Richard Dawkins - Anti -Christ or Great Thinker?

a lot of my friends in math/physics are really into dawkins & co. it's a shame because these are really smart kids who could have killer opinions on everything but just need to, like, take a humanities class.

i read some pretty scathing reviews of that pinker book when it came around, seemed like it made some pretty dumb points. but i think there's a good point to be made in that a lot of widespread declinism attitudes are founded on pretty misguided beliefs because of media or whatever and it's reassuring to look at numbers, puts things in context. our capacity to destroy ourselves is now effectively infinite though so it's now disconcerting to think what will happen if/when that number starts to increase again

Dawkins and the average Dawkinsian may not believe in inevitable progress, but they would quite likely believe that if we were all good Enlightenment moderns rather than backwards religious types then such inevitable progress forever would be our reward.

Surely Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist, is well aware of how many different ways a species can fail.

I don't know if the death of religion would result in inevitable progress forever but it would probably be a good start.

signed, STALIN

Its worth an effort surely signed me

how would you convince people to do things without religion?

(i mean things they don't actually want to do)

I would lolololol

Sorry, i'll just try that aglolololllolol nope

i don't believe in god & ppl convinces me to do things all the time

the race paradigm will end before the religion one does

i mean im not religion

who holds this idea of inevitable progress other than john q strawman?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/39/GodfreyKneller-IsaacNewton-1689.jpg/220px-GodfreyKneller-IsaacNewton-1689.jpg

An object in motion stays in motion, right? It's sort of implied by the scientific method, or determinism, or materialism, or whatever, all that stuff combined into one. There is no God and there is nothing that can be ultimately unknowable, thus all knowledge is accumulating towards some kind of goal. The goal is different for different secular theories (100% accurate predictions, hacking laws of time-space, Godlike creative and perceptive powers) but there seems to be a goal there. Maybe scientific determinism took a huge beating during the 20th century, but those biases are still there,

An object in motion stays in motion, right?

Progress is not "an object" with mass and velocity. Unlike things are unlike, film at 11.

It's sort of implied by the scientific method, or determinism, or materialism, or whatever, all that stuff combined into one.

It really isn't.

There is no God and there is nothing that can be ultimately unknowable, thus all knowledge is accumulating towards some kind of goal.

1. There are lots of things in science and math that are considered unknowable! Tons! Not only unknowable, but PROVABLY unknowable!
2. The guy who you quote above regarding the laws of motion was devoutly, DEVOUTLY religious, so.

Like, your whole paragraph is so strawmanny it should be singing "We're Off The See The Wizard."

I know the answer to that question.

but im not letting on.

because, here's the thing: i dont believe in god and am therefore only in it for chaos, destruction and personal profit.

sucks huh.

I think the "myth of progress" that Gray is targeting is really one about the idea of "control"--a sort of humanist assumption that increases in technology and knowledge afford humans ever greater abilities to control their own destiny and the conditions of their lives and such abilities will be extended to an ever larger group of people. Gray's position, if i understand him correctly, is more the opposite: that such means of control don't proceed from the conscious or rational aims of human beings but are instead the product of the impersonal forces of the animal unconscious or the entropic move to complexity of the physical universe itself.

i always liked this passage from William James:

The scope of the practical control of nature newly put into our hand by scientific ways of thinking vastly exceeds the scope of the old control grounded on common sense. Its rate of increase accelerates so that no one can trace the limit; one may even fear that the being of man may be crushed by his own powers, that his fixed nature as an organism may not prove adequate to stand the strain of the ever increasingly tremendous functions, almost divine creative functions, which his intellect will more and more enable him to wield. He may drown in his wealth like a child in a bath-tub, who has turned on the water and who can not turn it off.

