Well, it’s two different things to find their ideas interesting or true… and to have some opinion about them personally. (ie: to make the claim that they are a ‘jerk’ or whatever).
I have no real opinion about any of these people on a personal level. That takes a different type of research and/or assessment. Probably from actually knowing them personally.
“Yet, Feynman could do college level mathematics as a young boy and had encyclopedic knowledge of various other scientific fields, before he even started work on Quantum Electro Dynamics.”
I don’t think he is saying there is no differences between people. But only that there is no real good differences between regular Catholics and the Pope. Only superficial ones.
“One Pope wrote Humanae Vitae or On Human Life, which deals with the possibilities that new science brings for human life.”
Then it would seem like philosophers and scientists – or even theologians – would be as celebrated as the Pope. Which doesn’t seem to be the case.
It seems only incidental to them being Popes and so having a lot of spare time. Like Jimmy Carter writing, later in his life, about Palestine.
““How come man is the only creature to discover and talk about the theory of evolution?” Why can’t other carbon life-forms like animals do it?”
I don’t understand the question. It’s either being asinine or coming from a context not stated here.
@Libertyandlife, I think the main argument coming from the atheist side is the negative side-effects of religion are inherent as they view it as being inherently authoritarian. That’s why I like Hitchens’ arguments concerning human freedom from God, although he doesn’t extend these concepts to the government, obviously. They are two separate arguments, but for antitheist libertarians, they are woven together.
Saying, “atheists can be dicks too” misses the point that antitheists want to make. On the topic of something like circumcision, many atheists would not do that to children unless there was some verifiable, scientific reason behind doing it to help the health of the child, but a religious person would do it out of respect for custom/authority and because it is a tenet of their religion. The effectiveness of circumcision is ancillary to those people. It’s the same argument as pointing out Stalin and Pol Pot; they didn’t do what they did because they were humanists, they did what they did because they were psychopaths. A lot of religious doctrine, because it claims to have the undoubted, objective answer to most problems, short-circuits a lot of rational consideration and causes people to do things they otherwise wouldn’t consider.
I won’t spend much time on this but :-
Sagan seems a bit kooky but more of a scientist than a philosopher which is ok.Plus he was an agnostic.Feynman I’m unfamiliar with.Dawkins I used to be something of a supporter of ,after reading God delusion at 15 but less so now.I had a brief scan of his central thesis recently and have also seen his comments/speeches recently and I find it weak,unpersuasive,aggression,dishonest and ignorant in many cases.As a scientist he’s actually rather good.Hitchens is a hack personally and philosophically.Same goes for sam Harris.
If you mean their evangelical atheism, I find it irrational.
I also dislike the hijacking of the term “skeptic” to mean “true believer in atheism”, when an actual skeptic is almost a fallibilist, not drawing conclusions EITHER way without solid proof.
You can’t prove there is notthing outside of the measurable, testable boundaries of this universe. So a skeptic reserves final conclusion. He can find it unlikely, he can rule out specific details of specific supernatural claims, but he can’t rationally be atheist.
And, of course, real scientific reasoning is not only skeptical, but fallibilist. It denies any certainty, however upsetting this is for the faithful Objectivists. All knowledge and observation is a best guess/approximation, at most. This is something on which Mises, Popper, and Einstein agreed, and where the above abandoned scientific realism for the junk science that poses as Authority, today.
Kaz, when you say all knowledge and observation is a best guess, you are right.
The universe is perhaps 14 billion years old. But there are (possibly) stars which are more than 14 billion light years away. So the time for their light to reach earth is more than the age of the universe itself. Some have guessed from gravity and movements of stars that there may be stars beyond the observable stars, but we are limited to 14 billion light years of the galaxy always. Since 10,000 years is a pretty small number compared to 14 billion, our ancestors have only seen the same stars we have from the surface and were no less advantaged.
And then there is chaos theory, where Lorenz observed that small error approximations keep piling up until they make a big difference, and where things change faster than we can observe and understand them.
This is the scientific side of limitations of knowledge and uncertainty. Keynes and Hayek believed in these things as far as they applied to physical human beings, who are more complex than atoms and planets, but now we know that they are just as true for everything. We can only be skeptics and nothing else, if we are to reach a final resolution.
But a skeptic’s loss is never reaching conclusions, and man’s “animal spirit” and desire for “creative destruction” have allowed him to make perpetual series of mistakes which allow him to progress further towards understanding of what’s going on, but only roughly.
