Richard Dawkins - Anti -Christ or Great Thinker?

no religions claim to have any knowledge of god

this is putting it a bit strongly. most religions claim that they know what God wants or requires of humanity, but this is ALWAYS because God sent an interlocutor to humanity, a spokesperson who had a direct line to God and was sent to relay his instructions. so some knowledge of God is possible, in the sense of what God reportedly said or commanded or what have you. understanding his fundamental nature is a different question, however, and all the monotheistic religions (as well as buddhism and to a lesser extent hinduism) emphasize God's eternal, infinite, all-encompassing, category-defying nature.

because monothesim came along, said that the nature of god was fundamentally unknowable

most of them, as I note above, said "there is no way to God except through me, his trusty sidekick. If you do what I say God wants you to do, maybe some good stuff will happen to you. Probably. Maybe in the next world. Not necessarily in this one though. Anyway, give me some money."

and in the process absorbed and superceded all other religions

the unknowable nature and absorption of pantheistic traditions are kind of tangentially related. it's more that being able to say "God is infinite and omnipresent" allowed pantheistic cultures to accept monotheism, while also integrating their local customs into it.

xp

One thing to remember here is the old "set of all sets" paradox. To conceive of the universe as a whole invents the universe/non-universe distinction (if you dont use that distinction it becomes hard to determine what you mean by "universe") and invites the question as to whether the universe contains itself. In a lot of traditions (Cusa and Jonathan Edwards come to mind) this paradox is how god is concieved.

Cusa is an interesting guy

most religions claim that they know what God wants or requires of humanity, but this is ALWAYS because God sent an interlocutor to humanity, a spokesperson who had a direct line to God and was sent to relay his instructions. so some knowledge of God is possible, in the sense of what God reportedly said or commanded or what have you.

OK, so you'll agree that most popular religions claim to have some kind of knowledge of what god wants or has said? So isn't it fair to attack those claims, and a bit absurd for believers to then argue "well we don't really believe those things." Doesn't the idea that "god is just like the whole universe of energy or something man" directly contradict the idea that god has instructions that he sent to us through an interlocutor?

super annoying thread

islam and christianity are both making people's lives worse in africa

i guess dawkins is annoying, though, big picture

lol apropos of that article I am reading Pathways Through to Space right now! Very cool link.

guys i didn't revive this richard dawkins thread to talk about atheism

Oh yeah on topic: dawkins' preference for Christianity (as somehow more modern and thus closer to his ideal) over Islam gives the game way

you revived it to talk about the unmitigated evil of islam?

x-post

OK, so you'll agree that most popular religions claim to have some kind of knowledge of what god wants or has said?

yeah this is fairly common. there are traditions within various religions, though, that contradictorily stress than the only true knowledge of God is that which is attained through personal union with God and his creation - which is primarily the mystic schools (sufism, kabbalah, etc). then you get into some really slippery theological territory.

So isn't it fair to attack those claims

sure, go ahead.

and a bit absurd for believers to then argue "well we don't really believe those things."

are you talking about me? which believers are you referring to here? devil's in the details. this is usually pretty complicated. some sects will follow some teachings and reject others and have really complex reasoning for doing so. Fundie Christians don't keep kosher, for example (which is based on instructions in Leviticus) but they do hate them gays (which, they claim, is based on instructions in Leviticus).

Doesn't the idea that "god is just like the whole universe of energy or something man" directly contradict the idea that god has instructions that he sent to us through an interlocutor?

God contains multitudes, etc.

xp

dawkins' preference for Christianity (as somehow more modern and thus closer to his ideal) over Islam gives the game way

OTM x1000

exactly

i STILL dont know if i should donate to christian charities

dawkins' preference for Christianity (as our last and best defense against the ravening turbaned hordes) gives the game away

fixed

what he said about islam was crass and bad rhetoric. he's not the first person id ask about solving the crisis in nigeria, but i wouldn't ask you guys either really. the christianized social and political elite there is more modern (democratic) than the violent islamist opposition.

i guess the policy institute i was hoping to start was a bad idea

this is usually pretty complicated

No, it's really not as complicated as you're making it out to be. But do what you've gotta do to demonize Dawkins. He doesn't say enough totally dumbass things on his own, so it's good to you you've got his back.

dude, seriously...

super annoying thread

islam and christianity are both making people's lives worse in africa

i guess dawkins is annoying, though, big picture

― reference + ilx meme (history mayne), Wednesday, May 11, 2011 7:49 PM (47 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i kind of <3 you sometimes

lol

like literally you don't think a mysterious force that we don't have any real knowledge of created the universe? cuz um that is more or less the current scientific view of things.

