Follow the breadcrumbs back Robin.
Breadcrumbs? someone needs to sweep the floor!! (Joke) Thanks
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Richard Dawkins has been on my mind in the last couple days after I accidentally(and regretabally) stumbled upon few of his opinions.
- Saying that only because scientists may be unable to explain origins of the universe, that does not mean Christians should. But apart from creationists nobody tries doing soo, someone should tell him. Saying that you believe God made the world is not the same as claiming you know exactly what happened in scientific terms.
- Writing a whole essay explaining that science is not a religion… Ermm, who said it was?
- Mocking pro lifers because they eat steaks. OK, I’m not what any one would call a pro lifer but I find comparing shooting an elephant with aborting a pregnancy extremely distasteful, to say the least. He’s using similar argument also to blame animal cruelty on Christians, which I have seen a lot of in certain circles but maybe that’s for a different tread.
- Apparently Richard expressed view that breeding people in the same way as dogs would be beneficial cause we could achieve desirable traits etc. Yeah, cause no one ever thought of that before…
The point I’m trying to make is that why no one seems to be challenging him for some very worrying views? Especially that he often blames Christians for views their views, especially on women and children.
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I’ve never thought the fact that this universe like myself has an expiration date was any reason not to glory in the accomplishment it has been and still is. I don’t think I am due eternal life and don’t require such a guarantee to find wonder in nature or human creations.
I’ve tried to respond to your post but you seem to have in mind much more than what you say. If you would be more specific perhaps I could as well.
It is not about pie in the sky. It is about justice. While we are finding wonder and joy in creation, which is a good thing, billions of wrongs go unredressed. Billions have lived short lives of painful existence as they suffer and die. Materialism to atheism is calvinism to Christianity. Good for the lucky elect who either God chose or those born in a specific time and place who get to experience these wonders of life and human creation. As Christians we do believe in sin, and despite that Garden story original sin seems nonsensical, we can’t shake the fact that while the world is ultimately good, there is something wrong with it. It is about having a worldview that is tenable. RD would be quite at home pointing out all the absurdities and immoralities of believers. One wonders how on God’s green earth he has figured out how we “ought” to live. Or does he just believe his moral opinions are complete subjective? Don’t we all take morality seriously? Don’t we have to?
I would never s
That was my inspiration in starting the thread and sharing the suggested minute long portion of that second video by Iain McGilchrist. I think those who trade on their reputation in one area in order to get away with making outlandish claims in another need to be called out.
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Open-view theism disagrees. I assume free will. It is logically impossible to even argue against it for you have to presuppose you found some truth about the universe and are sharing it. You have to suppose truth or more than just whatever our brain happens to condition us to believe.
With God there is still mystery. That exotic otherness to the universe. With materialism, it is just clockwork by default.
Vinnie
I didn’t listen to it with that in mind so I’m not sure. But he does go on to delineate the limitations of rationality. Rationality is a closed system which can only operate on what it has admitted into itself. Ignoring what doesn’t fit with ones expectation of rational tidiness guarantees that rationality will always be self consistent. But unless we are aware of its limitations we are prone to just end up occupying a small part of reality and imagining it is the cosmos itself. He points to Dawkins as an example of what we must avoid. He goes into this in a several minute band beginning just before and mostly after the part I suggested.
I’ve no idea what free will is. Does God have it?
Klax
I am an open theist incompatibilist libertarian… comes largely from the existentialist roots of my theism. Had to dig up what it was we were fighting about in the other thread… God set us up to fail? My contention was if things are “rigged” then it was habits and consequences of the choices of human beings which did it. And apparently my willingness to take the Bible as seriously as allowed by logic and scientific findings tends to irritate you as well. I certainly don’t take it as myth in the dismissive sense that you claim.
With the idea of God as some kind of divine watchmaker you also get a clockwork universe. I am not a big fan of the mystery woo woo approach either, but I do favor an understanding of God more in the role of a shepherd, creating living things for a relationship. I see the whole idea of design as incompatible with the very meaning of the word “life”. We are using the machinery of life to design our own viruses for medical purposes, and I do not think we are creating life, but machines.
P.S. My use of the word “libertarian” is in the much rarer sense of someone who believes in free will, rather than in the political philosophy. I acknowledge the many logical difficulties and limitations of free will, but I do think it exists nevertheless. It is rare and fragile rather than guaranteed or absolute. I once suggested that it may be little more than a sense of ownership for a random element in the machinery of our decision making. But I don’t think it changes the fact that we do sometimes choose who/what we are by becoming the cause of what we do in an example of causality which is not perfectly time-ordered.
I don’t imagine you intend to be arguing that our desire for justice is a reason for supposing there must be a God to sort us out and ensure we all get our just desserts. Wrongs are committed and suffering is rampant but I don’t find that evidence either for or against a God. I’m not a Christian and don’t share your conception of God. However I do find within my own experience what could be taken as grounds for belief in a wiser Other. I just don’t see any reason to combine that with a belief in a cosmic creator. If I’d been well raised within the church I could see how I would no doubt have made that connection too. But I wasn’t and it would just seem gratuitous to do so now.
Meeh militant atheism.As i said countless of times and speaking by the records Christianity is diminishing sadly.THere will come a time which im sure since we are gonna make the minority in case of religion we are gonna get persecuted.That may happen with other religions as well but im speaking about Christianity.If Dawkins fanatics listen to him well congratulations.Maybe in some years from now we will have another Nero or another USSR
I am afraid that I do not appreciate Dawkins when he speaks in topics of science, because he mixes his ideology with science so completely that one cannot tell where his ideology stops and science begins, so I must conclude that they are one.
