I watched it too.  I have to say that he was indeed courteous!  Totally out of character and he amazed me.  I never thought I would ever agree with anything he said, but tonight I did.  Perhaps he's been taking on board all the articles that have taken him to task for his attitude.

See, I do try to be fair.

Milly; I'm glad that you are no longer so irritated by R.D..  And I, for one, am glad that he is no longer, for the moment, irritating people so much.


Strictly speaking, we're still *in* an ice-age; don't you watch QI?    About BSE: without large-scale scientific structures it's not especially likely that anything would have been said 'til now about BSE at all.  And BSE was caused, so far as people know, by human actions not due to high-technology.  I don't see where the failures of science come into it directly.  I don't know about the incident you're referring to in the seventies, and a quick google search doesn't reveal anything; could you give me one or two more keywords?  Science informs certain decisions.  It very occasionally gets things wrong, but what about all the lives that modern medicine has saved?  One aught view these things in perspective.  Of course, corruption does build up in large companies and governments and they have to be constantly questioned &c..

Of course, there are issues with animals being given loads of medicine, food being doused with toxic pesticides &c..  But this is not something the scientific community perpetrates, nor that the scientific community can fix by itself.


And this does similarly apply to religious believers?

(I see what you're saying.  However, the pop-lit market probably wouldn't be up for such things, and nothing he's saying is, to my knowledge, in any way original, so I doubt it would find much interest in the specialist market).


Touche, indeed.  Of course, political ideologies are still rather more concrete than religious beliefs.  But anyway.


Acknowledged.


Indeed; I do understand that the reading of sacred texts can be quite a challenging experience for people.  I guess in any culture people are under duress to hold certain beliefs.  But I do believe that today things are better in that respect than they have been in the past in the western world.


Ok; I'll give it a quick scan through and extract what I can   (postscript: this turned out rather longer than I had anticipated!)

"Even Richard Dawkins lives more by faith than by reason. We hold many beliefs that have no unimpeachably rational justification, but are nonetheless reasonable to entertain."  If my beliefs are not all rationally justifiable, but nonetheless reasonable, how can you say I live more by faith than by reason?

"Dawkins rejects the surely reasonable case that science and religion are not in competition on the grounds that this insulates religion from rational inquiry."

More personally, his characterizations of of God, though functionally seeming to attempt to prove the point that Dawkins' strategies do not apply to ALL conceptions of "God", contain an objective tone that is, so far as I can interpret it, insubstantiable (he might be able to give theological references, but still).  For instance:

"God is not a celestial super-object or divine UFO, about whose existence we must remain agnostic until all the evidence is in."

"His transcendence and invisibility are part of what he is." (The latter is something that Dawkins would say is a good reason to dismiss such a concept.  I would say that any arguments based on the latter part I would probably have trouble accepting myself).

"[Christian] religious people ... consider that God has revealed himself ... in the form of a reviled and murdered political criminal."

"For Judeo-Christianity, God is ... the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever, including ourselves."

"He is the answer to why there is something rather than nothing." 

The previous two seem also to fall into the waffle category for me.  I personally do not find the latter question to be especially meaningful, and the former...am I to infer that the reason why there is something rather than nothing is that something is possible?  This sounds rather like Erdős' "probabilistic method"* to me

"He is what sustains all things in being by his love"

"To say that he brought it into being ex nihilo is not a measure of how very clever he is, but to suggest that he did it out of love rather than need."

"Like a Modernist work of art, there is no necessity about it at all, and God might well have come to regret his handiwork some aeons ago. The Creation is the original acte gratuit. God is an artist who did it for the sheer love or hell of it, not a scientist at work on a magnificently rational design that will impress his research grant body no end."

"Because the universe is God’s, it shares in his life, which is the life of freedom. This is why it works all by itself, and why science and Richard Dawkins are therefore both possible."

"To be dependent on him, as to be dependent on our friends, is a matter of freedom and fulfilment."

"God is transcendent of us (which is another way of saying that he did not have to bring us about), he is free of any neurotic need for us and wants simply to be allowed to love us."