so much bullshit equivocation in this

this is from awhile back in the thread, but since the rest of this conversation got really boring really quickly...

like, most non-hassidic Jews (myself included) bristle at the implication that the Hassidim are somehow a more "authentic" representation of Judaism than I am, that they represent the core tenets of Judaism (rather than a regressive, self-rightoues 18th century offshoot)

I wanted to point out that the 18th century offshoot of Hassidism was originally a radical movement against a centralized, regressive expression of Judaism. The Baal Shem Tov was deliberately contradicting ideas about the role of authority and power (originally heavily Rabbinical) in the faith, and a huge part of his work was giving communities and uneducated/impoverished ppl more agency in the performance of their religion. Moreover he was pushing a heavily gnostic inspired canon that really developed Jewish theology and eventually inspired ppl like Gershom Scholem. Not to mention an aesthetically beautiful tradition imho esp when compared to the major documents we have from the pre-Hassidic Rabbinical European context. Which I think actually makes this point even better. There is really no way these (historically relatively recent) radicals -- who btw were often considered heretical and even until today certain Hassidic sects are controversial -- are the model for "authentic representations of Judaism." Also, that yesterday's radical is often today's reactionary (or to quote Danny Ben-Israel: "The Hippies of Today are the Assholes of Tomorrow").

Also def approve of verb "study" for Talmud. I spent 6 years of (high school and post hs) schooling basically studying Talmud!

did you do the rocking thing

(i did not rock when i read augustine, hence the less committed verb)

i did! it's called shuckling!

Question: Why is Dawkins the close-minded one when his books are full of far more ideas than can be found in religious texts? Aren't believers the close-minded ones for not considering his ideas and points?

Which religious texts? Some of them are full of ideas (actually, the majority of religious texts I've ever studied are way more dense than any Dawkins book).

God contains multitudes, etc.

xp

― american thinker (Shakey Mo Collier), Wednesday, May 11, 2011 7:57 PM (Yesterday)

That is as much a cop out as "Well, the Lord works in mysterious ways." (And it's an insult to Whitman.)

Not that I don't think that believers aren't close-minded. I think human beings in general are pretty close-minded whether of faith or not.

The big three: Torah, Bible, Koran. To me they seem to chronicle quasi-historical-mythical events more than anything else. Ok, some ideas, but they are mostly very basic lessons on how to not be an asshole. Crime and Punishment grapples with moral issues in a far more interesting and revealing way than The Bible.

lol @ Torah Bible being separate things, but yeah, I think the values of those texts tend to be as mythological texts not unlike say Odysseus or Sophocles. Their value is more in establishing these shared cultural stories, myths + archetypes.

Sorry, Torah, then xtian Bible. Yes I know the Torah's in the Christian bible.

And you gotta admit The Odyssey blows the Bible away on that level. Odyssey actually has a narrative!

The Bible has pretty significant narratives...

man religion is just so dumb huh

you guys let's just settle our differences and all study for the ap test together

And you gotta admit The Odyssey blows the Bible away on that level. Odyssey actually has a narrative!

like I don't agree with this on any level. even tho I happen to love both.

Odyssey actually has a narrative!

yes, the bible is a proto-perecian meditation on chaos by comparison

i did! it's called shuckling!

― Mordy, Thursday, May 12, 2011 1:55 PM (1 hour ago)

scholarship is a really cool thing to have a like half-ceremonial physical tradition for

(i'm saying "half" b/c it probably helps you concentrate too)

it's also kind of a tic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZZB-MkQ6LE

To me they seem to chronicle quasi-historical-mythical events more than anything else. Ok, some ideas, but they are mostly very basic lessons on how to not be an asshole. Crime and Punishment grapples with moral issues in a far more interesting and revealing way than The Bible.

― thirdalternative, Thursday, May 12, 2011 8:22 AM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark

if you can't see how myths and social guidelines transmit ideas, i don't know what to say. the bible is massively dense with ideas, is a compendium of wildly different social and religious philosophies. it would take ages to fully understand and absorb.

like seriously though the old testament is a bunch of eyebleedingly epic high-stakes stories about family and lust and power and calls to duty and doubts and betrayals

maybe you meant the new testament except that's a book about a guy leading a rebellion in one of the strange outer provinces of a doomed empire who is betrayed by one of his closest friends

the odyssey has to artificially get the boats lost again twice just to string things out

And you gotta admit The Odyssey blows the Bible away on that level. Odyssey actually has a narrative!

― thirdalternative, Thursday, May 12, 2011 8:25 AM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark

the bible has many narratives, all shorter than the odyssey, but that makes no difference. literary , philosophical, historical and theological value aren't determined by page count. this isn't a contest.

i was about to say there's more pussy in the odyssey but that's not even true is it.

