Richard Dawkins

[cpayne]

The best-known philosophical atheists for most of my life have been Antony Flew (except I don’t know if he’s still an atheist?), Kai Nielsen (not looking up the last name but I think that’s right), and Bertrand Russell. Nowadays it’s Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and the linguist guy—Pinker? To me it seems evident that Dawkins aspires to be the next Bertrand Russell, except the philosophical candlepower just isn’t quite there.

An atheist friend of mine gave me *Why I Am Not a Christian *by Russell—for Christmas! Twisted sense of humor.

Also, I keep posting this but no one seems to believe me: The variation on the ontological argument by Norman Malcom ends with the conclusion, “Either it is necessary that God exists or it is logically impossible that God exists.” If this argument works (I think it does), this actually DOES switch the burden of proof. To argue against God’s existence, one would have to argue for the logical impossibility of God’s existence. Otherwise, the conclusion would be that God’s existence is necessary.

As for Popper’s falsifiability thesis: Hasn’t that been more or less abandoned by philosophers? As I remember it, it went something like, “If the conditions for the falsifiability of a statement (such as God Exists) cannot be specified, then the statement is meaningless.” But didn’t Quine or someone like him point out that no such conditions can be specified for the thesis itself? In other words, the falsifiability thesis is meaningless by its own criterion of meaning!

Please correct me if I am mis-remembering what this thesis entails.

 

[cpayne]

Dawkins is a very good writer and polemicist but his understanding of philosophical theology is fairly shallow (he dismisses the arguments of Aquinas for example in merely a few pages). He is strongest when he argues using science, but what he mostly shows is that old natural theology doesn’t work in explaining the structure of living organisms, as well as the findings of modern evolutionary biology, but that has been known for a while.

Far more powerful arguments have come classically from David Hume and more recently by J.L. Mackie and Antony Flew, and to a lesser extent Bertrand Russell.

Yes—I forgot to mention Mackie.

 

[Malcolm_McLean]

As for Popper’s falsifiability thesis: Hasn’t that been more or less abandoned by philosophers? As I remember it, it went something like, “If the conditions for the falsifiability of a statement (such as God Exists) cannot be specified, then the statement is meaningless.” But didn’t Quine or someone like him point out that no such conditions can be specified for the thesis itself? In other words, the falsifiability thesis is meaningless by its own criterion of meaning!

Popper was describing the scientific process at a certain stage. That was no mean achievement, but it wasn’t quite as significant as he thought.

For instance modern biological experiments produce masses of data, which only a computer can handle. So the main focus is on looking for patterns in the data. It is quite clearly science, but it is not about falsifying hypotheses by experiments.