"Jesus did not die because he was mad or masochistic, but because the Roman state and its assorted local lackeys and running dogs took fright at his message of love, mercy and justice, as well as at his enormous popularity with the poor, and did away with him to forestall a mass uprising in a highly volatile political situation."  Shouldn't there be something about "dying for our sins" in there somewhere?

"Dawkins ... is as obsessed with the mechanics of Creation as his Creationist opponents" - I am not comfortable with this comparison the sophisticated (I have been reliably told) work if Dawkins with the blundering about of Creationists as if they are in some way come about for the same reasons.

His talk of "Dawkins' God" is not, from what I gather, entirely right.  From what I know, Dawkins goes through several basic, but different, characterisations of what a "God" might be; it is not sensible to identify them all (this might be due to some sloppiness of Eagleton's prose more than an essential point, I think).

"The Christian faith holds that those who are able to look on the crucifixion and live, to accept that the traumatic truth of human history is a tortured body, might just have a chance of new life – but only by virtue of an unimaginable transformation in our currently dire condition. This is known as the resurrection. Those who don’t see this dreadful image of a mutilated innocent as the truth of history are likely to be devotees of that bright-eyed superstition known as infinite human progress, for which Dawkins is a full-blooded apologist. Or they might be well-intentioned reformers or social democrats, which from a Christian standpoint simply isn’t radical enough."  The first two sentences of that count as an objectively-toned assertion about what Christianity *is* I think (which it isn't necessarily by any means).  The second half I have nothing especially interesting to say about (yes, Dawkins can be a little naive, and yes, there are probably more than a few Christian social democrats).

Hmm. this is already getting too long I think. Will plough on; feel free to give up, if you haven't already, at any point   I will take no offense, but am trying to be comprehensive.

Am...it doesn't make much sense to refer to Dawkins as a "God-hater".

"The mainstream theology I have just outlined may well not be true; but anyone who holds it is in my view to be respected"
I for one would not respect a person solely because they hold certain beliefs (sloppy prose again I suspect). 

"...Dawkins considers that no religious belief, anytime or anywhere, is worthy of any respect whatsoever. This, one might note, is the opinion of a man deeply averse to dogmatism."

Am, OED gives a definition (the best-fitting in this case) of "dogmatism" as "A system of philosophy based upon principles dictated by reasoning alone, and not relying upon experience; opposed to scepticism. More generally, a way of thinking based upon principles which have not been tested by reflection." Certainly any intended irony doesn't really work out in my mind.  Thought has gone into the formulations in his book, I'm pretty sure.

"Yet the Apocalypse is far more likely to be the product of them than the work of religion. Swap you the Inquisition for chemical warfare."
This is a rather messy conflation I think.  There is some meaning in it, but it's certainly not an either-or situation in any event!

In the spirit of not constantly nit-picking:
"He also holds, against a good deal of the available evidence, that Islamic terrorism is inspired by religion rather than politics." There is certainly some religious motivation in there.  But yes.

"...one can be reasonably certain that he would not be Europe’s greatest enthusiast for Foucault, psychoanalysis, agitprop, Dadaism, anarchism or separatist feminism. All of these phenomena, one imagines, would be as distasteful to his brisk, bloodless rationality as the virgin birth."

Ah no, one can not.  At least for Dadaism, I'm pretty sure that Dawkins knows the difference between what is art and what is not art.  As said elsewhere, he had a part of St Matthew's passion on his Desert Island disks list.

"There is a very English brand of common sense that believes mostly in what it can touch, weigh and taste, and The God Delusion springs from, among other places, that particular stable."


I think personally that the scientific method has a certain domain of validity (I'd guess chiefly that of the physical world), and it can mix over with other types of thoughts outside of this domain.  Within this domain I don't see that there's any better way to deal with things.  When it comes to more general "quantifiable" information that's not so directly linked to the natural realm, then things are far more up in the air.  BUT that's not what you said:

I haven't read a single one of his books through (to reiterate: I'm not on good terms with pop science), so I can't really comment on this.  I doubt it; he seems to be essentially a humanist.  For a rather irritatingly-named example, here is a link to a list of his "new ten commandments": http://lifeslessons.blog.co.uk/2007/07/11/.  I think you'll see it has a bias towards skepticism, and is not as extrovertedly altruistic as maybe others might want it.  I would rank skepticism as being a *very* important movement to keep alive in modern society myself.

