Comments on: Curse you, Richard Dawkins

By: gurgySuergo

gurgySuergo — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 09:56:41 +0000

How are you ?
The interesting name of a site – blog.voyou.org
I today 8 hours
looked in a network So I have found your site
The interesting site but does not suffice several sections!
However this section is very necessary!
Best wishes for you!
Forgive I is drunk )

By: zube

zube — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 19:27:45 +0000

Its interesting that the concern that Catholic spokespersons recently expressed about Blair’s recent conversion to Catholicism was not the fact that he helped initiate an unjust, cynical war killing thousands of innocent people but rather his position on abortion- as if to suggest that this is the sole humanitarian issue facing mankind today.
In so far as Grayling et al. attack this level of ethical thought emanating from official religion, the attack is thoroughly justified.
Its when he makes the further point that a scientific metaphysics is all that humans need in order for them to solve all of their problems that his position becomes problematic. There are many profound philosophical debates such as those begun by Mcdowell’s mind and world about the disenchanting effects on human freedom of a dominant scientific paradigm. or the concerns of thinkers such as Adorno about how the rationality of the enlightenment could turn into forms of domination.
It seems to me that it is in such debates that are of philosophical interest since the rise of fundamentalist religion is a symptom of the underlying malaise which these debates are attempting to grapple with

By: Doris BT

Doris BT — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 07:36:57 +0000

Dawkins’ argument against religion is inconsistent as well as ill-informed. On the one hand he argues deductively, as a rationalist: science has the capacity to answer all the questions about the universe which used to be answered by faith in God; it is no longer rational to believe in God since, although one cannot prove a negative, all the scientific evidence is stacked against the existence of God; therefore those who continue to believe in God are willfully irrational. For a committed scientific rationalist, this argument does not need bolstering by any empirical evidence. Even if it could be shown that belief in God produced a high strain of altruism and benevolence in the human species, if scientific rationalism is the best possible belief system (the one true faith), then it would be better to be an evil rationalist than to be a saintly fool. Thus Stalin and Mao deserve greater respect than William Wilberforce and Martin Luther King, and, if we want to deny this, then we must do so by showing that Stalin and Mao were irrational, not that they were morally wrong. But Dawkins also argues inductively – i.e. he claims that religion can be shown empirically to be a malign force in human affairs, that it is morally bad and ought not to be allowed to exist in any form. But, if he wants to pursue this line of argument, Dawkins should be more scientific in his analysis of the evidence. Religion (a term so broad that it is virtually meaningless, but that’s another issue), has undoubtedly been used to justify much that is violent and destructive in the world, but so has scientific rationalism – back to Stalin and Mao. Religion has also inspired great acts of goodness in the world, as have science and reason. In fact, if one were to be rigorously scientific in mustering the moral evidence for and against religion and for and against science, it is hard to see how one would ever arrive at a clear conclusion as to their positive or negative value. As one contributor suggests, dividing the issue between religion = bad, science = good, doesn’t help any of us in our quest to make meaning in a complex world. (New paragraph) There have been several references to Eagleton’s Catholicism in this website. I found his review rather woolly and preachy, but I think he is right in identifying Dawkins as typical of a certain kind of north Oxford conservative – not a radical thinker but a narrow-minded conformist who displays remarkable ignorance and willful distortion of the facts in his treatment of religion. Dawkins is the product of a certain kind of Protestantism which views all religion as fundamentally explanatory and moral in purpose - in this he sings from the same hymn sheet as evangelical creationists - and if it can be shown to be neither a good explanation nor a good moral force, then it should be done away with. But Catholic Christianity is not reducible to explanations and morals. Like many religious traditions, it includes a myth which seek to give poetic expression to a faith that we originate in and are held in being by a creative and loving mystery manifest in but not reducible to the material world. Catholicism does not have a literal approach to scripture, and it has always been rather bad at fostering good middle class morality such as Dawkins seems to approve of. In its vigorous devotions, its incarnational theology and its aesthetic and sensual extravagances, Catholicism expresses something of our human response to a cosmos that is wondrous in its complexity, and yet in which we find ourselves as conscious beings haunted by the mystery of being, tormented by our capacity for terrible acts of violence and yet desiring of goodness, beauty and truth, and capable of imagining that there is more to us than the time and space of our material existence. (New paragraph) Anti-religious polemicists such as Dawkins and Grayling seem wedded to the disturbing illusion that if only we could get rid of religion, there would be fewer problems in the world. But history suggests that it is a small step from wanting to get rid of an idea or belief to wanting to get rid of the people who hold it, and that is why their hostility to religion is at times as terrifying as any religious fundamentalism or repressive ideology. Those of us who belong to religious traditions must confront bigotry and extremism and take seriously the many moral failures of our traditions and the challenges posed by the rapid development of science and technology. But scientists have a similar responsibility to put their own house in order. I look forward to the day when Dawkins turns his attention to his fellow scientists and asks why so many of them end up in the pay of arms manufacturers and multinational pharmaceutical corporations. In the meantime, I wish he would be a little more rational in his critique of religion.

