comes to religion, some are of the opinion that he should just keep his mouth shut!
Thanks in advance for your insight!
If someone has replied to my inquiry, I have missed it...please kindly point out your reply.
Otherwise, would someone care to enlighten me on this question? Thanks!
The biggest quote used by Dawkins shows him as sort of a jerk.
"The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully." - Richard Dawkins
The biggest quote used by Dawkins shows him as sort of a jerk.
Dawkins can definitely be acerbic (largely, I believe, out of exasperation), but surely jerk != oppressor?
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The biggest quote used by Dawkins shows him as sort of a jerk.Dawkins can definitely be acerbic (largely, I believe, out of exasperation), but surely jerk != oppressor?
Actually, I think that Dawkins is largely misquoted. On both "sides". Or at least misrepresented.
I have two issues with Dawkins.
1) He definitely has an "agenda". He strongly feels that the world would be a better place without any religion at all. And he uses his platform to "preach" this.
2) More than that though is how others have received him and his "preachings". Looking at reviews of some of the things he's said or written read like -- "Holy is the ground Dawkins walks and great is his works." In some ways, it feels like he has turned Atheism into as much or more a religion than many religions -- although I don't believe he meant to do that.
Outside of that, meh. He's got some good points that most people should probably consider or think about.
Actually, I think that Dawkins is largely misquoted. On both "sides". Or at least misrepresented.I have two issues with Dawkins.
1) He definitely has an "agenda". He strongly feels that the world would be a better place without any religion at all. And he uses his platform to "preach" this.
Agreed. In fact I think he's very open about it. But he never advocates bigotry or violence (that I've read or seen).
2) More than that though is how others have received him and his "preachings". Looking at reviews of some of the things he's said or written read like -- "Holy is the ground Dawkins walks and great is his works." In some ways, it feels like he has turned Atheism into as much or more a religion than many religions -- although I don't believe he meant to do that.
No argument here, either. It's kinda ironic that some people disavow religion, only to place blind faith in Dawkins (or anyone else).
Outside of that, meh. He's got some good points that most people should probably consider or think about.
He can certainly be very blunt, but I'm not just seeing the oppression angle that some people claim to. YMMV.
Wow sorry I posted the quote :( I actually got that from his book "The God Delusion``
I'm not. I haven't found the subsequent discussion all that caustic, beyond the one smug barb.
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But your response is very short on specifics.
So is his.
What would "refute" his claims? Maybe giving you verses that showed that he was forgiving? Loving? Caring? etc. Or do we not care about that?
It's hard for me to refute something when it's difficult at best without some serious research to find "specifically" where he's getting his stuff. But is God "genocidal" when he allows some city-states to live among them? Is God "unforgiving" when he allowed an enemy prostitute (and her family) to live?
But your response is very short on specifics.So is his.
What would "refute" his claims? Maybe giving you verses that showed that he was forgiving? Loving? Caring? etc. Or do we not care about that?
It's hard for me to refute something when it's difficult at best without some serious research to find "specifically" where he's getting his stuff. But is God "genocidal" when he allows some city-states to live among them? Is God "unforgiving" when he allowed an enemy prostitute (and her family) to live?
A single instance of genocide (which, IRRC, god at the very least commands) is sufficient for Dawkins to make his point. A murderer doesn't stop being a murder simply because he fails to kill everyone he meets.
I don't know, Moff. I don't see a lot of wiggle room on this. :(
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And the other half?
My point was a lot of his "points" come from the same place. A few I have no idea where they come from (sadomasochistic?). A few come from Levitical law which was written in direct contrast to neighboring practices (because raping boys on the alter is a bad thing). And some are little more than opinion (pestilential). And some (misogynistic) I understand where he gets it from, yet there were women judges, leaders, and prophets. But a lot of it (petty, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, megalomaniacal, capriciously malevolent bully) is mostly just a lot of neat sounding words to describe (his interpretation/opinion) the same thing/event.
At least as near as I can figure out.
I removed a post (and the direct and indirect replies to it.)
Snark does not help a religious discussion to stay civil.
On the subject of the Dawkins quote, I have my copy of The God Delusion here and I would like to provide it some context. I beg my reader's forbearance (or only three bears, if that's what can be spared :) )for some lengthy quotes. Forgive me any errors, I'm typing it up myself rather than C&Ping.
