He only appears inconsistent if one has poor comprehension skills. You've acknowledged that "faith" has multiple meanings. You've acknowledged that Dawkins is familiar with the multiple meanings and that you can tell which definition he is using at a given time. Obviously, that means your comprehension skills are adequate. Where are you having a problem?
That's getting pretty close to an "only an idiot would disagree with me" argument now. I could say the same to you and ask you what
your problem is. It doesn't really get us anywhere except maybe getting each other's backs up.
Actually, although Dawkins uses the word "faith" at different times with different meanings, I'm not sure he does so consciously (or at least maybe he doesn't look at how he's used the word).
Take the part of the debate about a third of the way in. Dawkins says "we only need to use the word faith when there isn't any evidence". The use of "only" suggests that he has this one definition he uses stuck in his mind as the right one. Lennox asks him if he has evidence for the faith he has in his wife. Dawkins' immediate response is to say that he has plenty of evidence (he knows instinctively how faith is being used in that context). He doesn't deny that he has faith in his wife. He then goes on to make out that Lennox is suggesting that "faith" is how we know someone loves us and that isn't what the word means, but that's not quite what Lennox was saying faith was. I think the point Lennox is making is that it is
because of the evidence of that love that he has faith in his wife.
When Dawkins dismisses that as just a semantic point, it is as if he's suggesting Lennox is just using word play to undermine his arguments. What Lennox is actually doing is trying to convey what he understands the word "faith" in a religious context to mean. For Dawkins to ignore religious people telling him what they mean by faith and then just continue to define religious faith as "belief without evidence" would seem to me to either be wilfully ignorant, intentionally dishonest or so arrogant that he thinks he understands religion better that the religious do and can tell them what and why they believe.
Context tells me that he is attacking belief WITHOUT evidence. You are plenty smart to figure that out too.
The indication is context.
The context of the end of chapter 8 is very much criticising religion and (what he claims is) religious faith as a whole. There's no indication that he even accepts that faith in the context he is describing it can be based on reason and evidence and that those who do that would be an exception.
Lennox is wrong. Dawkins is using one word in more than one way. This is very common in language.
Sure, having pointed out that he has defined a word a certain way, he should be able to use it in that way and be clear in what he's saying. The problem is that as soon as he starts using that definition to describe
religious faith in general, he is misrepresenting people if that is not what
they mean by the word.
Something we often see on these boards is some theist who comes along and criticises atheists because it's irrational to claim that there is no God. Of course, what they are doing is using a different definition of the word "atheist". Several dictionaries list atheism as the belief that no god exists, so it is a common definition that is being used there. Having been pointed out to them that for most of the atheists here, that definition misrepresents their position, if the theist continues to make arguments based on what we generally call the "strong" atheist position but talking as if the argument was about all atheists, it gets pretty frustrating all round. In fact, I think I'm pretty much describing some of Yrreg's arguments here.
Anyone offended by that definition of allegiance is not familiar with how language works.
I wasn't so much talking about taking offence, but using a specific type of loyalty to criticise loyal people generally. Do you think it's a reasonable argument to suggest that people who say that loyalty to their family is good are helping to create a climate which encourages blind, unquestioning loyalty to murderous dictators?
I hadn't been responding to your posts because you told me you had put me on ignore.