I’m generally not a fan of the group of new atheist “scientists” who place themselves as political and philosophical figureheads, particularly the likes of Dawkins and Hitchens. As public intellectuals, what they’re really doing has nothing to do with science per se - they’re taking on the role of philosopher and social commentator, and their status as “scientists” doesn’t give them any special authority in this respect as I see it. I think that they should stick to what they do best within their professions rather than put themselves in such a position.
I think someone like Carl Sagen is in an entirely different category, since he largely restricted himself to scientific education and cosmological speculation.
I don’t listen to scientists when they talk about religion, or anything other than what their expertise is (Sagan made notoriously erroneous statements about the history of religion vs. science). Would you ask a mason about plumbing?
Talk to a theologian, historian, or a religious studies scholar.
Why wouldn’t you listen to Richard Dawkins talk about science?
(His whole thing is that the religions are just a bunch of bad scientific hypotheses designed to address how some specific things about the universe or world came about.)
“Why wouldn’t you listen to Richard Dawkins talk about science?”
I would, but I have no interest in his ideas about religion.
To him, religion is science.
I agree with the premise that religions start as an attempt at science. That seems almost a truism; they sit around the cave listening to the thunder, and try to explain what it is. Not knowing how the scientific method works, they come up with giants rolling boulders.
The reason not to listen to Dawkins on theology, though, is that he constantly proves himself ignorant of even basic theological knowledge. He makes arguments that were either refuted by theologists already (which doesn’t prove they’re right, but means he should have addressed their refutation), or AGREED WITH by theologists, already, and therefore clearly aren’t relevant to the discussion.
For example, Augustine of Hippo dismissed Biblical literalism 1500 years ago. It’s hardly pivotal to even Christianity today, much less the possibility of things outside the testable bounds of observation.
In fact, Dawkins, like so many atheistic evangelists, appears to be ignorant of anything outside of a narrow band of Christianity that he hates. How much time does he spend on Buddhism? On the non-organized-religion possibilities of things that cannot be observed and tested?
Proving there was no Great Flood has nothing to do with atheism. It’s too specific.
Doesn’t he also address the Biblical figuratism?
Maybe he simply tries to focus on what most of his potential audience is familiar with.
Are you saying that he doesn’t do anything but try to disprove specific, non-pivotal things?
“You can’t prove there is notthing outside of the measurable, testable boundaries of this universe.”
Yes, you can. Via logic.
“Something” must be an object. And that object must be matter; especially given that the ‘consciousness’ properties inherant to all theism is an emergent property of matter.
The testable boundaries of the universe are all that is made of matter. Which is the definition of the universe: all that is. It is nonsensical to say outside the boundaries of the universe. Because if something is out there, it must be within the universe.
Dawkins doesn’t address theologians, he says, because he doesn’t see that as the main drive of religion today. But people in megachurches and governments.
Mises says, IIRC in theory and history, that the problem of Thomism is two-fold. One that it merely builds up from what is taken for granted in scriptures, not from metaphysics itself. And two… that it doesn’t solve the problem of religion and rationalism. But only splits religious people between those who claim rationality and the majority who claim unwavering faith (in addition to the third: those who outside Christianity all together). In a way, theology unto itself cannot accomplish anything.
I don’t mind their message, no God is much more reasonable then a god existing. I just don’t think it’s worth wasting time on arguing. Besides most people are influenced much more by crappy culture then just religion, most people act and behave very similarly even with different creeds. Only the really religious folks can be a problem, but not all of them are. Some of them can be quite peaceful.
There is a lot of wisdom and beauty that can be found in religions as well as bullshit. I’ve learned much about self discipline, loving yourself and family, and good ethics from different religions. I just don’t take their ontological message seriously. We should be focused on spreading the concept of liberty and non aggression.
Get off your anti-theistic hump and accept human beings for the flaws they have, and work with what you can. If your message is true, time will let it dominate. People will be much more open to it when your not trying to put it down their throat.
Basically:
“To him, religion is science.”
I have no idea what this is supposed to mean, really.
He sees himself as a scientist fighting against a widely accepted crank scientific hypothesis.
I mean that none of that addresses whether there might be something that is outside of the realm of testable observation.
“There is no god, because there’s no dragon on that mountain” is an irrelevant argument.
He leaves even the quantification of the likelyhood of there being something unaddressed.
In his less sensationalist moments, Dawkins calls himself a “de facto athiest”.