First the incriminating section itself:
The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it, a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. Those of us schooled from infancy in his ways can become desensitized to their horror. A naif blessed with the perspective of innocence has a clearer perception. Winston Churchill's son Randolph somehow contrived to remain ignorant of scripture until Evelyn Waugh and a brother officer, in a vain attempt to keep Churchill quiet when they were posted together during the war, bet him he couldn't read the entire Bible in a fortnight: 'Unhappily it has not had the result we hoped. He has never read any of it before and is hideously excited; keeps reading quotations aloud "I say I bet you didn't know this came in the Bible..." or merely slapping his side & chortling "God, isn't God a s%*&!"' Thomas Jefferson - better read - was of a similar opinion, describing the God of Moses as 'a being of terrific character - cruel, vindictive, capricious and unjust'.
It is unfair to attack such an easy target. The God Hypothesis should not stand or fall with its most unlovely instantiation, Yahweh, nor his insipidly opposite Christian face, 'Gentle Jesus meek and mild'. (To be fair, this milksop persona owes more to his Victorian followers than to Jesus himself. Could anything be more mawkishly nauseating than Mrs C. F. Alexander's 'Christian children all must be / Mild, obedient, good as he'? I am not attacking the particular qualities of Yahweh, or Jesus, or Allah, or any other specific god such as Baal, Zeus, or Wotan. Instead I shalld efine the God Hypothesis more defensibly: there exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us. This book will advocate an alternative view: any creative intelligence, of sufficient complexity to design anything comes into existence only as the end product of an extended process of gradual evolution. Creative intelligences, being evolved, necessarily arrive late in the universe, and therefore cannot be responsible for designing it. God, in the sense defined, is a delusion; and, as later chapters will show, a pernicious delusion.
Not surprisingly, since it was founded on local traditions of private revelation rather than evidence, the God Hypothesis comes in many versions. Historians of religion recognize a progression from primitive tribal animists, through polytheisms such as those of the Greeks, Romans, and Norsemen, to monotheisms such as Judaism and its derivatives, Christianity and Islam.
Dawkins goes on to say that he doesn't see why going from polytheism to monotheism should be considered a progressive improvement in itself, which isn't quite relevant to the point but I wanted to mention to head off any misunderstandings.
I own the paperback, which has an additional preface where Dawkins comments on objections to the book. Therein are two relevant sections that immediately pop out.
You always attack the worst of religion and ignore the best.
"You go after crude, rabble-rousing chancers like Ted Haggard, jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, rather than sophisticated theologians like Tillich or Bonhoeffer who teach the sort of religion I believe in.'If only such subtle, nuanced religion predominated, the world would surely be a better place, and I would have written a different book. The melancholy truth is that this kind of understated, decent, revisionist religion is numerically negligible. To the vast majority of believers around the world, religion all too closely resembles what you hear from the lieks of Robertson, Falwell or Haggard, Osama bin Laden or the Ayatollah Khomeini. These are not straw men, they are all too influential, and everybody in the modern world has to deal with them.
That's the entirety of his response under the bolded heading, but there's a bit more elsewhere about the quote itself:
In 1915, the British Member of Parliament Horatio Bottomley recommended that, after the war, 'If by chance you should discover one day in a restaurant that you are bieng served by a German waiter, you will throw the soup in his foul face; if you find yourself sitting at the side of a German cleric, you will spill the inkpot over his foul head.' Now that's strident and intolerant )and, I should have thought, ridiculous and ineffective as rhetoric even in its own time). Contrast it with the opening sentence of Chapter 2 [quoted previously], which is the passage most often quoted as 'strident' or 'shrill'. It is not for me to say whether I succeeded, but my intention was closer to robust but humorous broadside than shrill polemic. In public readings of [iThe God Delusion[/i] this is the one passage that is guaranteed to get a good-natured laugh, which is why my wife and I invariably use it as the warm-up act to break the ice with a new audience. If I could venture to suggest why the humour works, I think it is the incongruous mismatch between a subject that [icould[/] have been stridently or vulgarly expressed, and the actual expression in a drawn-out list of Latinate or pseudo-scholarly words ('filicidal', 'megalomanaical', 'pestilential'). My model here was one of the funniest writers of the twentieth century, and nobody could call Evelyn Waugh shrill or strident (I even gave the game away by mentioning his name in the anecdote that immediately follows)
For myself, I think the line is funny in a gallows humor sort of way -and I can imagine him and Lalla Ward reading it with delightful relish, which I may have actually seen on CSPAN during the book tour- but was more struck by the terrible accuracy of it. Insofar as it makes direct, reportorial claims about the doings of the God of the Hebrew Bible, such as citing his commission of genocide, he's guilty of the lot of it.
