Melanie Phillips Vs Richard Dawkins

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August 6, 2007
The age of unreason
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In rage (Arrogance, dogma and why
science not faith - is the new enemy
of reason)
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Our most celebrated atheist, the biologist Professor Richard Dawkins, has briefly turned his attention away from bashing people who believe in God. Instead, he is about to bash people who subscribe to ‘new age’ therapies which he says are based on ‘irrational superstition’.
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Straight of the bat Melanie Phillips falls down, showing
her bias she attacks Prof Dawkins as a basher. Akin
to some fundamentalist in need of deporting. I haven't
seen Dawkins on any march, with a placard, megaphone,
thumping some book. This attack paints Melanie's feeling
before she has proved her case and it is unworthy.


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In a TV programme to be shown later this month, Dawkins looks at a range of ludicrous therapies and gurus, including faith healers, psychic mediums, ‘angel therapists’, ‘aura photographers’, astrologers and others. Not surprisingly, he is horrified by such widespread irrationality, not to mention an exploitative industry that fleeces people while encouraging them to run away from reality.
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So what? Are we to support charlatans now?
I haven't seen this programme. Who has?
How am I to give fair judgment on something
I haven't seen. Are we to take Phillips opinion as gold.
I don't think so.


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He is right to be alarmed. What previously belonged to the province of the quack and the charlatan has become mainstream. The NHS provides funding for shamans, while the NHS Directory for Alternative and Complementary Medicine promotes ‘dowsers’, ‘flower therapists’ and ‘crystal healers’.
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So what's the problem?!
What is she on about?



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Indeed, such therapies aren’t the half of it. Millions of us are now eager to believe that the world is controlled by conspiracies of covert forces, for which there is not one shred of evidence because such theories are simply bonkers.
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Huh? Yeah if you say so. You much kmow all eh?
Mz Phillips cos you're like a jerno???


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Thus press articles and TV documentaries seriously advance the belief that the 9/11 attacks on America were orchestrated by the U.S. government itself. Similarly, thousands believe that Princess Diana was murdered at the hands of a conspiracy composed of the Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Charles and MI5.
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But but, that white car driver and...
never mind.


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Bestselling books by the former TV sports presenter David Icke, who has announced he is ‘the son of God’, argue that Britain will be devastated by tidal waves and earthquakes, and that the world is ruled by a secret group called the ‘Global Elite’ or ‘Illuminati’ which was responsible for the Holocaust, the Oklahoma city bombing and 9/11.
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How odd, she didn't mention Hitler...


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These trends are not just nutty but sinister. Thousands of cults now combine similar crazy beliefs with programmes to control people’s minds and behaviour. Their techniques include food and sleep deprivation; trance induction through hypnosis or prolonged rhythmical chanting; and ‘love bombing’, where cult members are bombarded with conditional love which is removed whenever there is a deviation from the dictates of the leader.
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Yeah, lets call them cults, heaven forbid we call them
fledgling religions eh?


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Disturbing indeed. But where Dawkins goes wrong is to assume this is all as irrational as believing in God. The truth is that it is the collapse of religious faith that has prompted the rise of such irrationality.
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Do what? You're blaming Dawkins for people believing in fairies!?
Do me a favour. Hitting fruit cake beliefs is like giving someone medicine. They may be very sick and need more. You don't stop
just cos they barf.


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We are living in a scientific, largely postreligious age in which faith is presented as unscientific superstition. Yet paradoxically, we have replaced such faith by belief in demonstrable nonsense. It was GK Chesterton who famously quipped that ‘when people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing — they believe in anything.’ So it has proved. But how did it happen?
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Two wrongs don't make a right, erm
If 1+3=389 is wrong it isn't the teachers fault
if you say 1+3=340

You can't say because Dawkins isn't another god he should shut up.


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The big mistake is to see religion and reason as polar opposites. They are not. In fact, reason is intrinsic to the Judeo-Christian tradition.
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LOL When the reason is to control people by
saying anything, then yeah, erm it's a reason.


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The Bible provides a picture of a rational Creator and an orderly universe — which, accordingly, provided the template for the exercise of reason and the development of science.
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BS! The bible is full of contradiction.
A vengeful god, uber carrots and sticks all over the shop.
Where do I begin with such nonsense...

The suppression of science for hundreds of years.
Has this, Phillips, even heard of Galileo?
What a fine time he had.
Does the inquisition ring a bell etc etc....


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Dawkins pours particular scorn on the Biblical miracles which don’t correspond to scientific reality. But religious believers have different ways of regarding those events, with many seeing them as either metaphors or as natural occurrences which were invested with a greater significance.
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If Christianity came to these shores as a book of
poetry and metaphors then a god damn lot of people
have got killed over a bunch of metaphors.

Clearly Phillips just cherry picks the latest feel good
bible incarnations and nothing ever bad happened because
of faith and blah blah cotton flowers, cherry glasses...


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The heart of the Judeo-Christian tradition is the belief in the concept of truth, which gives rise to reason. But our postreligious age has proclaimed that there is no such thing as objective truth, only what is ‘true for me’.
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Or more acuralty for Phillips, what truths I want to beleive
in the bible.



