Any Richard Dawkins fans here?

[Unsane]

I love the guy.

http://video.google.com/url?docid=9002284641446868316&esrc=sr4&ev=v&len=2871&q=richard%2Bdawkins&srcurl=http%3A%2F%2Fvideo.google.com%2Fvideoplay%3Fdocid%3D9002284641446868316&vidurl=%2Fvideoplay%3Fdocid%3D9002284641446868316%26q%3Drichard%2Bdawkins%26total%3D2530%26start%3D0%26num%3D10%26so%3D0%26type%3Dsearch%26plindex%3D3&usg=AL29H2146t37tM4ZwHzKM0qw8hAqigT4Rg

[varkam]

1. I'm a big fan of his.

I highly recommend, besides the obvious, The Devil's Chaplain and Unweaving the Rainbow.

[Kutjara]

2. Me too.

I've read all his books and love the way he can clearly explain the most abstruse concepts in ways that make intuitive sense.

Even better that he's an atheist: I enjoyed The God Delusion immensely.

[TZ]

3. Loved him since college

When I studied evolutionary/socio-biology which is his field. Excellent writer. If you are interested in the science of evolution you can't get any better than "The Blind Watchmaker" or "The Selfish Gene".

[edhopper]

4. Reading

"The Blind Watchmaker" was a deciding in factor in my moving from being an agnostic to an atheist. I've seen him attacked for being angry, or criticizing religion only at the most orthodox level.(Both BS) But I've never really seen anyone counter his arguments against religion.

[Unsane]

5. I am struggling with the agnostic-atheist distinction myself.

I'm not sure I can ever be a full blown "atheist" because, in many ways, I think being so is just as anti-science as is being devoutly religious. As a lover of reason, logic, and the scientific method, I say yes, nothing has proven an existence of a divine force in the universe, or an afterlife, but such things haven't been disproven either. An absence of proof isn't proof of absence, so to speak. I can't categorically say one way or the other whether these things exist. I believe they do not based on our best understanding of astrophysics and evolutionary biology, but these fields haven't definitively disproven the existence of such things, or given satisfactory answers otherwise.

[edhopper]

8. It is not anti-science to be an atheist.

The absence of any proof is not disproof, but you must then ask if there is any validity to the theory. Are you agnostic about n-rays or the cosmic either or for that matter, unicorns and faeries? What part of the God hypothesis do you find could be valid in the absence of any and all evidence. And with an abundance of countermanding evidence.
I'm not saying you shouldn't be agnostic, but to call atheism anti-scientific does not hold true.

[dmallind]

14. Struggle no more

Just stop using the inaccurate vernacular driven definition of atheist as "someone who categorically states there can be no kind of god" which allows room for a spurious "middle position" of agnosticism and use the correct one of "somebody who lacks a god belief".

Ironically you quite accurately described this misuse yourself - absence of evidence certainly isn't eveidence of absence, and to say "there is no possible god" assumes a universal knowledge, not to mention an agreed upon definition of "a god" which has never been established. But similarly absence of faith - atheism is not the same as faith in absence (the misuse of atheism as a term rampant today)

Thus it is an exceptionally rare breed of atheist - the "strong atheist" to philosophy types - who actually tries to prove the logical impossibility of a metaphysical universal negative. I know hundreds of atheists. I know two strong atheists. Anecdotes are not data, but trust me I know and talk to a lot of atheists. I've done a bunch of debates, meetings, cable tv shows (yep I'm the fat bastard with the hybrid Anglo-US accent for anyone who flips by public access at weird hours of the morning). The rest of us generally have a position summed up as "I see no evidence for any existing god belief, and there is much evidence showing those beliefs are mand made, but that cannot preculde the remote possibility that somewhere in the universe there is something to which the term "god", once defined, may be aable to be applied".

[Realityhack]

17. I think (Dawkins?) teapot anaylogy is appropriate.

Not sure if he is the originator but he uses it frequently.

The concept is. There is a teapot orbiting the sun. It's a very nice Victorian teapot. Because of the size and orbit of the teapot no current scientific instruments could be expected to locate it. And there is absolutely no evidence of the teapots existence. But over time entire cultures have believed in the teapot. Your culture believes in the teapot. Some people will even get very angry if you question how such a teapot could exist.
Now scientifically we must be strictly agnostic with respect to the teapot. Our current instruments can not disprove the existence of the teapot. So there IS a chance it exists.
However, we can reasonably say that for all intensive purposes we are atheists with respect to the teapot as we do not believe it exists. This is not the same as believing it does not exist. We simply have absolutely no reason to believe it exists and it would be very silly to spend our life acting as if it did. In fact it would be rather silly to claim agnosticism regarding it's existence because while we are strictly agnostic about all kinds of things (actually everything) we must at some point distinguish what is a serious possibility from what is just fantasy.

Most self described atheists will openly admit that they are strictly speaking agnostic about the existence of a god or gods. But they do not actively believe in one, thus they are not theists, and therefore atheists.