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On the subject of the Dawkins quote, I have my copy of The God Delusion here and I would like to provide it some context. I beg my reader's forbearance (or only three bears, if that's what can be spared :) )for some lengthy quotes. Forgive me any errors, I'm typing it up myself rather than C&Ping.
Thanks for that. Probably took a while. (And I'll let the typos slide -- this time. ;-) )
First thought that comes to mind was it sounds like his quote is being used in ways other than he initially intended.
One thing that I disagreed with though was -- "The melancholy truth is that this kind of understated, decent, revisionist religion is numerically negligible." I'm not sure where he gets his "numbers" from, but just because you don't hear about us doesn't mean we're not around doing good.
Again, outside of that, I feel he has some good points that should be thought about.
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Since my snarky comment and the serious question that followed it were deleted (but the rest of the ensuing conversation wasn't...weird, huh?), I'll repost:
Moff,
If "only" 2% of the OT is all the bad stuff that Dawkins says, does that really matter? At what point does the severity of the "bad" override the "good." For example: a man lives to 100 years old and is a saint for 98 of those years. For two of them, however, he decides it's his mission to wipe out all of humanity, kill every infant he sees, etc. How would you describe that man? Insane? Likely. Evil? Most definitely. A saint? I highly doubt it. Why should a "perfect" god get a free pass when a mere sinning mortal does not?
Also why the (apparent) bipolar nature of god? In the OT god is wrathful and vengeful. In the NT god is all about peace and love. What gives? Which one is the "real" god or are you expected to cherry pick from both (which most religious leaders seem to do)?
If the Bible were obviously perfect, there would be no need for faith. There are things in the Bible which are horrible. Jesus himself is recorded in the Bible as having said things which are horrible. The question is, can you look past that? All institutions (including the church) are corrupt.
That's a bit like saying everyone's evil, isn't it? I would take it for granted that every institution is corruptible. Everyone's fallible and the world is full of perverse incentives. Being bad can pay good, if you will. :) And alas, being good can pay badly too.
But I don't think it follows that every institution has been corrupted. Certainly some are pretty bad ab initio, like a longstanding criminal enterprise might be. I'm pretty sure there's no good way to run a genocide business. That said, it would be a practical impossibility to go about our lives without interacting with all kinds of institutions: governments, employers, charities, non-profits. Surely we should try to give institutions a tentative presumption of innocence at least until we've got reason to think they're engaged in some kind of skullduggery.
Can you look past that? Can you have faith in something when there is no reason whatsoever to have faith?
Actually, I can't. I'm fairly sure I'm dispositionally incapable of it. I hope I am, anyway. :)
I'm not talking about faith in the Bible, or in Christianity, or in the Church. I think such faith would be pathological. I'm talking about faith in love. God is love. So, I'm talking about faith in God. It's not faith if you have reason to believe in it.
I will agree with your definition of faith and its dichotomous relationship with reason, evidence, and so forth. That's certainly what it seems like to me as an outside observer of the religious.
Love can certainly be nice enough, fulfilling, pleasant, desirable, terrible, destructive, maddening. But I'm not sure how one would have faith in it. I mean, brain states are brain states. The science is a bit in its infancy, but we can actually observe how the brain (and the rest of the body, but that's older news) responds to stimuli.
If you mean that you have great confidence in where love leads you, that seems like a rough road to follow. Human emotions are twitchy things (especially mine) and can make us undertake some drastic and ill-advised courses of action. Are you still having faith in love if you've got a tiny little Dawkins in a red tweed suit on your shoulder interrogating it constantly and reminding you about its often poor judgment?
