I'm not a Christian, Muslim or Jew. I don't believe in God. I find it slightly unnerving that there's still religious fundamentalists out there that flatly refuse to accept scientific evidence of evolution and more, and yet...
I can't stand Richard Dawkins.
I know that there's some dangerous ideas put out there by fundamentalists, but for the most part, if they stick to themselves and are generally good people who don't interfere with others then I don't really care what they believe.
Not necessarily this article, but generally, and especially listening to him talk live (radio, conferences etc) Richard Dawkins is arrogant and pig headed. It's kind of ironic that by dedicating his life to setting them straight, Dawkins has become as much of a fundamentalist evangelist as the religious fundamentalists he spends his time mocking.
It may be insensitive to be so blunt about it, but I think the longer you're an atheist the harder it gets to keep a "live and let live" attitude.
I liken it to having a friend who truly, sincerely believes in Santa Claus. At first, you might just laugh it off as a harmless quirk. But as time goes on, and every day you're hearing about Santa Claus this and he won't stop going off about whether or not he's on the Naughty or Nice list this year, you might start to tactfully point out some of the flaws in his belief.
How fast would Santa need to go to cover the entire world in one night? Why has there never been a photograph of Santa? What about people who don't celebrate Christmas?
Your friend laughs, and explains that you need to have more faith in Santa Claus, and that if you don't watch out you're going to be on the Naughty List. And now every time you go out for a drink your friend is telling people about Santa Claus, and he's posting Santa-related links on your Facebook wall. How long can you put up with that before you just snap?
> I know that there's some dangerous ideas put out there by fundamentalists, but for the most part, if they stick to themselves and are generally good people who don't interfere with others then I don't really care what they believe.
It's easy to have this perspective if religious fundamentalism has not had a major impact on your life. However, if your parents were religious fundamentalists, you would likely view things in a different light (or, more likely, you'd be just as religious as them).
Mine are, and I enjoyed a childhood characterized by a morbid fear of eternal damnation, church twice weekly, private Christian school to ensure that I did not come into contact with peers from less- or non-religious households, and a total abhorrence of modern science and particularly evolution. However, my parents are intelligent people - it was not their fault they were both born into religious households - and they instilled in me a great love of reading, which backfired for them because, as a science/computer geek, I eventually started in on science books and started to question everything.
For me it was like a great window of truth opened on the world and suddenly, everything made sense - and was also so much better than I had been taught. Of course, that caused no end of problems within my family, in part because I passed along my newfound knowledge to my younger siblings. Dawkins would have been proud of me as a young adolescent.
Most of my friends from those days never read what I read, and they carry on in the same fundamentalist, "the earth is 6,000 years old and homosexuality is evil" fantasy land. And of course, they indoctrinate their children just as thoroughly as they were indoctrinated. Religion excels at that.
Meanwhile, my parents, who I love dearly, are still convinced they are both heading for an eternity burning in hell because they have yet to experience the born-again moment that Protestant Christians pine for. The problem, I think, is that they are too honest with themselves. They really just need that single powerful religious moment (aka hallucination) that they would get if they fasted for three days and prayed continually in a closet, but they haven't had it. So these dear, sweet, kind and incredibly honest and ethical people are still plagued by the morbid fear I managed to cast off as an adolescent.
Just because people are "good" doesn't mean that the religious beliefs that have taken over their lives are not damaging to the lives of others and particularly children. I would take Dawkins' earnest, educated, rational and well-meaning brand of urgent atheism over fundamentalist religion any day.
I know that there's some dangerous ideas put out there by fundamentalists, but for the most part, if they stick to themselves and are generally good people who don't interfere with others ...
If only.
When Dawkins et al get their own worldwide television networks and suitably sized fund-raising and political infrastructure then I'll entertain the idea that atheist advocates are anywhere near like that of the fundamentalists.
As a Christian... I wish everyone would agree not to call it "fundamentalism". There is nothing fundamental about the views of this subset of Christians. The term is pure marketing, wild enough for good TV and, thus, wild enough to acquire impressionable followers, and the beliefs are not fundamental.
I see the stance against evolution as just a form of We vs They, a political tool more than religious, unnecessary for Christianity at large, and damaging to the religion in the long run if it persists. I have seen it create stupidity in otherwise fairly intelligent individuals because they want to be seen as part of the group, not ostracized from their equally-susceptible peers. For similar reasons, I have had friends reject the religion entirely, as they do not want to be a part of this insanity. As for me, it is another nail in the coffin of my interest in the organization aspects.
I remember when "The God Delusion" was a hot topic hearing groups of otherwise intelligent people hi-fiving each other over how smart they were because they were atheists, & how COMPLETELY WRONG religion of any kind is.
Maybe I just got all my anti-religious rage out of my system early in my life, but observing people carry on like the very fundamentalists they claim to despise (but it's ok, cuz we're secular!) is very disappointing.
Being a religious fundamentalist and good person who does not interfere with others, well those don't go together, at all.
If you honestly think that is possible, you should seriously rethink your stance.
Whether you tolerate them or not is meaningless, they cannot tolerate you, because of what you don't believe in.
You might wanna learn to recognize an enemy when you see one.
If you're describing Dawkins as fundamentalist, then you either a) don't know much about him, and what he stands for, or b) have a grave understanding of what fundamentalism means.
It bothers me that Dawkins gets that accusation that often, when it's clearly false.
Argh. This makes my blood boil. There are many good responses to this comment but I want to address one idea in particular: the idea that by putting things in the same category you can make them equal.
It's terribly poetic to say that Dawkins, in his opposition to fundamentalism, has become a fundamentalist himself. But poetic doesn't mean true, and this particular trope abuses poetry for deceptive ends. Let us exhaust this "fundamentalism" idea. What does fundamentalism mean? Does it mean strongly believing in something? Does it mean accepting that thing as true? Am I a fundamentalist gravitarian because I tell everyone who asks that gravity is true?