[muriel_volestrangler]

18. The teapot analogy coems from Bertrand Russell

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot

[Realityhack]

19. Thanks.

I thought I remembered Dawkins crediting someone on it.

IMO it's a great analogy for atheism.

[More Than A Feeling]

6. Here's an attempt at analysis of his arguments from someone who

appears to have actually read the book: http://www.faithfullyliberal.com/?cat=14

See what you think.

[dmallind]

15. Not so much I'm afraid

The first response is a classic argumentum ad baculum - how can so many people be so wrong? Unfortunately history is replete with examples of the huge mass of the population being wrong.

His second is confusion over burden of proof - an even more basic fallacy. He even tries to explain this away by saying the burden of proof is on the one saying "you are deluded", but how can that be? "You are deluded" just means "I don't believe you" - it is Dawkins' position that believers do not have enough evidence to accept belief as reasonable, and are thus deluded in remaining believers. That is a denial of a positive claim, not a positive claim in itself as the writer states.

His third actually has some merit - it WOULD be nice to say "here's the bar where I would say you would have enough evidence to accept a belief as inductively reasonable". This would be highly speculative, but would be valuable I think.

His fourth is tenuous at best - the position that Dawkins relies on devaluing religious experience by proving it can be mechanically created in the lab by stimulating the brain. Here agin we see the inherent problem of any believer who attempts to use strict logic to establish that belief, and it's that no matter how hard they try, they rarely if ever manage to remove the implicit tautology that divine existence is accepted to begin with. Essentially the writer says "just because you can fake religious experience doesn't mean all religious experience is fake. That's a tempting argument if you applied it to say, moon landings. But the difference is there is no ALTERNATIVE source for religious experience which has been empirically established or even inductively concluded. The believer takes it for granted that gods can cause religious experience just like naturally occurring or artificially created brain activity but without backing that up or even stating (or possibly even acknowledging to himself) that that's an assumption which is unsupported logically. Simply put the ONLY way of creating religious experience established is by simple electronic stimulation of certain areas of the brain, either by "misfiring wetware" or lab experiment. We can't just throw "oh and gods can do it too" in there unchallenged. So it's silly to state that Dawkins' argument is weak here, except that he probably missed an opportunity to explicitly spell it out as I did (although doubtless better and more interestingly than I did).


The next point is a combo of one and four - how can so many people have religious experience and all be fake? See above.

Finally in the addendum he takes another crack at reworking the idea of miracles - but again misses the same point. We have not established any competing source beside brain activity for internal experience, and neither have we for phenomena known as "miracles". Essentially the writer is relying on "the god of the gaps" by stating that if we can't explain it, his god must have done it.

[Silent3]

16. There's whole lot to plow through there.

This guy is at least making a much better effort to understand what he's criticizing than most do, I'll give him that.

I went down to part 3a (presumably there are parts 1 and 2, with (pardon the expression) God knows how many lettered subparts preceding), and read that part in more detail.

He (or she -- the author is named Chris Marlin-Warfield) is missing a big part of Dawkins argument about complexity and probability. Perhaps that means it's at least partly Dawkins' fault for not making his own point clearer.

What I think is being missed is this: One of the major reasons believers often insist that a deity must exist is that the universe is too complicated to have happened "by chance". Dawkins claim that the universe is improbable isn't so much his own claim that he's using to make a circular argument (Marlin-Warfield actually says, "Dawkins commits the fallacy petitio principii"), but a necessary inclusion of a premise of the argument for God that he's arguing against.

[and-justice-for-all]

7. Oh yeah! Dawkins rocks..nt

[immoderate]

9. Count me among them.

--IMM

[PassingFair]

10. I'm a hugh fan of his!!111

I love the little guy!

[SecularNATION]

11. I heartily applaud Richard Dawkins.

Dawkins has bravely taken on religion when few do. His book THE GOD DELUSION is well worth reading.

[Unsane]

12. kick

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

13. (Raises hand)

In order of preference:

1) River out of Eden
2) The Blind Watchmaker
3) The God Delusion

But the others are great, too. Much more pleasant to read than, say, Daniel Dennett, who makes similar points but has a (IMHO) tortuous writing style.

[nemo137]

20. In the style of my hipster generation

I liked the book better than the movie.

The God Delusion was neat, Climbing Mount Improbable and the Ancestor's Tale also neat - Root of All Evil and the interviews and controversy surrounding it? A little shrill, and I still question his equation of religion and child abuse. But the dude is still one of the greatest biologists of this generation, and a voice that deserves listening to.

[Ian David]

21. Dawkins Rocks!

I met the guy when he lectured for The New England Skeptical Society.

[CanonRay]

22. Just finished "God Delusion"

Awesome, I'm thrilled somebody finally put this in words.

[Deep13]

23. Nice graphic. With friends like you, who needs Fundys. nt

[Unsane]

24. Thanks. With candidates like Hillary "McCain is better than Obama" Clinton, who needs dems?

pwned

[Realityhack]

25. Just in case

and I personally hope it doesn't happen.

But IF she gets the nomination don't forget to take that sig line graphic down.