And this post is brought to you by a 50/50 split of Samnell's cynicism and idealism, and the number seven. :)
First, let me ask, have you ever heard of Godel's incompleteness theorem?
Yes, but I'm not very interested in the philosophy of math. Or for that matter in abstract mathematics itself. In the absence of real world referents it seems no more useful or interesting to me than arguing about whether or not the balrog had wings.
if so, do you accept it? If so, are you okay with the fact that there are going to be things which are true, but which your model of the world simply cannot ever prove to be true?
My model of the world is not axiomatic, but rather a posteriori and empirical. (I'm pretty sure, in fact, that a priori knowledge is a contradiction in terms.) So to judge from what I could make out of Wikipedia's article on the incompleteness theorem (which was not much, since its hardly written for general audiences and I don't have a lot of patience for excessive mathematical and philosophical jargon) is simply inapplicable.
The question of what you have faith in is kinda important, because of the way we're hardwired. Except for blind luck, we achieve only that which we have faith in. We evolved with the ability to feel the numinous because we can only achieve what we've not yet achieved - things we can't see and have no evidence of.
I will agree that evolution has predisposed us to a great number of elementary cognitive errors, the most relevant one here being a preference for detecting patterns and intentionality where none exists.
But certainly the numinous is only a real category if the divine actually exists, which is at the least an open question. So it sounds like you're being a bit circular. I will agree that people feel things they think are supernatural, but the evidence seems quite firm on the side that they're all mistaken.
But that said, I can't quite agree with you on achievement requires faith. For eighteen years of my life I had never been to Eurasia, but I did not have faith that Eurasia existed. Rather I had enormous piles of evidence that it did in fact exist.
Separately, I think virtually every species of achievement ultimately comes down to blind luck. :)
And, yes, having great confidence in where love leads you is a rough road to follow. It seems to me that if everything in life were easy, it'd be kinda boring. If you can find the right group of people, you all can help each other keep that faith in love. That's really what church is supposed to be about.
I would prefer an easy boring life to a difficult, painful one. I would much rather a life in a peaceful equitable society to one in, say, Somalia. I will grant that sometimes struggle and hardship can be worthwhile, or the right thing to do even if they're not, but it seems to me far more often they breed pathologies, broken people and societies, and misery for its own sake.
I also think they're a bit insidious. Having decided that these things are worthwhile naturally predisposes one to wishing them upon others "for their own good" or as "tough love". That's not to say that everyone who so values them becomes a sadist but the journey between "adversity is good" and "we should increase adversity for its own sake, since it's go good" is pretty short and appears very seductive since, among other things, it lets one free oneself from responsibility for unpleasant things that happen in one's society.
Afraid I've got to head to bed early tonight for a long day tomorrow. I'll get back to this tomorrow night hopefully!
For the evolution discussion, that common cold is, technically, a disease rather than an organism. The particular organism causing the disease (let's say rhinovirus) will indeed mutate into more adaptive, resilient rhinovirus (microevolution). However, nothing's yet convinced me 100% on that rhinovirus becoming, say Penicillium candida (because I love me some Brie!), or later still a tsetse fly (macroevolution, at least as much as I have studied thus far). I'd welcome some specific direction to further research, however, as I always like to speak from a position of knowledge rather than supposition.
I'm hard pressed to figure out what part of the above was meant to be a joke and what was meant to be taken seriously (such is the peril of the Internet). I can only say that the issue is whether or not some strain of an organism can mutate to the point where it can no longer breed (creating fertile offspring) with other members of the same species. If it can do that, then everything else is inevitable.
And, frankly, I see no reason why it can't do that.One of the best websites I have seen for educating yourself about evolution is talkorigins.org
This section details some speciation events we have observed, and this one explains why nearly every biologist in the world subscribes to the idea that life on our planet evolved from a common ancestor.
Good stuff. An excellent overview on the topic.
If someone has replied to my inquiry, I have missed it...please kindly point out your reply.Otherwise, would someone care to enlighten me on this question? Thanks!
I'm not really interested in picking out quotes. Especially since what is and is not offensive can be in the eye of the beholder.