Any definition of fundamentalism as "strong belief that something is true" is so common as to be useless. But that's not quite what's happening here. You might characterise a fundamentalist belief in God as one that would brook no counter-argument. A stronger definition than before: "belief that something is true that accepts no evidence to the contrary". Does Dawkins believe that? Let's ask him:
"I am no more fundamentalist when I say evolution is true than when I say it is true that New Zealand is in the southern hemisphere. We believe in evolution because the evidence supports it, and we would abandon it overnight if new evidence arose to disprove it. [...] My belief in evolution is not fundamentalism, and it is not faith, because I know what it would take to change my mind, and I would gladly do so if the necessary evidence were forthcoming."
This is from his book The God Delusion, which I infer that you haven't read. I don't blame you - I put it off until last year because I had heard that Dawkins was uppity and confrontational. I can't speak to who benefits by that impression, but it is fiction. The book is, if utterly uncompromising, extremely polite and calm in tone. Dawkins treats religion with neither kid gloves nor boxing gloves. His intent isn't to injure, it's to challenge.
It frustrates me so much that people repeat mistaken ideas like "Dawkins is a fundamentalist" even while he seems to take such great pains to make his points clear. People who are not familiar with his work or his opinions accuse him for things he's never said. To gleefully point out that a biologist and someone who mutilates female genitals for a living are both "fundamentalists" is not clever. It's a deceptive attempt to make unequal things equal by putting them in the same category.
You echo that idea in your earlier allusion that people should be left to believe what they believe. Can I label anything as a belief and therefore make it equally valid? Is a 'belief' that man was created by ejaculating into a river equally valid to a 'belief' that the total momentum within a closed system will remain constant?
We can do better, and you owe it to yourself to do better. I know disagreement isn't in vogue, and it might not win you friends at parties, but it's the intellectually honest thing to do.
Please, read Dawkins' work. Disagree with him if you like, but at least don't do it out of ignorance. Feel free to start with "Fundamentalism and the Subversion of Science", the entire chapter of The God Delusion dedicated to your "fundamentalists are equal" argument.
I've listened to Richard Dawkins debate live several times. In no instance have I ever heard him being anything other than perfectly gracious, even when being repeatedly personally attacked, so I'm having a hard time understanding your criticism of him - which amounts to calling him names.
> Not necessarily this article, but generally, and especially listening to him talk live (radio, conferences etc) Richard Dawkins is arrogant and pig headed. It's kind of ironic that by dedicating his life to setting them straight, Dawkins has become as much of a fundamentalist evangelist as the religious fundamentalists he spends his time mocking.
Hardly. Dawkins can be very blunt, be he is hardly a fundamentalist. How do you think he should act?
If a scientist is producing good research that is getting published in peer reviewed journals and is generally acknowledged to be contributing to the advancement of the field, I don't care how weird his personal beliefs are.
I think the concern Dawkins tries to show in that article is that it is very difficult to trust people with religious beliefs in certain fields because those beliefs necessarily introduce a bias.
No, the idea that the human race is progressing morally is a highly contentious bit of Enlightenment philosophy. The fact that we can have this conversation over the freaking internet is ample proof that humanity is progressing intellectually, given that it requires an insane amount of distributed knowledge and capabilities that didn't exist when the Enlightenment was beginning.
Dawkins doesn't bother me any more than any other atheist I've read. The fact that he lives and is popular in my time makes him no more threatening to my faith than Thomas Paine, Voltaire, Lucretius, A.J. Ayer or Bertrand Russell. I know where my faith fits in the history of ideas, and I'm comfortable in the capacious intellectual house it affords me. Dawkins is amusing at best, annoying at worst. As a philosophical atheistic thinker I find he's small beer indeed and I'd rather read Nietzsche.
In my own intellectual journey (not necessarily the same as my journey of faith), I find no attraction to reductionism of any kind. It's always seemed to me a truncated worldview, artificial and strained, ignoring the real content of our deepest intuitions of meaning, beauty, love and justice. I side with Plato and Cicero contra Lucretius, Aquinas contra Bacon, etc. (yes, Bacon was a Christian, I disagree with his metaphysics). I believe the Scientific Revolution was a necessary reform on the excesses of Aristotelian Physics, but in many ways we through the baby out with the bathwater when we chucked Formal and Final causes out by fiat. But that's another discussion...
I write that preface to provide some context on what my real concern is with regards to Dawkins and the legions of young enthusiastic atheists that I run into, in person and on the web: the absolute philosophical illiteracy of so many naively confident advocates of reductionist science and the silly caricatures of faith they hold to. Mostly what I find in this generation of non-believer is not reflective, self-conscious atheism but rather an inherited, brittle and angry atheism that assumes the final triumph of reductionist materialist science has been accomplished. For these dogmatics the mere existence of faith or religion of any kind is really appalling and a cause for anger and aggression. There's simply no difference between, say, Wendell Berry and Pat Robertson, C.S. Lewis and Jerry Falwell, Dostoevsky and Fred Phelps.
It's just flat strange and saddening to me, to know that there are those who truly think that the Santa Clause analogy would have been devastating to St. Augustine or Tolstoy or Tolkien. That the existence of reflective intellectual Christians like Annie Dilliard, Flannery O' Connor or Walker Percy so long after Darwin is merely an anomaly to be ignored.
This kind of naivety makes not only for fruitless engagement across the theistic/atheistic boundaries, but for increasing hostility and social disintegration. When I read Dawkins and those that find his simplistic reductions of religion intellectually appealing, I'm not offended as a believer, I'm not threatened intellectually, but I am discouraged about the future of community. If the main participants in the the great God Debate (which is really no more acute now than at any other time in history, and probably a good bit less than late 19th Century Britain at least) don't have the intellectual resources or emotional charity required for deep engagement of such a weighty matter, then we not only have more anger, hostility and misunderstanding, but we become more impoverished in our self-understanding on both sides.
