Dawkins, atheism & intelligent design

godless dave said:
Marcus Aurelius wrote a response to Pascal's Wager some 1500 years before Pascal came up with it.
Marcus Aurelius (copyright expired) said:
Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones. I am not afraid.
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Seems a pretty good way to live your life. Certainly better than Pascal's. IMHO. :cool:
 
bwinwright said:
Crusader Richard Dawkins is Anti-Christ, Anti-God, & Anti-Organized Religion

Richard Dawkins, a professor at Oxford University and perhaps the world’s most famous atheist, is working diligently to spread his message that faith in God is one of the world’s great evils. He often refers to the attacks on September 11th, 2001 as his justification, claiming that such evil acts are the direct result of a twisted faith in a non-existent fantasy called God.

When Dawkins was a teenager he believed in the concept of Intelligent Design due to the multitude of highly organized and complex examples of order, purpose, and design he observed all around him in nature. However, after observing so many injustices in organized religion, Dawkins decided to separate himself from these evil institutions and become an atheist.

Of course, Dawkins also realized that being an atheist and scientist in an academic environment like Oxford University simply go hand in hand. It is simply not cool to be a scientist and believe in God too. After all, Charles Darwin was an atheist, wasn’t he?
Dawkins claims that his enhanced understanding of biology naturally led him to atheism.

Dawkins’ most recent book, The God Delusion, has already sold more than 1.5 million copies making him a millionaire many times over. He has tapped into an ever growing contempt for organized religion, helping millions of people justify their own conversion to atheism. Dawkins is earning big money crusading for atheism.

Much like Gay Pride, Dawkins is asking people to be proud of their atheism, to stand up and speak out, announce their atheism to the world. Dawkins is successfully convincing millions of people to reject the tyranny of organized religion and think for themselves.

Dawkins rejects the idea of Intelligent Design because nobody can tell him where the Intelligent Designer originated. He prefers to say that Natural Selection is sufficient to explain all of the orderliness and complexities of nature. Dawkins believes that no intelligence was necessary in the process of establishing the complex order we observe in nature.

Dawkins wants to destroy organized religion so much he carelessly ignores both fact and reason when he claims that highly complex systems and extremely sophisticated examples of orderliness simply evolved through some mindless, non-intelligent process.
He refers to this mindless process as Natural Selection. He fails to realize that Natural Selection “is” Intelligent Design, or he may simply be intentionally ignoring this fact.

For example, when one examines the complexities and sophistication of a Dolphin’s Sonar, one realizes that such a system is far more intricate and involved than anything man can make right now. When all the components and variables are scientifically considered from the perspective of irreducible complexity, the mathematical probability of such a fantastic system evolving through some mindless process is absolutely impossible.

The example of a Dolphin’s Sonar is only one of millions of such examples of super sophisticated and irreducibly complex systems and processes we have observed in nature, all of which would have been impossible without the involvement of intelligence.

Dawkins’ idol is Charles Darwin whose Theory of Evolution has now been disproved by numerous scientists. The field of micro biology, alone, has revealed Darwin’s Theory to be laughably false. Dawkins has been avoiding debates with microbiologists because they know how wrong Darwin’s Theory really is and can prove it too.

Darwin actually believed that a bear that devoted enough time to swimming could actually evolve into a whale. Of course, this idea has been found to be both false and absurd. Modern microbiology thoroughly debunks Darwin’s Theory.

The primary reason Intelligent Design is not allowed to be taught as an alternative to the theory of Evolution is because nobody can scientifically explain the origination of the Intelligent Designer. The law, established in the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial, says that because we can not explain this Intelligent Designer, scientifically, the theory must be classified as a religion and not allowed to be taught in public schools.

Dawkins says Faith is one of the world’s great evils. Faith has been defined as “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Jesus taught in Matthew 9:29, “According to your Faith be it unto you.”

Jesus also taught in Matthew 21:22, “And all things, whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, Believing, ye shall receive.”

Jesus also taught in Mark 9:23, “If thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that Believeth.”

Jesus also taught in Mark 11:24, “What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them.”

Of course, the recent best selling book entitled The Secret was about this mental law of faith or belief as taught by Jesus, otherwise known as The Law of Attraction. This same mental law has been taught by many great philosophers, prophets, and seers throughout history. The bottom line is our experience is a direct reflection of our habitual thoughts and feelings.