That said Dawkin's is a part of the New Atheist Movement. A movement that seems intent on overturning Stephen J. Gould's 'compartmentalized scientist' philosophy. In some sense for the last decade or two most where supposed to leave their personal beliefs at home when they came to work. This was supposed to be true if you where religious but also if you where an Atheist. This is a view that, among other things, believes that God is essentially untestable.
The New Atheist Movement disagrees with this philosophy. They believe that religion is a testable hypothesis and feel that such testing has shown God not to exist. Their vocal about this view point and are keen to overturn the applecart and cause controversy. That said I suspect that they have also entered the scene at a fortuitous time. Books like the ones found in the new Atheist movement are not new. They have been coming out for decades. What is new is that they have an audience and adherents.
My personal suspicion is that the New Atheist Movement is essentially a creation of Christian revivalism in the USA, by which I mean the movement away from the centre with a liberal view view of religion/science (one that essentially accommodates both). Concepts like Intelligent Design, at least in the sense that they began to gain some mainstream acceptance, have essentially already upset the previous equilibrium. The New Atheist movement gains a foothold as a push back against such philosophies.
In other words if Intelligent Design had been a non event that quickly faded into irrelevance then Dawkin's The God Delusion would have become the one book of his no one ever bothered to read.
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Feel troubled over the fact that you tried to use Wikipedia as a source.
Ok it really chaps my ass when people say stuff like this. For a vast majority of the non pop-culture entries, Wikipedia is a damn good source (at least for a jumping off point). Most of the entries are very well referenced and are pretty accurate. I have also seen discussion as to whether it might not even be a better source than some of the single-author textbooks in use by the education system (more authors=more oversight and more chance to catch and correct any fallacies). I find that people who bash wikipedia as a valid source often do so as a way to dismiss (rather than respond to) an argument.
My 2cp.
Here is an article about one study on the accuracy of Wikipedia.
Wikipedia isn't perfect, but I'll take it over Some Random Guy on the Internet(tm) every time, thanks.
And I honestly was under the impression that -everyone- is aware that there are other sources besides Wikipedia and Some Random Guy on the Internet(tm) - peer reviewed academic journals, for example. So, I'm a bit surprised by the choice you lay before us.
I agree that this is a false dichotomy, and also that debates on the accuracy of Wikipedia belong elsewhere.
Why is it that no one ever wants to cite my work?
COBOL, not COBAL. Or was that on purpose? :P
Feel troubled over the fact that you tried to use Wikipedia as a source.Ok it really chaps my ass when people say stuff like this. For a vast majority of the non pop-culture entries, Wikipedia is a damn good source (at least for a jumping off point). Most of the entries are very well referenced and are pretty accurate. I have also seen discussion as to whether it might not even be a better source than some of the single-author textbooks in use by the education system (more authors=more oversight and more chance to catch and correct any fallacies). I find that people who bash wikipedia as a valid source often do so as a way to dismiss (rather than respond to) an argument.
My 2cp.
Pot meet kettle.
Yes, but I'm not very interested in the philosophy of math. Or for that matter in abstract mathematics itself. In the absence of real world referents it seems no more useful or interesting to me than arguing about whether or not the balrog had wings.Godel's incompleteness theorem isn't just about math. It's about any rational model of the world. It says that any consistent model of the world is going to be unable to explain everything about the world.
Ok. Why should I think this is the case then? Experience has suggested the opposite for, well, all human history. Every time someone fences off a subject and declares it unknowable, the fence turns out to be full of holes.
My model of the world is not axiomatic, but rather a posteriori and empirical.You wrongly imply that those two things are mutually exclusive. In reality, if we were unable to derive axioms from experience, we'd be unable to operate in a rational manner. Among other things, science would be impossible.
If it's derived from experience, I don't consider it an axiom. A tentative conclusion based on evidence and subject to review in the light of further evidence arising hardly sounds axiomatic to me. Quite the opposite. To my understanding of the term, an axiom is a dogma. It is asserted to be true without evidence and thus in my estimation is without value. Are you operating under a different understanding?
But that aside, if this all follows and I've gotten an odd comprehension of the term from somewhere, I'm afraid you're still going to have to demonstrate that the incompleteness theorem is not merely relevant, but also true in the face of a system of constantly revised and improved tentative conclusions based in evidence about the real world.