By: Codisdead » Blog Archive » Public intellectuals vs open discussion

Codisdead » Blog Archive » Public intellectuals vs open discussion — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 00:24:24 +0000

[...] Then somebody blogged about it, and A. C. Grayling weighed in. I found it interesting to see how he dealt with the constraints of online socialising: a savvy person would perhaps have toned things down for fear of being called an obvious troll. [...]

By: mark k-p

mark k-p — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 17:27:14 +0000

I did in fact read Eagleton’s piece, and it is up to its neck in Aquinas. The fact he doesn’t break off his Catholic address to mention St Thom every time he invokes one of his doctrines is neither here nor there. Once again, I can only register my surprise that Eagleton’s sermon is being taking seriously. Sure, all of the above(obvious, banal) points are made, but within a stew of fallacies, poor argumentation and dewy-eyed re-statement of RCC platitudes. Dawkins’ all-too evident overstating of his case oughtn’t to be used as a defence of theism. And, it’s all too true, Marx – and Marxist ideas – hardly feature at all in Eagleton’s polemic.

By: Alex_dyad

Alex_dyad — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 00:15:00 +0000

Come back AC Grayling – let your flabby quasi-logical positivism be carved open by our incisive postmodern thought. I pretty much agree with caleb about the amount of people that have read the article. Aquinas was barely mentioned and neither was Marx. his point was basically this: 1. Dawkins knows nothing of contemporary philosophical theism or theology – true. 2. He reduces all believers to simplistic fundamentalist – true 3. reason != scientistic – also true 4. god is not a scientific hypotheisis or a person as such- true (he could have mentioned that Dawkins is the mirror opposite of creationists in believing this) 5. All religious people and social hope they bring is bad in Dawkins – true. I could go on but it is late. As among the only person here who has read Dawkins, Derrida and a shed load of contemporary theology (other than Adam) I can safely say that Eagleton’s review is pretty damned on the money about his book and other than the intervention of Grayling, we should all say so. Here is the question as I see it: how much recent theology and the work of Jacques Derrida have you actually read Mr Grayling? If the answer is more than I think your response will be (none) and you are relying only on third party hearsay then how do you consider yourself a thinker of any kind?

By: caleb

caleb — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 00:06:37 +0000

so we’re to take it that none of you is willing to read eagleton’s review of dawkin’s book then? you all seem to be discussing something quite different

By: Dominic

Dominic — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 09:50:23 +0000

I’m starting to see words enclosed be tags actually in italics, it’s scary. Interesting to note that one of the intermediate stages in the bootstrapping of scientific rationality is, apparently unavoidably, religion. Where else could the notion of an internally self-consistent and rationally ordered universe have come from?

By: Dominic

Dominic — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 09:46:55 +0000

It’s a bootstrapping problem. There isn’t an Archimedean point (or what Dennett would call a “skyhook”): you have to get to enlightenment rationality from unreasoning brute persuasion, via sophistry, in much the same way as you have to get from single-celled organisms to killer whales via trilobites (or whatever), without the assistance of any teleology. Hey, I’m not saying it’s a good metaphor…

By: Daniel

Daniel — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 01:16:33 +0000

Dominic - for this reason, I am not entirely sure whether Dawkins does have a minimally-satisfying account, in the way that you claim. Citing Dennet, Zizek is good on this in the TPV: “When you examine the reasons for the spread of scientific memes, Dawkins assures us, ‘you find they are good ones.’ This, the standard, official position of science, is undeniable in its own terms, but question-begging to the mullah and the nun – and Rorty, who would appropriately ask Dawkins, “Where is your demonstration that these ‘virtues’ are good virtues? You note that people evaluate these memes and pass them on – but if Dennet is right, people…are themselves in large measure the creation of memes… How clever of some memes to team together to create meme-evaluators that favor them! Where, then, is the Archimedan point from which you can deliver your benediction on science?’” [TPV, p.232]