Regarding these questions of faith and God, many atheists may choose to believe Dawkins, but I am betting on Jesus and Intelligent Design, respectively.
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Geez, what an eyesore. It doesn't provide me with any answers as to why I should or shouldn't read the book, which is why I read this post in the first place.
 
hereisjoe said:
The God Delusion
-by Richard Dawkins

Book review by Joe Boudreault

Richard Dawkins, an Oxford biologist and popular science writer, has well established himself as one of the foremost proponents of both modern evolutionary theory and atheism. It should be of no surprise that these two ............ The Blah, blah, blah,blah...........................ftware..[which is] well capable of constructing
'visions' and 'visitations' of the utmost veridical power.” Hearing him put it this way, yo..................blah,blah, blah,blah,blah,blah,blah, blah,blah,blah, blah.................blah,blah, blah,blah,blah,c. (blah,blah, blah,blah,blah,ld all be automatons, incapable of doing wrong – clearly not the case with humanity. But once again, the professor who admits he’s not a theist would just erase all semblances of religious logic from the debate.
Yet, fearfully awablah,blah, blah,blah,blah,a two-edged sword, and it can cut Dawkins as deeply as it can cut the rest of us. For me, the grand logic of Pascal’s Wager still stands.
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Good for you, Joe.
One word. paragraphs.You might stand a chance of someone actually reading your magnum opus then.


How about the possibility that unicons dug the Grand Canyon. You want to give that one a shot??
 
hereisjoe said:
...both modern evolutionary theory and atheism. It should be of no surprise that these two go hand in hand.
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OK, he's good so far.


Dawkins establishes his main claim on page 54: “That you cannot prove God's nonexistence is accepted and trivial, if only in the sense that we can never absolutely prove the non-existence of anything."

...

I cannot help but be reminded of the wise adage that in order to prove that God doesn’t exist, you’d need infinite knowledge of the entire universe.
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Did this guy even proofread his first paragraph? He contradicts himself right there!



Things get really strange when Dawkins makes statements such as “who designed the designer?” and “the little we know about God, the one thing we can be sure of is that he would have to be very, very complex and presumably irreducibly so!” ...
Dawkins ignores the very idea of irreducible complexity, something that God must have by virtue of an absolute nature.
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Again with the self-contradictions. He criticizes Dawkins for saying that this God character would have to be irreducibly complex, then turns right around and says he must be irreducibly complex.


Dawkins hates infinite regress, but he cannot explain his way out of it, and will not admit to an alternative.
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But wait - infinite regress is the theists' problem, not Dawkins'.

At this point, I saw no point in reading the rest of this drivel.
 
hereisjoe is an old sparring partner of mine from several Skeptoid episodes. Any topic containing the word "creationism", in fact.

Joe is a young earth creationist, and a big fanboy of the execrable Hydroplate theory. Here is creation wiki's explanation, and even they kick it around.

The point of this is that Joe isn't really qualified to do up Dawkin's shoelaces, let alone critique him.
 
bwinwright said:
He often refers to the attacks on September 11th, 2001 as his justification, claiming that such evil acts are the direct result of a twisted faith in a non-existent fantasy called God.
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If so, Dawkins is being a horrible skeptic.

He is counting the hits that support his view and not counting the millions of misses where a religious person does not go out and commit horrible atrocities.
 
Kahalachan said:
If so, Dawkins is being a horrible skeptic.

He is counting the hits that support his view and not counting the millions of misses where a religious person does not go out and commit horrible atrocities.
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Key words there would be "twisted faith", I believe. The implication would be that "non-twisted faith" is, at the very least, the more mainstream/accepted kind of faith, the kind that does -not- inspire anyone to commit acts of homicide and genocide.

Of course, one could of course argue that from a certain technical and pedantic point, all faith is somehow twisted. But I would think that the context implies heavily a difference between the kind of faith that the 19 terrorists had, and the kind of faith that most of the religious people of the world are currently experiencing.

But, of course, if Dawkins is -not- making this distinction when he's talking about "twisted faith", then he's a pretty bad skeptic.
 
godless dave said:
No, he wasn't. Where did you get that idea?
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Exactly, Charles Darwin went to uni to train to be a priest.

He discovered an interest in biology, and jacked in theology.
Over time he became an agnostic, but he began his studies as a Christian.
 
I think Darwin was diverted, initially by Geology.

Dawkins makes the point that you can do anything in the name of faith. If faith justifies you committing horrible acts it is then twisted. I do not recall him condemning faith in a blanket way - although he does make the point, a La Sam Harris that extreme faith is nurtured (or at least largely unquestioned) by moderate faith.

In terms of 9/11 (as if that were the only act of terrorism - ever) where was the condemnation of the Jihadists by moderate muslims? It was barely a whimper and although they insist they have no truck with extremism, the voice of dissent from global Islam was barely audible.
 
bokonon said:
Well, if he's getting a head start on this Dembski Intelligent Design course at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, I think we've got a brown noser on our hands. The requirement is for ten posts totalling 3000 words, and the first post was 851 words, while the second was 1158. Now, granted, he's getting a lot of cut-and-paste mileage here, with the duplicated content, but it's still going above and beyond.

Maybe we should have a scavenger hunt, to see if we can find another 8 "matching" posts somewhere on the internet...

ETA: Apparently, they've already deleted a "Dawkins, Atheism, & Intelligent Design" post over on "thedailyshow.com"...
But there's still one on abovetopsecret.com.
ETA2: And there's still one at The Daily Show (I guess they delete duplicates, rather than merging threads).
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20% of the grade is derived from 'hostile' forum spamming.
That's really sad.
I'd have thought JREF rated at least 35%.
 
