It is evident that many people here hate Richard Dawkins with a vengeance. But why? He is a promoter of science and has had a positive impact on many lives (and a negative impact on nobody). What's there to hate?
I certainly don't. I hate people who worship him, and hang on everything the man says as if he were the One True Prophet of science and reason. I've read most of his works, and found them to be rather below par--the more academic ones simply aren't that earth-shaking (Dibblee and de Vrise did more to advance our understanding of evolution than Dawkins has, and I'll bet 90% of you don't know who they are), and the more public ones pale in comparison with such authors as Sagan, Ward, and even Alvarez (
T. rex. and the Crator of Doom, for those interested).
In my mind, Dawkins' greatest skill is selling Dawkins to the public. Which is fine--lots of people are famous for being famous. But peole who buy into the press are exceedingly annoying, as fanboys always are.
stevea said:
Is a logical error is a "paradigm shift" ?
Depends on who you talk to.
If you talk to the Dawkins fanboys, the argument eventually boils down to "Dawkins said it, I believe it, that settles it." Dawkins said that gods don't exist, so that's proof they don't.
Less rabid non-believers tend to take the stance that if something can't be supported by evidence (which is an astonishingly slippery term), it should be dismissed. It's a foundational principle in scientific inquiry, only stated slightly differently (all statements must be supported by evidence). This stance does not permit us to say that gods don't exist, nor that fairies don't exist. What is actually asserted by this stance is that these questions, standing as they are without evidence to support them (from the skeptic's viewpoint--the theists have a very different one, and the refusal of most skeptics to accept that theists hold that viewpoint is why they feel that skeptics are ignorant, arogant jerks), are not admissible to the discussion. In short, S.G., H.F., and their ilk are actually
giving theists more credit than the "faitheists" they are accusing of being soft on theism. Think about it--S.G., by saying "Gods don't exist", is accepting that the topic is worthy of consideration. Someone who says "There's insufficient data to discuss it" is in fact saying that the theist position does not rise to the level of being wrong.
The theists' position is of course that sufficient evidence exists to at least warrant discussion. This isn't actually a wrong position, either. Evidence DOES exist--the rational atheist's criticism of theism isn't that it's unsupported by evidence, but rather that the evidence is of such poor quality that no firm conclusions can be drawn from it. Evidence is merely data supporting some conclusion. GOOD evidence supports a single conclusion in an argument (it can always be used for multiple arguments, of course--broken glass can be evidence for a break-in and an insurance claim, for example). The problem with theism is that the evidence they cite, when it doesn't collapse under the weight of logic, never supports a unique answer--it always allows for multiple interpretations. The fact that organisms previously thought to be extinct are sometimes found in deep oceans, for example, was once held up as proof of Creationism (the plausability of extinction was a major issue back then). It's also evidence of organisms migrating to follow preferred habitats, or adapting to habitats after being displaced by new organisms. The cosmological constants can be used to support the notion of a Creator God--and they can be used to support several theories of cosmology that include no gods. And so on.
(At this point I will be dismissed by the less honest members of the forum via some snippy comment along the lines of "Oh, that 'advanced theology' we keep hearing about; why don't you show us some examples of it?" I consider such comments to be confessions of the complete lack of integrity on the speaker's part. There is NO excuse for not doing the background research, regardless of what Saint Dawkins says--if someone wants to debate the existence of gods, it is incumbant upon them to at least be familiar with the major schools of thought on the topic as the basic requirement of good scholarship. If they don't, they are ignorant by definition--and among alleged intellectuals there is simply no excuse for such ignorance. There are two sides to this debate, and we expect middle schoolers to have a better level of academic diligence than some skeptics beleive is required of them. It's rather sad. There's also the pesky fact that several form members have supplied examples of such theological writings in the past, and everyone who makes dismissive comments about theology universally ignored them.)
To say there's no evidence is either to confess hopeless ignorance of the topic, to abuse language to the point where "Words mean what I mean when I use them" is a step up in terms of intellectual integrity (at least that statement is openly abandoning linguistics), or to flat-out lie. The real issue is that
no evidence has been presented that uniquely supports the notion of a god. What evidence has been presented is insufficient to support the notion of the existence of gods, because the evidence supports multiple conclusions in the discussion. Until unique evidence is presented to support the notion of gods, the question of the existence of gods is not one we can seriously consider.
As far as fairies go, I'm not exactly agnostic towards them. I've toyed for a while with the idea that the Fay and the like were garbled rememberances of early encounters with other human species. We know that such garbling occurred (see AronRa's YouTube video on dragons, leviathan, and other Biblical monsters for examples), and we know that Ice Age mammals lived well past when many think they died out (mammoths were around during the construction of the Pyramids, for example). It's not outside the realm of plausibility that humans and Neanderthals or other hominins interacted, and some of those interactions became legends, that were passed down through the ages, becoming more and more distorted through time. Testing this idea would require finding the earliest versions of fairy tales, however, which is beyond my capacity. I do rocks and bones; I wouldn't even know where to start looking for ancient books! Still, it illustrates the flaw in accepting pithy phrases uncritically--fairies may in fact be real, just very different from how people think of them today.
Gallstones said:
You seem to be implying that R Dawkins is a prophet. That imbues me with all kinds of ick.
Me too. It's the greatest proof against the belief that religion is a serious threat to humanity. If we removed religion entirely, we'd still have every one of the problems frequently associated with it--only with slightly different language. The fact that people can't differentiate between criticizing Dawkins and hating him is directly comperable to the way the most radical of theists can't differentiate between people disagreeing with them about religion and people attacking their religion. The way people demand we all accept what Dawkins has to say, and defend him even after it's been demonstrated that Dawkins is in fact wrong (there was a rather infamous poll....) is identical to the folks who demand we accept the Bible as literal truth despite the fac that it contradicts reality.
Religion is often a symptom, not the disease. The real disease is irrationality. And that'll be with us always, whether in the form of faith in God or faith in famous scientists.
) to (a) describing myself as agnostic and to (b) not giving a lot of thought to the background. I just saw his statement and it seemed a view that I'd agree with - I didn't expect the Spanish Inquisition. 