This wrongly implies that detecting patterns where none exist is a cognitive error. In reality, we care about whether perceived patterns are useful (i.e. help us reach our goals), not whether they really exist.
I will agree that evolution has predisposed us to a great number of elementary cognitive errors, the most relevant one here being a preference for detecting patterns and intentionality where none exists.
In reality a lot of people do a lot of very silly things. Believing an untruth is a cognitive error if anything is. I think I'd class it the very ultimate in all cognitive errors.
But certainly the numinous is only a real category if the divine actually exists,No, it's a real category regardless. The numinous is the sense we get that the world is bigger than we are. Innovation depends on it because innovation requires faith that all we have isn't all we can have.
How? You're just asserting this. I could as easily say that we know empirically that our situation is not perfect and thus could possibly be improved. In fact, it has in the past.
But that said, I can't quite agree with you on achievement requires faith. For eighteen years of my life I had never been to Eurasia, but I did not have faith that Eurasia existed. Rather I had enormous piles of evidence that it did in fact exist."Eurasia" is not an achievement. "I will visit Eurasia" is an achievement and, barring blind luck, requires faith that that achievement can be reached.
Faith didn't build the plane. Faith didn't make it fly. Faith didn't pay for the ticket; I would have noticed. You told me in a prior post that it's not faith if we have reason to believe it. (A statement with which I fully agree.) Well I've got plenty of reason to believe travel to Eurasia is possible, that the continent is there, and so forth. It's pretty obvious. Therefore faith cannot have been involved.
If your project here is to justify faith, then I'm afraid the definition you're operating under makes it impossible to justify in my eyes. On reflection, should you convince me that I do have faith in something (and no one's perfect so I might) I would immediately begin the work of ridding myself of it.
Samnell, I hope we can agree that it would be silly for John Doe to argue that he isn't going to believe something until it is proven to him, while at the same time refusing to take the time or make the effort to understand the proof.
You're the one making the case for the theorem and its applicability. Isn't the onus on you to make that case? Here is your chance to educate me, and mine to learn from you. I'm completely serious: I see absolutely zero applicability to the theorem, true or not, to anything aside abstract logic systems like pure maths. I do not appear to be alone in that:
Appeals and analogies are sometimes made to the incompleteness theorems in support of arguments that go beyond mathematics and logic. A number of authors have commented negatively on such extensions and interpretations, including Torkel Franzén (2005); Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont (1999); and Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom (2006). Bricmont and Stangroom (2006, p. 10), for example, quote from Rebecca Goldstein's comments on the disparity between Gödel's avowed Platonism and the anti-realist uses to which his ideas are sometimes put. Sokal and Bricmont (1999, p. 187) criticize Régis Debray's invocation of the theorem in the context of sociology; Debray has defended this use as metaphorical (ibid.).
As I said previously, aside real-world referents, mathematics is nothing more than arguing over the wings of the balrog to me. It's certainly useful when those referents exist and when it can be shown to model real-world phenomena. But that connection has yet to be made here.
Assume you go to a game store and buy a bunch of dice. You sit down at a game session and use those dice. Your goal is to have fun. You have fun. Later, you test your dice to see if they are truly random and you discover that they aren't. You play the game again. Now, you feel like you're cheating. You don't enjoy the game so much.
Was it an error to have fun the first time you played (i.e. to achieve your goal) or was it an error to learn that you weren't using a fair die (and fail to achieve your goal the second time)?
The cognitive error was in presuming the dice were fair. It's a fair presumption, but it turned out to be wrong. I was mistaken and should take pains to correct myself. To use the dice again, in a game with others who are unaware, I would class as a failure of character.
The measure of all propositions, however, is whether or not they map to reality. If they do not, we entertain them in error. How they make us feel is irrelevant. The dice would not be fair dice, and I would not be a responsible or a decent person if I persisted in claiming they were in the face of good evidence otherwise. That's just as true if the revelation provokes a shrug, a moment of guilt, or drove me to suicide.
