Re: The root of all evil? - Dawkins Documentary

Algis Kuliukas wrote:
Stanley Friesen wrote:
"Algis Kuliukas" <algis@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Stanley Friesen wrote:

Perhaps not the same boat, but it, at best, aggravates our current
problems. Much of the opposition to science from Fundamentalists comes
from their fear that science and faith are incompatible. To have a
famous science author such as Dawkins making exactly that claim just
makes them more determined than ever to "defeat" the evil "atheistic
scientists".

Well when religions teach children something that science has shown to
be false it is incompatible, isn't it? What form of fudge can get us
around that problem?

Certain *particular* beliefs are contradicted by science.

And where it does, they should be openly challenged. Don't you agree?

But science *does* *not* and *cannot* establish the absence of God or deny his
creative activity in history. What I am objecting to is the effort by
some atheists to assert exactly this.


The statement that there exists a God who is creatively
active and who intervenes in history is one which it should be
well within the power of science to address. It is a statement
for which no empirical support exists and which, nevertheless,
all collective religious movements of which I am aware, to
a greater or to a lesser degree, ask their members to take
into account as if it were a reality in making their life decisions.

At bottom the belief in such a being has no empirical basis,
and it is well within the province of science to point this out,
which for all practical purposes constitutes denying that such
a being exists.

I do not think science can prove *anything* and it is wrong to expect
it to.

I disagree. Science constitutes the only method yet found
of proving anything that is of any utility in the case when
we want to make objective statements about reality.

For example, I consider Newtonian mechanics to have been
empirically proven, within its range of validity.

To make such an admission, that science cannot prove
anything seems to be going too far. Science is pragmatic
in its goals. It has never sought for logical proofs in the sense
of mathematics.

This does not mean that scientific proof is any less powerful
a notion than mathematical proof, or that scientific proof is
non-existent.

It certainly cannot ever prove or disprove anything like the
absence or presence of a god or gods.

Once the notion of god or gods is adequately stated I do
not see why it should not become susceptible of scientific
proof.

If you are worried about
religious people feeling threatened by science because of this, then
this simple message - if correctly understood - should allay those
feears.


Why should scientists seek to allay the fears of religious people?
Science does not seek to allay the fears of scientific peple.

Religious movemens often make very sweeping and extensive truth
claims. They claim that the universe is organized in a certain way,
by a being or beings who are assigned various quite definite
characteristics, which are outlined in certain `sacred' texts.

Now it is clear that there are many different organized religious
movements, and it was explicit in the sacred texts of almost all
of them of which I am aware that all other religious movements
are false. In many cases the penalties for holding other beliefs
about the superbeing or beings are quite extreme. In the
case of the Abrahamic religions, the penalty is that one is to
be put to death, and it is only possible to evade this requirement
of the texts by a kind of tacit and collective denial that this is
what the texts actually say about the matter.

Now far be it from me to criticize religious moderates for wanting to
ignore these aspects of their sacred texts and ignoring them
as a practical matter. I applaud all those who oppose
fundamentalists who would restore the ancient ways
in their full horror.

But it must then be admitted by moderates that part of their
received religious tradition has been abandoned, and that
they are then on a slippery slope as regards the rest of the
tradition.

This also means that moderates have at best a weak position
in arguing against fundamentalists, who can, quite rightly,
say that religious moderates are not following the religious
traditions any more, have effectively given up the divine
law, and are destined for hellfire, in religions that make such
statements about eschatology and the afterlife.

In fact, it is only when one lives in a society which is strongly
secular in its institutions that religious moderates are able even
to think in the fashion in which they do today, and to express such
ideas of religious tolerance at all. For those who may doubt
the truth of this statement, consider that in many parts of the
world today where religious law is in force to a much greater
extent than in the US, people can be, and have been, legally
put to death for apostasy.

Now it will be said that it is only extremists who act in this
fashion. But who is to say that extremists are not right about
the religions of which they speak, if all arguments that can
be made against them must be made on the basis of
what is said in certain hoary old sacred texts which are only
regarded as sacred, in fact, because someone or other
has regarded them as sacred in the past, or because
the texts themselves assert that they were written by
the creator of the universe.

What science always does - with everything, not just in this debate -
is come up with hypotheses to explain various phenomena. Then, it sets
about testing those hypotheses using evidence. Sometimes, evidence
contradicts an hypothesis so it is either modified or rejected.
Sometimes evidence supports it, in which case the hypothesis might
still be modified to further explain some detailed of the phenomenon
that the original hypothesis did not cover. This is an iterative and
never ending process. Nothing is ever proven but, gradually our
knowledge improves and progress is made.


All of this is true and accurate ... but for religion, this iterative
process
leaves in the end very little space for a creator god who regularly
intervenes in history.

Either such a god can violate the laws of physics as we have
proven them, or it cannot. If it cannot, or chooses not to
intervene in such a way, then it does not have the characteristics
that religious movements (as I attempted to define them)
claim for it. And then, what force is there in the argument
that one should live one's life according to religious precepts.

When it comes to the 'god theory', we effectively have two, extremely
simple alternative hypotheses. They are not absolutely mutually
exclusive but they come pretty close to being so.

They are:
1) God(s) made man. Or
2) Man made god(s).