"I find no attraction to reductionism of any kind. It's always seemed to me a truncated worldview, artificial and strained, ignoring the real content of our deepest intuitions of meaning, beauty, love and justice."
Every piece of technology you use was built on insights provided by reductionism. Nothing you do is benefitted by the reductionist-less grand metaphysical musings of Zeus worshippers. In every age of humanity, there have been reductionists slowly advancing the state of the species, and high-concept self-proclaimed thought leaders using intuition to make eventually-meaningless but feel-good declarations about things like beauty, love, and justice. Of course reductionism doesn't feel attractive - it requires the surrender of the ego in pursuit of fact. It makes sense that you wouldn't feel threatened by alien ideas if you allow yourself to disregard reason.
There's simply no difference between, say, Wendell Berry and Pat Robertson, C.S. Lewis and Jerry Falwell, Dostoevsky and Fred Phelps.
Is this sarcasm? Maybe it's too late for me... Robertson, Falwell, and Phelps will be rightfully lost in the tides of history but C.S. Lewis and Dostoevsky had important things to say and conveyed them quite well. (I don't know Berry.)
It's just flat strange and saddening to me, to know that there are those who truly think that the Santa Clause analogy would have been devastating to St. Augustine or Tolstoy or Tolkien. That the existence of reflective intellectual Christians like Annie Dilliard, Flannery O' Connor or Walker Percy so long after Darwin is merely an anomaly to be ignored.
I am a non believer, not quite interested enough to be an "atheist", but I never paid much attention to the arguments atheists made. They seemed contrived and unnecessary. When I attended college and started meeting people from many different backgrounds, I couldn't help noticing that there are hundreds of different faiths. Which one any given person belongs to depends more on their friends, family, and geographic location than anything else. This is pretty arbitrary for something ostensibly so important and serious. So it seemed to follow that all religions must have been made up over the years.
As the years have worn on since college I've discovered that the reason I fell out of faith so easily probably had to do with how my mind worked. Like Dawkins in this respect, I had a hard time taking theology seriously. I just though it was an offshoot of history and literature but it seems people believe there is actually some philosophical credibility to it. I can actually read texts from the history of modern religion/science (like Aquinas and Lucretius) and find them interesting but modern theology I cannot digest for some reason. So it is particularly difficult for me to engage with serious theists.
That being said, I also don't read atheist texts. Seems like a waste of time. And I don't need an encyclopedia of arguments for something that seems plainly true to me.
Not this: "would have been devastating to St. Augustine or Tolstoy or Tolkien."
It's simplistic. And as an argument against specific dogma and teachings, it is quite effective. It's not meant to make a profound philosophical statement, it's meant to elicit exactly your response. Atheists are subjected to seemingly endless shitstorms (see: banana argument, peanut-butter argument, etc), it feels good to return the favor. Most of us know that we're never going to get through, so we might as well have fun.
This argument is getting really tired and I'm very disappointed to see it at the top of this thread. It's a lot like star wars fanatics claiming that people who have no interest in star wars have not considered the intricacies of canon with regards to who shot first, Han or Greedo, or the finer points in the psychological narrative of the prototypical journey Luke Skywalker finds himself on. It's worse, even, because at least star wars fans generally understand that their obsession is fictitious.
If you completely reject the foundation of superstition that underlies all religion by nature, what mullions they adorn their respective windows with becomes less and less interesting at the same time. This does not make you a dirty unwashed peasant not fit to breathe the same air as the fine milliners who have clothed the emperors noble brow; it just makes you someone who is aware that the emperor has no clothes.
Beautifully written. As somebody who could probably best be described as some flavor of agnosticism (I've heard my viewpoints described as Apathetic Agnosticism) I agree with many of your points about the shrillness of Atheists.
I was raised in a highly religious home and at a very early age, six or seven, found myself quickly asking questions that were not answerable by even the most educated theists in my family (I have two doctors of theology in my extended family) -- or rather were answered with what could be summarized succinctly and disappointingly as "because God says so".
I can understand the beauty that such belief can create -- and the nostalgic view of that beauty that can color ones worldview...even if in the end their deep explorations into the questions of faith is met only with more and more elaborate phrasings of "because God says so".
There is a beauty in the brilliant work and mental energies gone into constructing elaborate philosophies and edifices of the soul justifying that simple phrase.
I've found many atheists capable of enjoying that beauty on many levels, but with so many being the first generation of their ilk, have lived a life of persecution, disaffection, dissatisfaction and disappointment blended with feelings of betrayal often end up as harshly rejectionary of anything that smells like something they've already defended themselves and dismissed thousands of times every day.
Personally, as a person of math, science and engineering, I've come to the conclusion that "is there a God?" is a non-question in the same vein as "should trees take accounting classes?" and find atheist consumption with answering that question with a "NO!" to be both tiresome and wasteful, but I understand why they feel the need to answer it, and why they need to answer it in a shout.
I've never once see an Atheist imply that Phelps and Lewis should be judged equally, just as I've never even conceived of someone dismissing someone's accomplishments purely because of their faith. Likewise, I'd like to thank you for reinforcing the notion that Atheists are angry. As one who feels persecuted, I often do feel angry about it. But to assume that I'm not versed in religious, theological, or philosophical texts is irritating. Have you ever actually engaged these people you refer to, to explore if they have this depth of knowledge you seem to require them to have to have an opinion?