There is no evidence to support his theory of the independent Selfish Gene that magically produces intelligent, interdependent human and other species. This doesn’t mean that evolution is wrong, just that Dawkins is wrong.
In fact I just read a book by Robert Jastrow, Until the Sun Dies, His understanding of the evolution of humanity is much better that Dawkins, because it is based on the natural history, not speculation in the form of strange game theories.
“The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.”
This well known quote appears to be based on scientific facts, but it is not. There is no way life could exist in the universe unless the environment of earth was suitable for it. The Anthropic Principle has a wide following in science and it concludes that the universe was designed for life and human beings in particular. Darwin and Dawkins base their view of “natural evil” on the basis of some parasites, which make up a small percentage of all life on earth.
While I am concerned about Dawkins and Co., I am more concerned about his enablers who seem to agree with the specious Selfish Gene theory when they should know better.
Good science is the answer for bad science. The Selfish Gene is not good science. If possibly we cannot agree as to how life evolved, we should at least agree on that.
Rationality as based on the Logos of John 1 and Heraclitus is not a closed system. Mythos as a religious principle is.
These are generally ones with bad scientific claims, or badly mixing science and philosophy, or the ones promoting a science-religion warfare narrative.
I can’t remember which Asimov book it is, but it tends into the mixing category, if I remember correctly.
Most of the books are promoting YEC or ID, because my father keeps being given such things; But this is starting to get off-topic.
That’s the analogue of saying, after hearing a fire and brimstone preacher, “I’ve never read the Bible and nothing you say inclines me to do so.” No is entitled to condemn someone else’s sincerely held views without giving them a fair hearing. (I have done so, and I disagree with him.)
Precisely the militant atheist’s view of religion.
Selfish-gene theory is simply the view, which is half-true, that the body is a gene’s way of making another gene, and evolution operates by competition between genes. The other half of the truth is that genes are a body’s way of making another body, and that evolution operates by competition between bodies.
Of course not, and Dawkins doesn’t deny that.
Yes. But there are two mythoi: the mythos of concern and the mythos of freedom.
Determinism is not inconsistent with free will: when we are acting of our own free will, we are say we are determined to do such-and-such.
There is nothing in Calvinism to affirm that most people are not saved: that is a distortion. Indeed, Calvin himself believed that God is good, and that therefore most people are saved. He just affirms that God knows in advance who is and who is not, which is consistent with His omniscience.
That’s a distortion too. Scientific materialism hasn’t believed in a clockwork universe since 1905, if not earlier.
Ray Smullyan thought that God had to hypnotize himself into thinking he had free will, so that he could hypnotize the snake, so that the snake could hypnotize Adam and Eve. Of course, God set things up so that his and the snake’s delusions would eventually expire. DId Smullyan believe that? I don’t know.
As for me, I believe in ho agnostos theos because I have experience of him, and I believe he is unknown because he told me so.
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I am not following. We may have different definitions of determinism. To me it is an either or. How do you define determinism?
Does that apply to the contingent of neuroscientists denying free will and advocating strict determinism? Yes, 1905 was a big year for patent clerks. We get special relativity with its oddities about light and time dilation and also the photoelectric effect leading to the wave/particle duality, the HUP a bit later and a bunch of bizarre quantum mechanics (tunneling, entanglement, virtual particles). I suppose we can throw in dark matter and dark energy for good measure just because of how strange they are. Things definitely got really weird. The clockwork universe has been abandoned. Yet this is mainly at the microlevel is it not? On the macro-level and scales which humans and free will operate, does not determinism materialism still rule the day? NASA wouldn’t have rovers on Mars if they believed otherwise would they?
He affirms that God only knows or that He chooses and He elects? To me it doesn’t matter if God only predestined one to eternal torment. That is one too many.
Vinnie
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Both matter but concern is the one a non religious person most needs to tune into in order to avoid cynicism and despair. But I’m not sure why you mention it here.
Seems like youre very sure these are some sort of myth.Since freedom is a myth i guess subjucation myst be reality huh?What you just wrote for me just makes no sense.Its either out barrier of language or you speaking non-sense.How is freedom and concern something that all people have a myth is beyond me
I think it’s better if I explain what I mean by free will. In particular, I do not mean theological free will, the choice between God and Satan. I mean freedom in the ordinary sense, it which we can do what we choose to do or desire to do (within obvious limits). I am, for example, holding a spoon at the present time. I can choose to drop it or not: my will is free. This is true quite independently of whether making one choice or the other is causally determined by what has happened to me, or is happening to me. After all, why would we want the freedom to do other than what we choose to do or desire to do? Thus Quine. But Calvin himself agrees: it’s just that he also believes that without regeneration, free will is evil will.
Perhaps God agrees. Although Calvinists are not usually universalists (those who believe that everyone will be saved) nor vice versa, there is no inconsistency between the two views.
Every Calvinist will struggle with God’s sovereign choices at various points in their life, including this one. I have host of dearly loved non-Christian friends and family, not to mention two young sons. But I find the opposing view equally troubling, namely, that God being able to save some, would allow them to spend an eternity in hell because it is what they wanted. My son may want to drink the chemicals under the sink, but that is situation in which I am not going to respect his free will.
Ultimately, no theological position (Calvinism, Arminainism, universalism, open theism, etc.) is theologically unassailable. But personally, I am more comfortable with a God who, although not bound to save any, elects to save some, than any of the other options on the table. Not to mention, the position which I believe makes best sense of what I see in the bible.