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That is because our society won’t put up with anything which gets in the way of ‘what I want’. How we feel about things has become all-important. So reason has been knocked off its perch by emotion, and thinking has been replaced by feelings.
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Yes Mz Phillips, lets all march back to the brainwashing pulpits
cos you said so. Cos you want Your emotions to rule over
everybody esle. Cos you want to get your way.

We is der stoopid peeps and we choose to tink!


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This has meant our society can no longer distinguish between truth and lies by using evidence and logic. And this collapse of objective truth has, in turn, come to undermine science itself which is playing a role for which it is not fitted.
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If a sledgehammer reveals the truth that there is something
on the otherside of the wall.

It is not the responsibilty of the sladgehammer to be the wall.



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When science first developed in the West, it thought of itself merely as a tool to explore the natural world. It did not pour scorn upon religion; indeed, scientists were overwhelmingly religious believers (as many still are).
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It would be foolish to not know the world you are living.
So are we to believe scientists are foolish?
If the world is religious then you might want to keep your head on...
If Phillips thinks this is not the case then I refer her to her Darwin.
And I note Newton went to a religious school.
Atheist schools being thin on the ground.


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In modern times, however, science has given rise to ’scientism’, the belief that science can answer all the questions of human existence. This is not so. Science cannot explain the origin of the universe. Yet it now presumes to do so and as a result it has descended into irrationality.
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For modern times read, the grip around the neck has been loosened
thanks to a number of poor soles.

For 'scientism' read, if you don't have all the answers
then the simple god one is right, drop all science, back to church... caves...

Universe failing. This is the hide god argument.
If we look over the hill then hide god over the next hill.
If we roam the whole planet then hide god in the clouds...
Phillips has hidden god at the origin of the Universe.
If was found and explained she would hide him away further still.


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The most conspicuous example of this is provided by Dawkins himself, who breaks the rules of scientific evidence by seeking to claim that Darwin’s theory of evolution — which sought to explain how complex organisms evolved through random natural selection — also accounts for the origin of life itself.
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Even a sponge has the right to think!

But sadly Mz Phillips abuses that right.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_life


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There is no evidence for this whatever and no logic to it. After all, if people say God could not have created the universe because this gives rise to the question ‘Who created God?’, it follows that if scientists say the universe started with a big bang, this prompts the further question ‘What created the bang?’ Indeed, if the origin of life were truly spontaneous, this would constitute what religious people would call a miracle. Accordingly, this claim in itself resembles not so much science as the superstition that Dawkins derides.
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Oh calm down woman... high chair...

Just because you can ask why and don't get an imediate
reponse with your obvioulsly limited search skills doesn't
mean you can squeaze your god into the margins.

Sceince didn't know all it knows today on day 1 did it.
Not everything is so poetical, so quickly gratify.


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Moreover, since science essentially takes us wherever the evidence leads, the findings of more than 50 years of DNA research — which have revealed the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce life — have thrown into doubt the theory that life emerged spontaneously in a random universe.
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Oh god, this Phillips is all over the shop.
Shoving confused data into muddled thinking on top of sand...

I suspect sceince takes us where the reserch funds are.
One minutes Phillips excepts Dawin, next minute she doubts him.
Mz Phillips is clearly so far out there I don't know why
all the pretence. She may as well shove a couple of big
crosses on her shoulders and have done with it.



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These findings have given rise to a school of scientists promoting the theory of Intelligent Design, which suggests that some force embodying purpose and foresight lay behind the origin of the universe.
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She spins, again.



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While this theory is, of course, open to vigorous counter-argument, people such as Prof Dawkins and others have gone to great lengths to stop it being advanced at all, on the grounds that it denies scientific evidence such as the fossil record and is therefore worthless.
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Below are some US reports, hardly home ground for
Dawkins. But to Mz Phillips it's all Richard Dawkins fault.

(The unequivocal consensus in the scientific community is that intelligent design is not science.[10] The U.S. National Academy of Sciences has stated that "intelligent design, and other claims of supernatural intervention in the origin of life" are not science because they cannot be tested by experiment)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_design



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Yet distinguished scientists have been hounded and their careers jeopardised for arguing that the fossil record has got a giant hole in it. Some 570 million years ago, in a period known as the Cambrian Explosion, most forms of complex animal life emerged seemingly without any evolutionary trail. These scientists argue that only ‘rational agents’ could have possessed the ability to design and organise such complex systems.
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God hiding in a hole?



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Whether or not they are right (and I don’t know), their scientific argument about the absence of evidence to support the claim that life spontaneously created itself is being stifled — on the totally perverse grounds that this argument does not conform to the rules of science which require evidence to support a theory.
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Slaps head, doh! Science asks for evidence before proving something.



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As a result of such arrogance, the West — the crucible of reason — is turning the clock back to a pre-modern age of obscurantism, dogma and secular witch-hunts. Far from upholding reason, science itself has become unreasonable. So when Prof Dawkins fulminates against ‘new age’ irrationality, it is the image of pots and kettles that comes irresistibly to mind.
http://www.melaniephillips.com/articles-new/?p=530


LOL, she's a scream this one.

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Blue


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