A New Bad Book

[SteakNPotatoes]

I wonder why I bother.

Have fun. I’m sure your faith will be greatly strengthened with this exercise.

I will continue to look for rational criticisms somewhere else.

Good luck.

 

[Malcolm_McLean]

I didn’t accuse you of “cherry picking”, details are impotant, as well as correct word usage. I am no scientist, but my understanding of science is that it must be acurate and precise.

I am a scientist. Science is the old word for “knowledge”, and by science we mean “empirical knowledge”, unusally about natural phenomenon, though where natural science ends and social science starts is an interesting question.
Scientists describe things, count things, and measure things. Then they try to explain what they have seen, and to test those explanations.

If Dawkins wants to reject God as unscientific and irrational, then I insist his arguments against God be scientific and rational. Pantheism is not, by definition, “a non-supernatural synonym for Nature or the Universe”.

I’d say that the pantheist has to say that the universe is worthy of reverence. That isn’t Dawkin’s position.

As for my opinion of the book, my mind was made up on it’s message before I opened it- I’m reading it only to be able to refute it. On keeping an “open mind”, that would apply only to the validity, consistency, logic, and rationality of Dawkins’ specific arguments. I don’t believe I have misrepresented anything Dawkins has said, aside from bollixing the title of the book, but I have and will cite false definitions of words. His point is to deny God. You can’t accept any religion (pantheism) or religiosity as valid and deny God. Pantheism, by defintion is not atheism. If we’re going to make up our own definitions to words we can’t have rational discourse. Atheism is the complete rejetion of God. How can something be “like God” to one who does not believe God exists?

It is interesting you say ths. Dawkins is the classical hard atheist. He doesn’t believe in God, and he doesn’t believe in a supernatural. That’s quite rare. Most people who describe themselves as atheists believe in the paranormal, or in environmentalism, and the green mentality fades subtly into magic. I wouldn’t deny the title atheist to the woman who buys organic non-GM sugar in the supermarket on the grounds that it is better for her. However in fact all sucrose is chemically identical and supermarket packets are virtually 100% pure.

 

[dsb1808]

Among several philosophers, Dawkins’ book has not been received well. Noted atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel in “The Fear of Religion,” New Republic (October 23, 2006, pp. 25-29) gives one of the best critical responses. Mary Midgley, who has tangled with Dawkins before, reviews it in New Scientist (October 7, 2006). And, John Cottingham in The Tablet (October 19,2006).

I talked to the Dean of our Science program and she told me that Dawkins’ book isn’t getting good play among scientists (she, like Dawkins, is an atheist).

I watched Dawkins’ BBC video companion to the book (available on his web site). It was pathetic. Even the Dawkins supporters on campus are embarrassed.

I have a PDF of the Nagel if anyone wants a copy.

David

 

[San_Patricio]

Among several philosophers, Dawkins’ book has not been received well…
I talked to the Dean of our Science program and she told me that Dawkins’ book isn’t getting good play among scientists (she, like Dawkins, is an atheist)…
Even the Dawkins supporters on campus are embarrassed.

So, combining all that with the fact that the only person here that seems to support him doesn’t want to play anymore, I’m probably wasting my time with the book?

 

[dsb1808]

So, combining all that with the fact that the only person here that seems to support him doesn’t want to play anymore, I’m probably wasting my time with the book?

If you want to learn the best in atheist thinking, then I would say Yes. If you want to understand a new militant atheism that seems to be gaining ground, then you should know what is coming.

David

 

[hecd2]

Let me declare at the outset, that I am sympathetic to the book’s central thesis while considering it to be flawed.

Among several philosophers, Dawkins’ book has not been received well. Noted atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel in “The Fear of Religion,” New Republic (October 23, 2006, pp. 25-29) gives one of the best critical responses. Mary Midgley, who has tangled with Dawkins before, reviews it in New Scientist (October 7, 2006). And, John Cottingham in The Tablet (October 19,2006).

Mary Midgley’s ‘tangling with Dawkins before’ was very much one-sided. Midgley wrote a famously ill-informed and poorly argued critical review of ‘The Selfish Gene’, based almost entirely on a failure to understand its thesis. Dawkins replied with one of the most devastating defences of an author’s work ever written, quite demolishing Midgley’s reputation as a critic and commentator on scientific methods amongst serious thinkers. Midgley is a supporter of the fallacy of Lovelock’s pseudoreligious Gaia hypothesis. Meanwhile, Dawkins’s reputation as a scientist, based on the radical and explanatory ideas in the Selfish Gene that are becoming ever more influential, continues to grow apace.

I talked to the Dean of our Science program and she told me that Dawkins’ book isn’t getting good play among scientists (she, like Dawkins, is an atheist).

It got a mixed review in Nature from Lawrence Krauss, who was critical, as I was, of some aspects of the book, and appreciative, as I was, of Dawkins’s analysis of the best modern morality and the limited extent to which it depends on biblical morality:

"Dawkins proceeds to brilliantly review the roots of modern morality and the changing moral ‘zeitgeist’, as he calls it. With authority and wit, he marvellously dissects the absurdity, hypocrisy and selectivity that is inherent in so much of modern biblical morality. "

Krauss ended with a broadly supportive summary:

“Finally, his treatment of religion and childhood is, I believe, precisely accurate. We do our children a great disservice (which Dawkins goes so far as to call abuse) by forcing religion upon them at an age where they are far too young to digest the deep and subtle issues associated with the possibility of divine purpose. In doing so, we encourage them to rely on potentially destructive emotions rather than to use their brains. And pondering how to build a world of adults that might result from the latter rather than the former is surely what motivates Dawkins here, even if his approach might also provoke some religious fundamentalists to harden their unfortunate belief that knowledge and reason are dangerous things, to be avoided at all costs.”

Alec
evolutionpages.com