Are you equally scathing of the millions that vote to keep me from having rights because their preacher on Sunday that they blindly listen to, tell them I'm a filthy sinner? Ignorance is not unique to any side, and well-versed-ness is not a requirement for having an opinion. And from where I'm sitting, Robertson, Lewis, Falwell, Phelps, the Greeks, the Romans, they all make the same fundamental mistakes in logic as far as I'm concerned. Of course, I'm not going to get riled up about it unless the live half way across town and I have to see them with their signs on my drive to work twice a week.
For what it's worth, I don't even find Dawkins to be that terribly reductive. Much of his talks and writings revolve around very real, palpable, tangible and timely issues. He addresses them at high levels and reduces them and disassembles them. Also, I don't understand your first sentence at all, it seems like just another attempt to lump and dismiss atheists.
It's all anecdotal, no doubt, but the Atheists I know are FAR, FAR better versed in the Bible than the typical Christians that we come across who want to shout at us, insult us, call us names or inform us of the tortures we'll endure after we perish. Similarly, I'm shocked at the droves of people on my campus that haven't been to church in years, haven't read the Bible, are generally not good people, and can't even enumerate reasons why they cling to their faith, but happily rush out to vote for anti-gay Republicans. We can talk about the sad state of theological discussion in our society, but I see a far less intellectual "default" position in place.
I have always been a firm atheist viewing the church as "architecture and hypocrisy" but lately I try to be more open minded about other peoples beliefs. The marquee on the church down the road reads
"Freedom of the mind is the beginning of all other freedoms".
Great quote, and it reminded me that I have been too judgemental, which is what has bothered me most about religion.
>>the absolute philosophical illiteracy of so many naively confident advocates of reductionist science and the silly caricatures of faith they hold to.
(I can agree that Dawkins doesn't really have the background to do the theological/philosophical detailed arguments.)
I just note that to be religious is to make claims about the world ("reality", for some form of meaning) that is not based on reason or proof of facts.
So I really can't see a reason to take any religious belief more seriously than Son of Sam's world view.
I'd be more impressed if you weren't limited to insults for a motivation of what makes your supernatural creatures more likely to exist than the flying spaghetti monster.
The argument often centers on evolution vs creationism.
Yet Atheists and Christians would do well to pay more attention to Christ's resurrection, did it happen in history? Are there primary and secondary sources? How many of these sources are independent of each other and to what degree are they coherent, neutral, biased or opposed? How soon after the event were they written? Have they survived intact?
As the apostles themselves declared:
"And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead." - 1 Corinthians 15:14-15
I must preface this comment with a personal note: Dr. Dawkins is the reason I understand biology, evolution, and all living things. I have read all of his books on evolution, including The Selfish Gene, The Extended Phenotype, and many others.
This being said, I have always been appalled by Dawkins' deeply ironic crusade against religion. The simplest explanation for the widespread phenomenon of organized religion is best described by none other than Dawkins himself: Religion is a vestigial extended phenotype.
Dawkins popularized the idea of an extended phenotype. This theory postulates that the phenotypic effects of genes are not restricted to a single organism. In effect, certain gene expressions could result in behaviours which affected the said gene's rate of survival. This is a profound theory, because it posits a very strong evolutionary foundation for human socialization and behaviour. As discussed in Robert Wright's "A Moral Animal", and Matt Ridley's "The Red Queen", among many other works, recent evidence has made Dawkins' extended phenotype theory extremely plausible.
Thus, if we are to analyse religion from the view that it is a set of behaviours which maximizes a set of genes' reproductive success, everything begins making a great deal of sense. Paradoxically, if Dawkins used his his own theories to explain the phenotypic phenomenon that is organized religion, he'd have the vast support network of evolutionary scientists around the globe who would provide endless empirical examples[1] to validate his theory. Yet, Dawkins continues to treat religion as a philosophy, and attempts to tackle it philosophically. As many philosophers have pointed out, this is not Dawkins' strong point and he comes off sounding like an extremely misinformed amateur at best, and an inflammatory pundit at worst.
Furthermore, it is the scientific explanation of religion which is likely to be the most useful and profound, and as Ridley, Wright, and many others have demonstrated, what we can learn from these insights are far more pertinent to the human condition than Dawkins' misplaced philosophical crusade.
I sincerely hope Dr. Dawkins sees the unbelievable irony in his approach, and addresses it promptly. As one of the most popular scientists in media today, he could reverse a great deal of enmity that various religious groups have developed towards scientists and the scientific community. Scientific illiteracy is the greatest enemy of our time, and I do believe Dawkins is making the issue much worse by inflaming the public with his misinformed rhetoric.
Science has explained every natural phenomena known to man, and its explanatory power is only growing as we gather new empirical evidence. There is a growing body of research which demonstrates that all human behaviour is guided by a deep evolutionary purpose. This is especially true of religious behaviours which are widespread and have severe fitness costs. Religious behaviours are thus best understood as a vestigial extended phenotype, and not as an ontological philosophy.
As pointed out by others, Dawkins does consider the evolutionary mechanisms behind evolution. In The God Delusion he offers additional possible mechanisms to the one you mention. But Dawkins' goal is not to understand the mechanism by which religion came about. Rather, it is to show people that religion is both wrong and harmful.
You see, even if you find the spot in the brain that causes people to believe in God (if such a thing exists), it will not convince anyone that there is no God. The believers will simply say that God put it there. If you want to convince, logically, that there is no God, you have to do so at a philosophical level like Dawkins does. Having said that, I think it that there are more effective ways to achieve this goal than to ram people with the truth head-on like Dawkins does.
"Yet, Dawkins continues to treat religion as a philosophy, and attempts to tackle it philosophically. As many philosophers have pointed out, this is not Dawkins' strong point and he comes off sounding like an extremely misinformed amateur at best, and an inflammatory pundit at worst."
I've heard this before but I don't know much about religion or philosophy so to me Dawkins usually seems to make sense. Can you explain why you think he comes off as an amateur?
