scigirl

Also I want to add,

Dawkins teaches at Oxford right, not "middleton elementary." So all the precious little christian kiddies are in no danger from this raving radical atheist lunatic.

again.

sigh,

girl

liquid

It's simple. Dawkins is one of my heroes. And I was impressed even before I was aware he was an atheist. He presented the Royal Institution Christmas lectures quite a few years ago, which is where my interest in science became conscious rather than latent.

KC

Can anyone please point out where exactly
Dawkins has EVER said evolution 'proves' atheism? Instead of worrying about atheism being taught in schools via evolution, I think these people should be advocating classes in reading comprehension. Anyone with a sufficient education in basic English can easily see that Dawkins has NEVER, EVER said anything like this strawman.

Cheers,

KC

[ March 21, 2002: Message edited by: KCdgw ]</p>

GunnerJ

I rememebr Dawkins said in one of his books (and I only know this through others' quoting of him) that evolution makes it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.

Kevin

Peter Soderqvist has ably analyzed with your comments on Dawkins, so I'll tackle the Lewontin quote.

Despite your claims to the contrary, the quote is very much out-of-context, completely eliding the last two sentences which clarify the entire paragraph. (Kenneth Miller does this too, which is where I suspect this source comes from. If so, you should have cited Miller and not Lewontin, as if you were getting it directly from his NY Review of Books article.)

The last two sentences say: "The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen." That is the point: scientists cannot allow divine explanations into science not because scientists are inherently anti-God, but because it would make nonsense of the entire endeavor. Anything could fall under an irrefutable "Goddidit" explanation, even if these things appeared to not fit with the theology. I'm no fan of Lewontin, personally, I find his critiques of evolutionary biology and developmental biology to be ahistorical and miss several salient points, as in The Triple Helix but he deserves better than to be misquoted so flagrantly.

(As an aside, Dennett never said that religious people should be put into zoos, that was simply Miller's hysterical rhetoric in response to a comment along the lines that current religions may come to be seen as museum pieces, in a rather similar way to how we view Greek and Roman mythology today.)

KC

Which is not even close to saying that evolution 'proves' atheism. As Dawkins explains (in 'The Blind Watchmaker'), evolution provided a mechanism that could explain the complexity found in the biological world in terms of natural processes, without the need for supernatural intervention. It says nothing about the existence/non existence of a deity.


Cheers,

KC

GunnerJ

Well, you have no argument from me that he never claimed evolution "proves" atheism, nor did I ever state that this was his meaning in that passage. However, to say that it's nowhere close is something of an error in my estimation. I can at least see where someone could mistake his meaning.

Peter Soderqvist

TO KCDGW

WHEN RELIGION STEPS ON SCIENCE TURF BY RICHARD DAWKINS
The sudden injection of an immortal soul in the timeline is an anti-evolutionary intrusion into the domain of science. Religions make existence claims, and this means scientific claims. Either Mary's body decayed when she died, or it was physically removed from this planet to Heaven. The Official Roman Catholic doctrine of Assumption, promulgated as recently as 1950, implies that Heaven has a physical location and exists in the domain of physical reality - how else could the physical body of a woman go there? I am not, here, saying that the doctrine of the Assumption of the Virgin is necessarily false (although of course I think it is). I am simply rebutting the claim that it is outside the domain of science. On the contrary, the Assumption of the Virgin is transparently a scientific theory. So is the theory that our souls survive bodily death, and so are all stories of angelic visitations, Marian manifestations, and miracles of all types.
<a href="http://www.secularhumanism.org/library/fi/dawkins_18_2.html" target="_blank">http://www.secularhumanism.org/library/fi/dawkins_18_2.html</a>