And what does any of that have to do with your startling supposition that whether a proposition is true or false is unimportant as long as it helps us get our way? The very first thing I care about is whether or not a proposition is so. If it's not, I don't care about much else except if I'm honestly indulging it for the purposes of personal entertainment and nothing more. I have been under the impression that you were about something more than pleasure-seeking. Have I been mistaken?
You're asking how a feeling could be real and that asserting that a feeling is real is an error.
Not the feeling of the numinous, but the numinous itself. I have no doubt that many people have feelings, experiences, and so forth that they think are supernatural. It's just that their assessment of those things has turned out to be mistaken. People feel all kinds of silly things.
As I said before, the referent is in question and until those questions are resolved the feelings are uninteresting and beside the point. Many children go through phases where they believe they're long-lost royalty or whatever, anything more glamorous than their actual lives. They certainly feel on some level that it must be true. Yet their actual lives remain their actual lives. Reality isn't a lotus-eater machine that rewrites itself for our personal enjoyment, even though that would be really cool. :)
I used to edit Wikipedia regularly. I was a true blue believer. I ran into Jossi. In fact, he tried to get me kicked off Wikipedia.If you're not familiar with Jossi, read
http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Jossi
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jossi/Awards
And I want to stress that Jossi is -not- an isolated incident. Admins just like him crawl all over Wikipedia like cockroaches, praised by the Wikipedia community for years, without a care in the world for the three pillars.
I've also seen, on more than one occasion, a mob of editors organize around the same political views and sit on a collection of articles - again, without regard to the three pillars.
I've been in this world too. Not Wikipedia but a largish community that broke into factions and had cult like leaders that did not get along with each other as well as sock puppets etc.
Still my feeling about the community as a whole was that, by and large, a fair amount of good work still got done despite all the drama. So in Wikipedia's case, sure, read with a critical eye, and be particularly careful about topics that are extraordinary contriversial. A glance at the discussion page also usually highlights what parts different authors feel are in dispute.
Nonetheless 99% of the time, in my view, any given article is a pretty accurate view of the general consensus on that topic. Discarding or discounting the entire thing because 1% of the articles are inaccurate or misleading strikes me as a bad idea.
Especially considering that this posturing and such goes on in Academia as well. I'm sure that Encyclopedia Brittanica works very hard to get fair and balanced versions of their articles but some small percent of the time I suspect they are also essentially hoodwinked and get some academics biased view of a topic. Note that one of the benefits with Wikipedia is that there is usually some evidence that information is in dispute and bias may abound. You don't get that with Brittanica.
The onus falls on me to make the case regarding applicability only -after- you make the effort to understand what the theorem is. You, no doubt, realize that any attempt to discuss it's applicability with you is impossible until after you understand what it is whose applicability we're discussing.
You're the one making the case for the theorem and its applicability. Isn't the onus on you to make that case?
So far as I understand the theorem, it holds that it is impossible to create a logical system which is perfectly consistent with itself. Am I right so far?
You claim that the cognitive error was in the very thing which allowed you to reach your goal? How do you define "error", then? And please do so without resorting to anything resembling abstract mathematics.
Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of errors. The first is denying something that is actually so. The second is affirming something that is not so. False negatives and false positives, for short. If anything is an error in cognition, it's those two. We find out what is or is not so by examination of reality.
The measure of all propositions, however, is whether or not they map to reality.This implies the existence of an objective reality and, yet, you deny any interest in mathematics. I find that interesting.
What exactly does "objective reality" mean to you and how do you propose that it be understood in the absence of mathematics?
An objective reality is a redundancy to me; what would deserve the name reality except that? Objective reality is the stuff that does not go away when one ceases beliving in it. One can, if one is very foolish, decide that gravity is a myth and jump off a skyscraper naked. But any person who does so is just going to make a big mess on the ground.
Math can be of assistance in modeling and describing how some of reality operates, but it does not follow that any bit of math is immediately relevant and binding on reality just because, well, it's math. The universe isn't made of numbers. They're human linguistic conceits, just like Plato's forms.
Not the feeling of the numinous, but the numinous itself.The numinous is the feeling.
I am not following your position here at all. You previously told me:
We evolved with the ability to feel the numinous because we can only achieve what we've not yet achieved - things we can't see and have no evidence of.