Fair enough point. Both sides tend to exaggerate their own martyrdom. Atheists are treated appallingly in many quarters of society, and for that the anger is understandable. And if you're referring to my post (re: dismissing atheism) then I didn't express well enough that I was discouraged about the kind of atheism I run into all too often, that seems either angry or merely out to tweak and provoke rather than discuss. I have tremendous respect for many strands of atheism. Nietzsche had a staggering integrity, his writing still amazes me. I have had many great conversations over many good beers with thoughtful atheists. I don't dismiss it -- I want to understand it mostly. I don't 'get' atheism the same way they don't 'get' me, but that's ok. Bar's still open and we can keep talkin. That's the kind of discussion I was trying to advocate.
Would this "bashing" be tolerated against any group other than Christians?
The 'intellectual fight' for 'enlightenment' is the thin veneer the anticlerical Jacobins lay on their murderous ideology. Loot the Church, rape the nuns, kill the christians - started here, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_the_Vend%C3%A9e, repeated too many times in many places over the last couple of centuries.
And when their legitimate heirs Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot murder a few score million people, these Jacobins start talking about the "crimes of the Inquisition".
> Would this "bashing" be tolerated against any group other than Christians?
Yes..A lot of groups are more tolerant than Christians(on average)...but if you assume that the only 'groups' that exist are Abrahamic religions only then your hypothesis would be true.
Stalin's Russia, Hitler's Germany, Mao's China: all examples of states who have exemplified Dawkin's anti-religious secularization and education in the utmost extreme. Thought-policing and religious intolerance have always lead to the massacre of countless thousands.
This isn't reddit, this isn't related to programming or even computers.
Yes, I'm Christian and I find this guy annoying.
As a programmer though, I couldn't care less about him.
Hacker is a state of mind, a kind of deep curiosity about how things work and what I can do about it. This topic, therefore, is about the ultimate hack...why are we here, how does the world work and what can I do about it?
this isnt the programming subreddit either....nowhere has it been ruled that Hacker News discussions will strictly be programming related....I understand that this annoys you but please dont be dogmatic!
[+] [-] xavoy|14 years ago|reply
I can't stand Richard Dawkins.
I know that there's some dangerous ideas put out there by fundamentalists, but for the most part, if they stick to themselves and are generally good people who don't interfere with others then I don't really care what they believe.
Not necessarily this article, but generally, and especially listening to him talk live (radio, conferences etc) Richard Dawkins is arrogant and pig headed. It's kind of ironic that by dedicating his life to setting them straight, Dawkins has become as much of a fundamentalist evangelist as the religious fundamentalists he spends his time mocking.
[+] [-] jarin|14 years ago|reply
I liken it to having a friend who truly, sincerely believes in Santa Claus. At first, you might just laugh it off as a harmless quirk. But as time goes on, and every day you're hearing about Santa Claus this and he won't stop going off about whether or not he's on the Naughty or Nice list this year, you might start to tactfully point out some of the flaws in his belief.
How fast would Santa need to go to cover the entire world in one night? Why has there never been a photograph of Santa? What about people who don't celebrate Christmas?
Your friend laughs, and explains that you need to have more faith in Santa Claus, and that if you don't watch out you're going to be on the Naughty List. And now every time you go out for a drink your friend is telling people about Santa Claus, and he's posting Santa-related links on your Facebook wall. How long can you put up with that before you just snap?
[+] [-] adriand|14 years ago|reply
It's easy to have this perspective if religious fundamentalism has not had a major impact on your life. However, if your parents were religious fundamentalists, you would likely view things in a different light (or, more likely, you'd be just as religious as them).
Mine are, and I enjoyed a childhood characterized by a morbid fear of eternal damnation, church twice weekly, private Christian school to ensure that I did not come into contact with peers from less- or non-religious households, and a total abhorrence of modern science and particularly evolution. However, my parents are intelligent people - it was not their fault they were both born into religious households - and they instilled in me a great love of reading, which backfired for them because, as a science/computer geek, I eventually started in on science books and started to question everything.
For me it was like a great window of truth opened on the world and suddenly, everything made sense - and was also so much better than I had been taught. Of course, that caused no end of problems within my family, in part because I passed along my newfound knowledge to my younger siblings. Dawkins would have been proud of me as a young adolescent.
Most of my friends from those days never read what I read, and they carry on in the same fundamentalist, "the earth is 6,000 years old and homosexuality is evil" fantasy land. And of course, they indoctrinate their children just as thoroughly as they were indoctrinated. Religion excels at that.
Meanwhile, my parents, who I love dearly, are still convinced they are both heading for an eternity burning in hell because they have yet to experience the born-again moment that Protestant Christians pine for. The problem, I think, is that they are too honest with themselves. They really just need that single powerful religious moment (aka hallucination) that they would get if they fasted for three days and prayed continually in a closet, but they haven't had it. So these dear, sweet, kind and incredibly honest and ethical people are still plagued by the morbid fear I managed to cast off as an adolescent.
Just because people are "good" doesn't mean that the religious beliefs that have taken over their lives are not damaging to the lives of others and particularly children. I would take Dawkins' earnest, educated, rational and well-meaning brand of urgent atheism over fundamentalist religion any day.
[+] [-] jamesbritt|14 years ago|reply
If only.
When Dawkins et al get their own worldwide television networks and suitably sized fund-raising and political infrastructure then I'll entertain the idea that atheist advocates are anywhere near like that of the fundamentalists.
[+] [-] Xurinos|14 years ago|reply
I see the stance against evolution as just a form of We vs They, a political tool more than religious, unnecessary for Christianity at large, and damaging to the religion in the long run if it persists. I have seen it create stupidity in otherwise fairly intelligent individuals because they want to be seen as part of the group, not ostracized from their equally-susceptible peers. For similar reasons, I have had friends reject the religion entirely, as they do not want to be a part of this insanity. As for me, it is another nail in the coffin of my interest in the organization aspects.