There are more. From the Rig Veda, we have:

Then even nothingness was not, nor existence.
There was no air then, nor the heavens beyond it.
Who covered it? Where was it? In whose keeping?
Was there then cosmic water, in depths unfathomed?
But, after all, who knows, and who can say,
Whence it all came, and how creation happened?
The gods themselves are later than creation,
So who knows truly whence it has arisen?

If we examine the evidence for these we soon see that whereas
hypothesis 1) lacks supporting (as well as contradictory) evidence,
hypothesis 2) has an overwhelming amount of supporting evidence and no
contradictory evidence.

There is no evidence that god created man, that god created anything,
or, in fact, that anything has ever created anything. This is no
disproof, of course, because absence of evidence is not evidence of
absence, but the fact that the alternative hypothesis has so much
evidence in favour of it and nothing against it strongly favours the
default 'null' hypothesis being that man made god(s) and not the other
way around.

This is not establishing the absence of god, which I agree is
impossible, but it makes a very strong evidential basis for atheism
which, I believe, most fair-minded, educated people would endorse if
given the opportunity to freely decide for themselves.


Establishing the absence of God, absolutely, is really of no
practical importance, I think. Establishing the presence of God
is much more important, if one is making a serious claim
that one should take it into account in the way one lives.

Any hope we have of quieting the issue down is to be found in convincing
them that science is *orthogonal* to science.

I don't see much quietening down resulting from passive atheism. I
think we have to publicly challenge some of these ideas, not to try to
change the minds of the extremists, but perhaps of the moderates.

Yes, positions need to be challenged, but *not* from the point of view
of "evangelical atheism".

I don't know what that is, Stanley. I think some people, who by no
coincidence are rather more than just open to religious ideas, like to
posit atheism as being somehow in the same boat as religions, but I
think that is simply a falsehood. The logic I outlined above should
demonstrate that.


I'm in agreement, and I think that religious moderates
are in a weak position to argue against people like
Dawkins, who after all, only goes a few steps further
than they do in rejecting the ancient texts.

Creationism is abhorrent, and must be stopped.
But the moderates will *not* be convinced by being told science
disproves God, which it doesn't. Trying to do so will just convince
them that the radical Creationists are right. What needs to be done is
to show that faith and reality are not in *real* conflict, and that the
radicals are attacking a false enemy.

No-one, least of all Richard Dawkins, would claim that science
disproves god. If religious people are under the impression that is
what scientists believe, then that is one more delusion that they
should be disabused of as soon as possible.

Trully scientific minded people choose their beliefs, as much as
possible, on the evidence. The evidence, as we know it, clearly favours
an atheist stance. I think if these arguments are debated openly then
intelligent, fair-minded people will see it the same way.

'Faith', or 'the human spirit' as I prefer to think of it, is a
reality, I agree and it is therefore not in conflict with any
scientific truth. It too, like all of life on earth, has a Darwinist
explanation, even if that explanation might be quite complex and is not
yet quite understood by even the specialist anthopologists who have
studied it for decades.

I.e. atheism isn't the answer, clarifying the distinction between
science and faith *is*.

I think looking at the evidence dispassionately is the 'answer',
Stanley. If people (and here, I'm thinking mainly of the children) are
encouraged to do so, they will decide for themselves whether there is a
god or not and they will draw their own line between what religious
people call faith and the scientific truth.

If
the moderates started to leave in their droves, the insitutions and the
extremists that parasatise on them would lose all their power and we'd
have a better world.

Yes, I agree. But the moderates are there because the radicals have
convinced them that science threatens their faith. Claims by atheists
that science indeed does eliminate God simply appears to confirm that
idea and drives them further into the clutches of the radicals.

Then all we need is more communication so that those fears are allayed.

I have a feeling that religious people (moderates usually, but I
suspect extremists would agree too) have an agenda to label atheists as
some other type of religious extremists. Let's face it every religious
extremist is opposed to every other type of religious extremist, so
athiests are just one more type to be opposed to. Moderate religious
people are not so intolerant of other religions but they do seem to be
quite intolerant of atheists.


It's simple as I see it. Religious fundamentalists basically have
a basis on which to make a very strong claim to be representing the
truth of their respective religions. Their basis is far stronger than
that of religious moderates. Fundamentalists have no problem
whatever in regarding atheists as anathema, and for the most
part also regard religious moderates as anathema. Religious
moderates oppose fundamentalists, and their extremism, but
they need to establish their own claim to be representing the
religion. And organized religion has been in large part based
on exclusion and inclusion.

Therefore religious moderates have to draw a line somewhere,
or else it will be clear that their religion can include any possible
beliefs. They draw the line to exclude bugbears like `evangelical
atheists,' which from my point of view is a contradiction in terms.

Atheism is simply not a religion, and all people are atheistic with
respect
to some god or gods.

I've heard said several times words to the effect: "as long as you have
some beliefs, that's what counts." It's as if it's designed to only
exclude atheists from this groupishness, as if we are not human or
something. Well we have beliefs too, but they're based, as much as
possible, on evidence. We are still good citizens and care about other
people just as much as religious people do - it's just that we think
there are Darwinian explanations for this innate altruistic tendancy,
and not that it was God-given.


Yes.

The peace of God be with you.

Stanley Friesen

Which god would that be?

All the best to you too.

Algis Kuliukas

All the best to the both of you.

David

.

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