Since my argument is entirely without merit perhaps i should sing "If I Only Had a Brain".

there's deffo an odd characteristic of a certain modern scientific mindset (i.e. the Dawkins one) where as much as the distinct sciences have changed internally in the last hundred years and as much as these ppl are well aware of this, SCIENCE as some kind of ideological umbrella discipline is still thought of through p old school mechanistic-materialist terms.

totally otm

Kelvin had started packing up science in 1899 iirc

also included in that Dawkins et al mindset is a really hardcore Enlightenment style belief that religion represents the vestigial remains of civilization's infancy and thus really a sort of optional add-on to societal organization rather than, as I might be inclined to see it, a rather inevitable and not-really-optional part of society. that is, religion performs certain roles in society that cannot be duplicated in science or other social systems (though maybe philosophy is another matter). in this respect it's better to be reflective about our religious practices rather than pretend we've discarded them.

Better yet to go about discarding them

'Infinite progress' was a big part of communism, and of old-skool free-market liberalism as well. It was also inherent in the scientific community until Gödel and Eisenberg and other stuff. No one should believe in this stuff today, but I'll say a lot of neo-liberalists and nu-atheists sound pretty much like they do.

in terms of epistemology, i guess you could even say Dawkins et all are dancing on the grave of the hidden god of the middle ages

wow @ that william james quote btw

Religion is culture and oft times vice-versa. The problem I have with a lot of online atheist types is that they have no idea what place this accumulated set of habits and connections and whatnot that most folks call "religion" actually have in the lives of practitioners. Going to church on Sunday, e.g., and coffee and doughnuts and punch in the fellowship hall afterwards is a communal/social glue. The theological practices or tenets aren't at the forefront for folks who aren't in authoritarian groups, American fundie/evangelical or otherwise.

idk it's just a nicely-expressed pandora's box vague moan xp

Kingfish the idea that people meeting for doughnuts on a sunday is in the top 10000000 issues with religion is....... yknow

'this accumulated set of habits and connections and whatnot that most folks call "religion" actually have in the lives of practitioners. Going to church on Sunday, e.g., and coffee and doughnuts and punch in the fellowship hall afterwards is a communal/social glue.'

I don't know if this is a common talking point but having these privileges and benefits contingent on what church you join is a legitimate reason to worry. Not just doughnuts but daycare, career advancement, etc...

i have personally not found a better way of belonging to / participating in a community than frequently attending a particular religious institution. it does seem to be the (a?) dominant way that social life (especially when you have children) is organized in the united states.

I'm not saying its an issue, I'm saying its the common practice for the vast majority of folks who aren't fuckheads using a particular social structure as an attempt to reinforce authority and bash others.

In other words, the beliefs held ain't nec the issue, it's the particular mode of expression that a minority employ. Zealotry and fundamentalism are potential problems with any beliefs at all because of how our brains are wired.

Ymmv i spose, i personally find sport, work, movies, cards, cooking, music, hell even table quizzes if yr desperate those poor sonsabitches always need friends

ilx is an okay digital communal surrogate

really you go to movies and make friends

have we ever done a thread about communities + belonging to them?

Rly you go to prayergroup and make friends

i certainly don't prayer. that shit is boring.

prayer

my social life is mostly restricted to my bandmates and people at my kids' co-op. haven't found a temple I'd like to belong to.

and I mean there's work and ILX but those seem different

i go to shul to drink + gossip: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiddush_club

Oh shit i forgot drinking, that is embarrassing

Sub the bar for church, or Tarot carts for the Bible, or frat parties for youth groups, everyone falls into social structures no matter what.

bars are expensive. also I hate constantly yelling.

Well not you, per se. Yeah i don't like bars. Some people are really into them for the social reasons.

at my temple 90% of their programming is non-prayer service related. they run a montessori school that my daughter attends, learning groups, festive + sabbath meals, sunday school classes, mommy + me classes, challah baking, drinking at synagogue (super underrated), youth groups, etc

The appeal I see in religious community is that it's officially not about economic relations. You're bound together by an idea of one another's intrinsic worth rather than practicality. It's something you get from true friendship too, but maybe never on the same scale. And, yeah, that's something for which I want secular society to have a solution.

the communal part of religion is like so not the best part, the best part is the mystical power and the grandeur, the mighty hand that led us out of the wilderness, all that

how you guys gonna go for the coffee with your neighbors over the mighty saving Hand c'mon, you impious bastards, you