[+] [-] 5hoom|14 years ago|reply
I remember when "The God Delusion" was a hot topic hearing groups of otherwise intelligent people hi-fiving each other over how smart they were because they were atheists, & how COMPLETELY WRONG religion of any kind is.
Maybe I just got all my anti-religious rage out of my system early in my life, but observing people carry on like the very fundamentalists they claim to despise (but it's ok, cuz we're secular!) is very disappointing.
[+] [-] Xetrill|14 years ago|reply
Whether you tolerate them or not is meaningless, they cannot tolerate you, because of what you don't believe in.
You might wanna learn to recognize an enemy when you see one.
Edit 1: Relevant to my point (Sam Harris) http://www.youtube.com/user/Xetrill?feature=mhee#p/c/F25A63E... Edit 2: To the Rebecca Watson point (TheAmazingAtheist): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqU9JFbtucU
[+] [-] abless|14 years ago|reply
It bothers me that Dawkins gets that accusation that often, when it's clearly false.
[+] [-] sgentle|14 years ago|reply
It's terribly poetic to say that Dawkins, in his opposition to fundamentalism, has become a fundamentalist himself. But poetic doesn't mean true, and this particular trope abuses poetry for deceptive ends. Let us exhaust this "fundamentalism" idea. What does fundamentalism mean? Does it mean strongly believing in something? Does it mean accepting that thing as true? Am I a fundamentalist gravitarian because I tell everyone who asks that gravity is true?
Any definition of fundamentalism as "strong belief that something is true" is so common as to be useless. But that's not quite what's happening here. You might characterise a fundamentalist belief in God as one that would brook no counter-argument. A stronger definition than before: "belief that something is true that accepts no evidence to the contrary". Does Dawkins believe that? Let's ask him:
"I am no more fundamentalist when I say evolution is true than when I say it is true that New Zealand is in the southern hemisphere. We believe in evolution because the evidence supports it, and we would abandon it overnight if new evidence arose to disprove it. [...] My belief in evolution is not fundamentalism, and it is not faith, because I know what it would take to change my mind, and I would gladly do so if the necessary evidence were forthcoming."
This is from his book The God Delusion, which I infer that you haven't read. I don't blame you - I put it off until last year because I had heard that Dawkins was uppity and confrontational. I can't speak to who benefits by that impression, but it is fiction. The book is, if utterly uncompromising, extremely polite and calm in tone. Dawkins treats religion with neither kid gloves nor boxing gloves. His intent isn't to injure, it's to challenge.
It frustrates me so much that people repeat mistaken ideas like "Dawkins is a fundamentalist" even while he seems to take such great pains to make his points clear. People who are not familiar with his work or his opinions accuse him for things he's never said. To gleefully point out that a biologist and someone who mutilates female genitals for a living are both "fundamentalists" is not clever. It's a deceptive attempt to make unequal things equal by putting them in the same category.
You echo that idea in your earlier allusion that people should be left to believe what they believe. Can I label anything as a belief and therefore make it equally valid? Is a 'belief' that man was created by ejaculating into a river equally valid to a 'belief' that the total momentum within a closed system will remain constant?
We can do better, and you owe it to yourself to do better. I know disagreement isn't in vogue, and it might not win you friends at parties, but it's the intellectually honest thing to do.
Please, read Dawkins' work. Disagree with him if you like, but at least don't do it out of ignorance. Feel free to start with "Fundamentalism and the Subversion of Science", the entire chapter of The God Delusion dedicated to your "fundamentalists are equal" argument.
[+] [-] logjam|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] niete|14 years ago|reply
Hardly. Dawkins can be very blunt, be he is hardly a fundamentalist. How do you think he should act?
[+] [-] tzs|14 years ago|reply
If a scientist is producing good research that is getting published in peer reviewed journals and is generally acknowledged to be contributing to the advancement of the field, I don't care how weird his personal beliefs are.
[+] [-] tallanvor|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tuxcanfly|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fecklessyouth|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] barry-cotter|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davesims|14 years ago|reply
In my own intellectual journey (not necessarily the same as my journey of faith), I find no attraction to reductionism of any kind. It's always seemed to me a truncated worldview, artificial and strained, ignoring the real content of our deepest intuitions of meaning, beauty, love and justice. I side with Plato and Cicero contra Lucretius, Aquinas contra Bacon, etc. (yes, Bacon was a Christian, I disagree with his metaphysics). I believe the Scientific Revolution was a necessary reform on the excesses of Aristotelian Physics, but in many ways we through the baby out with the bathwater when we chucked Formal and Final causes out by fiat. But that's another discussion...
I write that preface to provide some context on what my real concern is with regards to Dawkins and the legions of young enthusiastic atheists that I run into, in person and on the web: the absolute philosophical illiteracy of so many naively confident advocates of reductionist science and the silly caricatures of faith they hold to. Mostly what I find in this generation of non-believer is not reflective, self-conscious atheism but rather an inherited, brittle and angry atheism that assumes the final triumph of reductionist materialist science has been accomplished. For these dogmatics the mere existence of faith or religion of any kind is really appalling and a cause for anger and aggression. There's simply no difference between, say, Wendell Berry and Pat Robertson, C.S. Lewis and Jerry Falwell, Dostoevsky and Fred Phelps.
It's just flat strange and saddening to me, to know that there are those who truly think that the Santa Clause analogy would have been devastating to St. Augustine or Tolstoy or Tolkien. That the existence of reflective intellectual Christians like Annie Dilliard, Flannery O' Connor or Walker Percy so long after Darwin is merely an anomaly to be ignored.