THE IMPROBABILITY OF GOD BY RICHARD DAWKINS
The physical chemist Peter Atkins, in his beautifully written book The Creation, postulates a lazy God who strove to do as little as possible in order to initiate everything. Atkins explains how each step in the history of the universe followed, by simple physical law, from its predecessor. He thus pares down the amount of work that the lazy creator would need to do and eventually concludes that he would in fact have needed to do nothing at all! The details of the early phase of the universe belong to the realm of physics, whereas I am a biologist, more concerned with the later phases of the evolution of complexity. For me, the important point is that, even if the physicist needs to postulate an irreducible minimum that had to be present in the beginning, in order for the universe to get started, that irreducible minimum is certainly extremely simple. By definition, explanations that build on simple premises are more plausible and more satisfying than explanations that have to postulate complex and statistically improbable beginnings. And you can't get much more complex than an Almighty God!
<a href="http://www.secularhumanism.org/library/fi/dawkins_18_3.html" target="_blank">http://www.secularhumanism.org/library/fi/dawkins_18_3.html</a>

A lecture by Richard Dawkins extracted from The Nullifidian (Dec 94)
Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence. The worst thing is that the rest of us are supposed to respect it: to treat it with kid gloves. Well I don't. I will respect your views if you can justify them. But if you justify your views only by saying you have faith in them, I shall not respect them. I suspect the reason is that most people, though not belonging to the "know-nothing" party, nevertheless have a residue of feeling that Darwinian evolution isn't quite big enough to explain everything about life. All I can say as a biologist is that the feeling disappears progressively the more you read about and study what is known about life and evolution. I want to add one thing more. The more you understand the significance of evolution, the more you are pushed away from the agnostic position and towards atheism. Complex, statistically improbable things are by their nature more difficult to explain than simple, statistically probable things. We cannot prove that there is no God, but we can safely conclude the He is very, very improbable indeed.
<a href="http://www.world-of-dawkins.com/Dawkins/Work/Articles/religion.htm" target="_blank">http://www.world-of-dawkins.com/Dawkins/Work/Articles/religion.htm</a>

Soderqvist1: Evolution doesn't prove atheism, but we don't need religion to prove evolution!

[ March 22, 2002: Message edited by: Peter Soderqvist ]</p>

stonetools

Well, I guess I'll have to give up on this. While you folks argue whether Dawkins said or almost said that evolution proves atheism, The political wheels are turning all over America. I ask you guys to reread Lizard's post , and randman's response to it.Now, there are millions of randmans out there , and PJ is busy motivating them to organize and vote.
Now, the broad religious middle that Dawkins is recently talking about is still up for grabs, But PJ has his finger on their pulse and he is on the march.This middle is not going to share your enthusiasm for Dawkins, Dennett, Lewontin, et al. You may think so, but I go to church, Bible study, and soup kitchens with these guys, and you're wrong IMO. THe american public admires scientists. They do not admire athiesm. Sorry, scigirl, maybe they should... but they don't.And politicians know this.
AS I said earlier, many religious leaders have spoke out against YECISm. Since YECs say so many stupid things, they cannot counter them all. After all they have congregations to pastor, soup kitchens to run, and elderly shut-ins to visit.THats what religious leaders do for the most part. I thought that some folks here would think that athiests could lend a hand by toning down some of their rhetoric, and not giving PJ more sound bites to use. Guess not...

scigirl

They don't have to admire it, but I would appreciate it if 1) it was acknowledged especially by the leader of the country and 2) people would attempt to understand it.

Exactly, stonetools, we are in agreement here. You admit that YECS say so many stupid things that religious leaders can't possibly counter them all. Well isn't that also true for scientific leaders? After all, they are busy trying to cure AIDS, cancer, arthritis, etc. I don't think most scientists are even aware of the problem. I do think scientists should step up and fight more. But when they do, like Richard Dawkins, people like you hate him. So it seems as if we are in a precarious catch-22. If we don't talk we are screwed, if we do talk we are even more screwed.

All I can hope for is that children today get the tools in school, and from their parents, to discern good science from pseudoscience. To think critically and logically, and to think for themselves. And I AM doing my part to ensure this happens, however small and wussy it is.

scigirl