Godless Dave, that's not an answer, that's 'avoidingb the question'. Quoting Marcus Aurelius is pure bunk because he doesn't address the logic of Pascal at all. God is God because he is logical, loving, all-knowing, and all-caring. Aurelius didn't think it through: God knows and therefore God cares and responds to our act of faith in Him. Aurelius is a cop-out.
 
CurtC, can you actually read English??? You posted "He criticizes Dawkins for saying that this God character would have to be irreducibly complex, then turns right around and says he must be irreducibly complex.
How so????? God IS irreducibly complex, yet Dawkins refutes this entirely. Did you really read his stuff? I don't think you did. You just like to hear yourself arguing. Good luck with that, buddy!



"Quote:
Dawkins hates infinite regress, but he cannot explain his way out of it, and will not admit to an alternative. "

The truth of this stands. Learn your English, man.

AND
"But wait - infinite regress is the theists' problem, not Dawkins'.

OH, really? You're escaping the argument by using semantics, huh? Neat, but inexcusible.

At this point, I saw no point in reading the rest of this drivel. "

So then, go back to the drivel of Dawkins.
 
Marius, you whined and whined about me coming here to this Forum from Skeptoid, because I would have (your suggestion) more space and verbosity to post longer explanations of my viewpoints. And when I did just that, you have only the comment: "One word. paragraphs.You might stand a chance of someone actually reading your magnum opus then. .."??? What gives?

Can you reply with a scientific articulation? Are you capable of that, Marius? Or are you just like almost all the others here - only able to say "he said blaa blaa blaa blaa..." etc etc..????!!!


No wonder I am reluctant to reply in this Forum. Yahoos indeed.

If I can take the time to intelligently write and post a viewpoint (re Dawkins' book) then surely you can take the time to respond or post your view. If not, goodbye.
 
hereisjoe said:
CurtC, can you actually read English??? You posted "He criticizes Dawkins for saying that this God character would have to be irreducibly complex, then turns right around and says he must be irreducibly complex.
How so????? God IS irreducibly complex, yet Dawkins refutes this entirely. Did you really read his stuff? I don't think you did. You just like to hear yourself arguing. Good luck with that, buddy!



"Quote:
Dawkins hates infinite regress, but he cannot explain his way out of it, and will not admit to an alternative. "

The truth of this stands. Learn your English, man.

AND
"But wait - infinite regress is the theists' problem, not Dawkins'.

OH, really? You're escaping the argument by using semantics, huh? Neat, but inexcusible.

At this point, I saw no point in reading the rest of this drivel. "

So then, go back to the drivel of Dawkins.
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I think your problem is not in reading, it is in thinking. The infinite regress Dawkins speaks of is this:

IDers point to the complexity of the universe.
IDers claim complex things must be created by intelligent beings.
Therefore god must have created the universe.

Dawkins merely points out that IDers also claim god is infinitely complex and that if what they claim is true about complex things having to be created by intelligent beings, Dawkins wonders what intelligent being created god.

Can you see the infinite regress here? At each backward step one can simply ask, "What created it?"

NOTE: Understand the preceding simple fact before going on because it gets a little more complicated.

The reason infinite regress is the IDers' problem and not Dawkins is because the IDers are the ones claiming that the regression stops at god. They think god was first which is completely contrary to their position that complex things require an intelligent being to create them. Asking "What caused that? is standard practice in science but not allowed in religion or religious based ideas like ID.

Infinite regress is one of the bits of evidence in a overwhelming landslide of evidence that points to ID being an infinitely stupid idea and IDers being infinitely . . . uninformed.
 
Another point that Dawkins makes (although neither he, nor I, claim he said it first) is that creative intelligence, in our Universe, (at least our part of it) seems to have arrived late in the proceedings.

How then would an intelligent creator being be at the start of it?
 
hereisjoe said:
Godless Dave, that's not an answer, that's 'avoidingb the question'. Quoting Marcus Aurelius is pure bunk because he doesn't address the logic of Pascal at all. God is God because he is logical, loving, all-knowing, and all-caring. Aurelius didn't think it through: God knows and therefore God cares and responds to our act of faith in Him. Aurelius is a cop-out.
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What evidence do you have that your god exists? And "all-caring"? Really? He's got a funny way of showing it.
 
hereisjoe said:
Godless Dave, that's not an answer, that's 'avoidingb the question'. Quoting Marcus Aurelius is pure bunk because he doesn't address the logic of Pascal at all. God is God because he is logical, loving, all-knowing, and all-caring. Aurelius didn't think it through: God knows and therefore God cares and responds to our act of faith in Him. Aurelius is a cop-out.
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But there is a major logical flaw in Pascal's argument.

"The church within which alone salvation is to be found is not necessarily the Church of Rome, but perhaps that of the Anabaptists or the Mormons or the Muslim Sunnis or the worshipers of Kali or of Odin." J. L. Mackie
 
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