This kind of naivety makes not only for fruitless engagement across the theistic/atheistic boundaries, but for increasing hostility and social disintegration. When I read Dawkins and those that find his simplistic reductions of religion intellectually appealing, I'm not offended as a believer, I'm not threatened intellectually, but I am discouraged about the future of community. If the main participants in the the great God Debate (which is really no more acute now than at any other time in history, and probably a good bit less than late 19th Century Britain at least) don't have the intellectual resources or emotional charity required for deep engagement of such a weighty matter, then we not only have more anger, hostility and misunderstanding, but we become more impoverished in our self-understanding on both sides.
[+] [-] jmathes|14 years ago|reply
Every piece of technology you use was built on insights provided by reductionism. Nothing you do is benefitted by the reductionist-less grand metaphysical musings of Zeus worshippers. In every age of humanity, there have been reductionists slowly advancing the state of the species, and high-concept self-proclaimed thought leaders using intuition to make eventually-meaningless but feel-good declarations about things like beauty, love, and justice. Of course reductionism doesn't feel attractive - it requires the surrender of the ego in pursuit of fact. It makes sense that you wouldn't feel threatened by alien ideas if you allow yourself to disregard reason.
[+] [-] naner|14 years ago|reply
Is this sarcasm? Maybe it's too late for me... Robertson, Falwell, and Phelps will be rightfully lost in the tides of history but C.S. Lewis and Dostoevsky had important things to say and conveyed them quite well. (I don't know Berry.)
It's just flat strange and saddening to me, to know that there are those who truly think that the Santa Clause analogy would have been devastating to St. Augustine or Tolstoy or Tolkien. That the existence of reflective intellectual Christians like Annie Dilliard, Flannery O' Connor or Walker Percy so long after Darwin is merely an anomaly to be ignored.
I am a non believer, not quite interested enough to be an "atheist", but I never paid much attention to the arguments atheists made. They seemed contrived and unnecessary. When I attended college and started meeting people from many different backgrounds, I couldn't help noticing that there are hundreds of different faiths. Which one any given person belongs to depends more on their friends, family, and geographic location than anything else. This is pretty arbitrary for something ostensibly so important and serious. So it seemed to follow that all religions must have been made up over the years.
As the years have worn on since college I've discovered that the reason I fell out of faith so easily probably had to do with how my mind worked. Like Dawkins in this respect, I had a hard time taking theology seriously. I just though it was an offshoot of history and literature but it seems people believe there is actually some philosophical credibility to it. I can actually read texts from the history of modern religion/science (like Aquinas and Lucretius) and find them interesting but modern theology I cannot digest for some reason. So it is particularly difficult for me to engage with serious theists.
That being said, I also don't read atheist texts. Seems like a waste of time. And I don't need an encyclopedia of arguments for something that seems plainly true to me.
[+] [-] burgerbrain|14 years ago|reply
"It's just flat strange and saddening to me"
This is why the analogy is used.
Not this: "would have been devastating to St. Augustine or Tolstoy or Tolkien."
It's simplistic. And as an argument against specific dogma and teachings, it is quite effective. It's not meant to make a profound philosophical statement, it's meant to elicit exactly your response. Atheists are subjected to seemingly endless shitstorms (see: banana argument, peanut-butter argument, etc), it feels good to return the favor. Most of us know that we're never going to get through, so we might as well have fun.
[+] [-] etherael|14 years ago|reply
If you completely reject the foundation of superstition that underlies all religion by nature, what mullions they adorn their respective windows with becomes less and less interesting at the same time. This does not make you a dirty unwashed peasant not fit to breathe the same air as the fine milliners who have clothed the emperors noble brow; it just makes you someone who is aware that the emperor has no clothes.
Enjoy your delusions.
[+] [-] bane|14 years ago|reply
I was raised in a highly religious home and at a very early age, six or seven, found myself quickly asking questions that were not answerable by even the most educated theists in my family (I have two doctors of theology in my extended family) -- or rather were answered with what could be summarized succinctly and disappointingly as "because God says so".
I can understand the beauty that such belief can create -- and the nostalgic view of that beauty that can color ones worldview...even if in the end their deep explorations into the questions of faith is met only with more and more elaborate phrasings of "because God says so".
There is a beauty in the brilliant work and mental energies gone into constructing elaborate philosophies and edifices of the soul justifying that simple phrase.
I've found many atheists capable of enjoying that beauty on many levels, but with so many being the first generation of their ilk, have lived a life of persecution, disaffection, dissatisfaction and disappointment blended with feelings of betrayal often end up as harshly rejectionary of anything that smells like something they've already defended themselves and dismissed thousands of times every day.
Personally, as a person of math, science and engineering, I've come to the conclusion that "is there a God?" is a non-question in the same vein as "should trees take accounting classes?" and find atheist consumption with answering that question with a "NO!" to be both tiresome and wasteful, but I understand why they feel the need to answer it, and why they need to answer it in a shout.
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] drivebyacct2|14 years ago|reply
Are you equally scathing of the millions that vote to keep me from having rights because their preacher on Sunday that they blindly listen to, tell them I'm a filthy sinner? Ignorance is not unique to any side, and well-versed-ness is not a requirement for having an opinion. And from where I'm sitting, Robertson, Lewis, Falwell, Phelps, the Greeks, the Romans, they all make the same fundamental mistakes in logic as far as I'm concerned. Of course, I'm not going to get riled up about it unless the live half way across town and I have to see them with their signs on my drive to work twice a week.
For what it's worth, I don't even find Dawkins to be that terribly reductive. Much of his talks and writings revolve around very real, palpable, tangible and timely issues. He addresses them at high levels and reduces them and disassembles them. Also, I don't understand your first sentence at all, it seems like just another attempt to lump and dismiss atheists.