* "if the probability that the random object has the property is greater than zero, then this proves the existence of at least one object in the collection that has the property." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probabilistic_method

There are of course also major questions as to whether 'the scientific method' is in any sense meaningful in terms of formulating an ethical basis for scientific work (or even, in a more sinister form, whether science does produce its own set of ethics, but bad ones). And furthermore about on what basis certain branches of science are supported and funded, and others not. It doesn't take a lot of imagination to see why branches of science which have defence implications might be likely to flourish more than others. Science may develop with some degree of autonomy, but I doubt a convincing case could be made that that is the whole story.

On the question of 'scientific method', from the point of view of empirical science, there are facts, observations, that which is derived from experience, and one disinterestedly follows where that 'data' takes one. But I think that means something quite different to how it is imagined by the empiricists (not because of any lack of 'respect' for data, mind you), because the perceiving subject already shapes their experience, and I do not believe one can do otherwise. As has been brought up in another thread to do with colour - we only perceive things as certain colours, in the sense of categorising them as such, because we possess the concepts for those, which are culturally specific. And a mathematical formulation involving zero is only meaningful within a language/culture that has a concept of zero. Perception is a social and cultural phenomenon.

I spend a fair amount of time looking up historical data from primary sources and the like. Now, whilst believing absolutely in the primary importance of not having decided one's conclusion prior to investigating the data, at the same time I know for sure that I, as a perceiving subject, already bring a range of pre-conceptions, ideologies, cultural assumptions, and so on, when I look through 19th-century periodicals, however much I try to do so 'neutrally'. In the end there isn't a neutral way, one is finding 'sub-texts' within such data, reading it in particular ways (sometimes 'against the grain'), and really the challenge is achieving some degree of self-reflexivity both individually and in terms of shared methodologies as well (which is why methodological self-questioning is important in any field of the sciences or humanities). The notion of studying anything so as simply to be able to ascertain 'wie es eigentlich gewesen' ('how it really was', the famous saying of 19th century historian Leopold Ranke) or, for a non-historically distant subject, 'wie es eigentlich ist' ('how it really is') is ultimately a fiction in a totally objective sense. Which is not to line up with the postmodernists who write off any possibility of truth or objectivity (the classic example used to show the futility of that position is the phenomenon of Holocaust deniers), just to stress that there are degrees of contingency. In the case of musical study, contemporary ethnomusicologists are in my experience the most aware of these issues.

I want to reply in detail to increp's post another time; just one thought on something from it:

The second statement relates to a most fundamental philosophical question: whether or not one accepts that formulation, I doubt any answer to it could be less than metaphysical. The third is an extension of the second. Whilst, as not a Christian, I don't accept the first statement, I can't see how it's waffle, nor how it can be anything other than a statement of one of the most intrinsic aspects of Christianity?

I've watched the Richard Dawkins programme now. It didn't say anything new to me, but it was certainly reasonably polite. (I wonder what he said in private?) I got a bit tired of the word "evidence", and I thought his assertion that there were "two ways of looking at the world" - rational or irrational - a bit limited. I very much agreed with his worry about the "exploitation of vulnerable people". I find that alarming.

Yes, I believe looking over the last billion years it's more normal for Earth NOT to have polar icecaps 

Apparently, if you remove the space within the atoms comprising The Dawkins, then The Dawkins would be reduced to a miniscule particle less than the size of a grain of salt. The resulting particle would have the same weight as The Dawkins and therefore be much denser and I'll tell you this for nowt. I've just about had enough of these ......(cont on page 94)

Professor Wessel. BSc (Boy Scout). EP. LP. CD. DVD. JPEG. MPEG. MP3 ....

Thank you, Ian.  If only I could hear sermons like this regularly.  (the wickedness of American foreign policy and the injustice of the distribution of the world's resources and environmental responsibility are frequently mentioned from the pulpit, but without Terry E's theological clarity.)

I am almost persuaded to be a Marxist. 

Just saw the documentary there. Found it quite interesting.  He attacked what he perceived to be the relativism of postmodernist thought at one point without really getting in to it enough to make any point about anything.