That is as much a cop out as "Well, the Lord works in mysterious ways." (And it's an insult to Whitman.)

whatever dude. read the Cusa reference/link I posted above, explains it more succinctly (and in science/math terms with PROOFS and everything!) way better than I can

xp

i was about to say there's more pussy in the odyssey but that's not even true is it.

bible is loaded with pussy

Ok, some ideas, but they are mostly very basic lessons on how to not be an asshole.

You do realize that the Bible is a collection of texts much more varied and complex than just the Ten Commandments section, right? Like, I don't want to sound condescending but get ye to a little Ecclesiastes, Job, Ruth, Exodus, Song of Songs, Lamentations, Hosea...

Not that I don't think that believers aren't close-minded. I think human beings in general are pretty close-minded whether of faith or not.

^^^OTM (also thx for the elucidation of the history of the Hassidim, I knew I could count on you to pop up with the scholarly wisdom)

also I would just like to say that the Book of Job is very strange, definitely interesting reading

from that link I posted above:

The paradox of the One and the Many is not only found in ancient traditions. It is the foundation of modern mathematics. All of modern mathematics is based on set theory, which was initially created by Georg Cantor in the late 19th century. At the very basis of his set theory is the intuition of set, which Cantor defined as follows: a set is a many which allows itself to be thought of as a one. Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) soon discovered in this coincidence of the One and the Many an inherent paradox, now called the Russell paradox. (Consider the set of all sets that are not members of themselves. Is this set a member of itself? If it is, then it isn’t. If it isn’t, then it is.) Although Russell tried to eliminate these paradoxes in set theory, Cantor viewed these paradoxes as Cusa might have seen them: Whereas some collections of many things can be consistently thought of as a one, others are so infinitely large that they cannot be consistently thought of as a one. Cantor called these collections inconsistent collections, and regarded them as absolutely infinite. Here we are reminded of Cusa’s teaching that the infinite involves coincident contradictories. It is at this point that the consistent mathematics of the infinite ends and the contradictory metaphysics of the absolute infinite begins. As Cantor said,

The Absolute can only be acknowledged and admitted, never known, not even approximately (quoted in Hallett, 1984).

The Infinite remains at the border comprehensibility, inviting us with its paradoxes to transcend the apparent division between finite and Infinite. As Nicholas of Cusa closes his treatise on learned ignorance,

These profound matters should be the subject of all the effort of our human intelligence, so that it may raise itself to that simplicity where contradictories coincide (Cusa, 1997).

In the 20th century, Hilbert, Russell and other mathematicians attempted to eliminate the paradoxes of set theory, so that mathematics would have a consistent and completely rational foundation. This program, however, was shown to be impossible by Kurt Gödel. Mathematics can never be completely reduced to an explicit set of axioms and logical rules. Any such attempt to fix mathematics in this way will always leave an inexplicable remainder. The mathematical system will leave out certain truths, it will be incomplete. Like Cusa’s polygons, it must either fall short of the completeness of the circle, or embrace the paradoxes of the infinite.

It is remarkable that Gödel’s proof of the incompleteness of any axiomatic system is based on a modern application of the ancient identity between numbers and letters. In Gödel’s proof, each letter or symbol used in a mathematical statement (e.g., a, b, c, =, +, -) corresponds to a unique number (e.g., 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6). These numbers can then be used to assign a unique number to each mathematical statement. For example, the symbols in “a+b=c” correspond to the sequence {1, 5, 2, 4, 3}. The first five prime numbers are then raised to these exponents and multiplied together to yield the unique number: 21 35 52 74 113=38,828,131,650. This number is unique because every number has a unique prime factorization. Moreover, this correspondence between statements about numbers and numbers themselves also relates logical relationships between mathematical statements to arithmetical relationships between numbers. A true mathematical proposition in the system thus corresponds to a true arithmetical relationship of numbers. This correspondence between levels of language allowed Gödel to construct a self-referential statement G=“this statement is not provable within the system”. Now consider whether or not G is true. Suppose that G is false. Then, since false statements are not provable by a logically consistent system, G is not provable by the system. So, if G is false, then G is not provable by the system. But G says that G is not provable by the system; so if G is false, then G is in fact true. This contradiction means that G cannot be false, as supposed. So G must be true, i.e., it is true that the statement G is not provable by the system, just as G says. Thus, G is true, but the system cannot prove it. In other words, if the system is consistent, then it is incomplete. Conversely, if the system is complete, then it must be inconsistent. The conclusion is that the mathematical system is either inconsistent or incomplete. In other words, axiomatic mathematical systems must either surrender the absolute distinction between true and false, or must surrender their claims to being totalizing accounts of truth.