It's all anecdotal, no doubt, but the Atheists I know are FAR, FAR better versed in the Bible than the typical Christians that we come across who want to shout at us, insult us, call us names or inform us of the tortures we'll endure after we perish. Similarly, I'm shocked at the droves of people on my campus that haven't been to church in years, haven't read the Bible, are generally not good people, and can't even enumerate reasons why they cling to their faith, but happily rush out to vote for anti-gay Republicans. We can talk about the sad state of theological discussion in our society, but I see a far less intellectual "default" position in place.
[+] [-] J3L2404|14 years ago|reply
"Freedom of the mind is the beginning of all other freedoms".
Great quote, and it reminded me that I have been too judgemental, which is what has bothered me most about religion.
[+] [-] berntb|14 years ago|reply
(I can agree that Dawkins doesn't really have the background to do the theological/philosophical detailed arguments.)
I just note that to be religious is to make claims about the world ("reality", for some form of meaning) that is not based on reason or proof of facts.
So I really can't see a reason to take any religious belief more seriously than Son of Sam's world view.
I'd be more impressed if you weren't limited to insults for a motivation of what makes your supernatural creatures more likely to exist than the flying spaghetti monster.
[+] [-] _urga|14 years ago|reply
Yet Atheists and Christians would do well to pay more attention to Christ's resurrection, did it happen in history? Are there primary and secondary sources? How many of these sources are independent of each other and to what degree are they coherent, neutral, biased or opposed? How soon after the event were they written? Have they survived intact?
As the apostles themselves declared:
"And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead." - 1 Corinthians 15:14-15
[+] [-] cappsjulian1|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abredow|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FD3SA|14 years ago|reply
This being said, I have always been appalled by Dawkins' deeply ironic crusade against religion. The simplest explanation for the widespread phenomenon of organized religion is best described by none other than Dawkins himself: Religion is a vestigial extended phenotype.
Dawkins popularized the idea of an extended phenotype. This theory postulates that the phenotypic effects of genes are not restricted to a single organism. In effect, certain gene expressions could result in behaviours which affected the said gene's rate of survival. This is a profound theory, because it posits a very strong evolutionary foundation for human socialization and behaviour. As discussed in Robert Wright's "A Moral Animal", and Matt Ridley's "The Red Queen", among many other works, recent evidence has made Dawkins' extended phenotype theory extremely plausible.
Thus, if we are to analyse religion from the view that it is a set of behaviours which maximizes a set of genes' reproductive success, everything begins making a great deal of sense. Paradoxically, if Dawkins used his his own theories to explain the phenotypic phenomenon that is organized religion, he'd have the vast support network of evolutionary scientists around the globe who would provide endless empirical examples[1] to validate his theory. Yet, Dawkins continues to treat religion as a philosophy, and attempts to tackle it philosophically. As many philosophers have pointed out, this is not Dawkins' strong point and he comes off sounding like an extremely misinformed amateur at best, and an inflammatory pundit at worst.
Furthermore, it is the scientific explanation of religion which is likely to be the most useful and profound, and as Ridley, Wright, and many others have demonstrated, what we can learn from these insights are far more pertinent to the human condition than Dawkins' misplaced philosophical crusade.
I sincerely hope Dr. Dawkins sees the unbelievable irony in his approach, and addresses it promptly. As one of the most popular scientists in media today, he could reverse a great deal of enmity that various religious groups have developed towards scientists and the scientific community. Scientific illiteracy is the greatest enemy of our time, and I do believe Dawkins is making the issue much worse by inflaming the public with his misinformed rhetoric.
Science has explained every natural phenomena known to man, and its explanatory power is only growing as we gather new empirical evidence. There is a growing body of research which demonstrates that all human behaviour is guided by a deep evolutionary purpose. This is especially true of religious behaviours which are widespread and have severe fitness costs. Religious behaviours are thus best understood as a vestigial extended phenotype, and not as an ontological philosophy.
[1]. http://evolution-of-religion.com/publications/
[+] [-] robertk|14 years ago|reply
http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Dawkins/viruses-of-the-mind...
He is aware that his approach is not optimal in terms of changing people's minds, but I'm not so sure he cares.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_2xGIwQfik
[+] [-] guygurari|14 years ago|reply
You see, even if you find the spot in the brain that causes people to believe in God (if such a thing exists), it will not convince anyone that there is no God. The believers will simply say that God put it there. If you want to convince, logically, that there is no God, you have to do so at a philosophical level like Dawkins does. Having said that, I think it that there are more effective ways to achieve this goal than to ram people with the truth head-on like Dawkins does.
[+] [-] raptorex|14 years ago|reply
I've heard this before but I don't know much about religion or philosophy so to me Dawkins usually seems to make sense. Can you explain why you think he comes off as an amateur?
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] davesims|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shithead|14 years ago|reply
The 'intellectual fight' for 'enlightenment' is the thin veneer the anticlerical Jacobins lay on their murderous ideology. Loot the Church, rape the nuns, kill the christians - started here, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_the_Vend%C3%A9e, repeated too many times in many places over the last couple of centuries.
And when their legitimate heirs Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot murder a few score million people, these Jacobins start talking about the "crimes of the Inquisition".
Good going.
[+] [-] freemarketteddy|14 years ago|reply
Yes..A lot of groups are more tolerant than Christians(on average)...but if you assume that the only 'groups' that exist are Abrahamic religions only then your hypothesis would be true.
[+] [-] _urga|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ceejayoz|14 years ago|reply
This is a far cry from what Dawkins advocates - free thought.
[+] [-] TheRevoltingX|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davesims|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] odiroot|14 years ago|reply
Since we established this isn't reddit, your personal opinions on Dawkins shouldn't decide whether this article should or shouldn't be here.
[+] [-] freemarketteddy|14 years ago|reply