This implies that the numinous is a thing one perceives, like heat, cold, or a bowel movement. Now you're apparently telling me it's not, but rather it's just a case of the willies or something.
I have already granted that people feel many things they think are supernatural. (A friend has informed me that you can get a really good religious experience from LSD. He did several times in the Seventies.) But it does not follow from that that they are correct in their assessment. People get the heebie-jeebies over all kinds of things. There's a minor genre of reality show where idiots are taken to dark, old buildings and told to wander around while some other idiot in a van is reading ghost stories into their earpiece and then asking them if they feel anything off.
Well yeah if you're pouring paranoia into someone's head in an, uncomfortable, unfamiliar place of course they're going to tell you they're spooked. And that's before you coach them on exactly what they're "supposed" to feel ahead of time. The hosts will then piously claim that Something Is Up here. They don't mention that it's their bank accounts for fleecing some gullible rubes.
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Pot meet kettle.Feel troubled over the fact that you tried to use Wikipedia as a source.Ok it really chaps my ass when people say stuff like this. For a vast majority of the non pop-culture entries, Wikipedia is a damn good source (at least for a jumping off point). Most of the entries are very well referenced and are pretty accurate. I have also seen discussion as to whether it might not even be a better source than some of the single-author textbooks in use by the education system (more authors=more oversight and more chance to catch and correct any fallacies). I find that people who bash wikipedia as a valid source often do so as a way to dismiss (rather than respond to) an argument.
My 2cp.
Huh? I wasn't really involved in that part of the discussion IIRC, so I don't really have an "obligation" to respond to any of the arguments presented by LT. I was simply commenting on the Wikipedia statement.
That said Dawkins is a part of the New Atheist Movement. A movement that seems intent on overturning Stephen J. Gould's 'compartmentalized scientist' philosophy (1). In some sense for the last decade or two most where supposed to leave their personal beliefs at home when they came to work. This was supposed to be true if you where religious but also if you where an Atheist. This is a view that, among other things, believes that God is essentially untestable.
The New Atheist Movement disagrees with this philosophy. They believe that religion is a testable hypothesis and feel that such testing has shown God not to exist (2). Their vocal about this view point and are keen to overturn the applecart and cause controversy (3). That said I suspect that they have also entered the scene at a fortuitous time. Books like the ones found in the new Atheist movement are not new. They have been coming out for decades. What is new is that they have an audience and adherents.
I'd like to step in and comment, as I myself am an active New ("Gnu") Atheist -- I regularly correspond with many of the more prominent proponents. Much like Benjamin Franklin wrote that tracts against Deism made him become a Deist, I was formerly an "accommodationist" -- an atheist who believes in ceding authority and importance to all religious claims, in hopes that the religious majority will graciously allow at least some scientific discoveries to stand -- until I read the views of both camps, and became convinced that the New Atheists, if a bit less polite, were a whole lot more honest about things.
1. Yes. Gould advocated "non-overlapping majesteria" (NOMA) -- science is supreme in matters of the natural world, religion supreme in matters of the supernatural, and neither is any good for the other. Sadly, there is no real definition for "supernatural," which means that Gould sort of painted religion into a corner: if "supernatural" phenomena do not follow natural laws as we know them, but are predictable, then they're susceptible to scientific inquiry, and the "supernatural" suddenly becomes "natural" once we adjust those laws to encompass them (like general relativity). On the other hand, if "supernatural" phenomena do not follow natural laws as known and can never be predicted, then religion can't predict them any better than science can.
2. No; this is totally inaccurate. We believe that many specific truth claims made by religion (e.g., "the Earth is 6,000 years old," or "prayer makes people get better") can be tested, and most of them have indeed been shown to be false. That doesn't mean "religion" is false. As to God, there has never been any real evidence presented for His existence. Just as we provisionally assume that there are no fairies (since there's no evidence of their existence), we feel the same way about God. You can't "prove" that God does not exist -- you can only indicate how unlikely His existence is. Even Dawkins says "I'm 99.9% sure there's no God."
3. It's not controversy for its own sake. The thing is, religion gets an automatic blanket of respectability, and criticizing it is considered off-limits in polite society in a way that criticizing science is not. The New Atheist movement seeks, through generating controversy, to strip away some of that artificial shield.