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Help, I'm being attacked by Atheists

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Our Lady Has Left the Building

14:02 / 18.09.07

And, during the renaissance, scientific discoveries were being made by theists, seeking to better understand the full glory of God's creation, not smelly atheists trying to ruin things for everyone.

14:11 / 18.09.07

Well... some of them came to the conclusion that Atheism wasn´t all bad... ( Hobbes for example.. )

04:42 / 01.10.07

i just want to note that comparing the "nu-atheists" to fundamentalist christians is a different move than to deny the facticity of evolution.

09:26 / 01.10.07

true.

But the comparison is often made by those who state the latter.

Dawkins himself is passionate about his belief in reason (as opposed to the belief in belief) and has repeatedly stated that the only thing to sway him is evidence. Whereas the fundamentalist christian will state that nothing will change his beliefs, no matter what the evidence is.

So that´s the basic difference: The ability to adapt to changing levels of evidence, and to change one´s theories accordingly. The fundamentalist will simply go on believing that 2+2=5, because that´s what Big Brother said in the scripture.

ONLY NICE THINGS

13:28 / 01.10.07

Dawkins himself is passionate about his belief in reason (as opposed to the belief in belief) and has repeatedly stated that the only thing to sway him is evidence.

And you believe him? That's a bit... faith-based, isn't it?

All Acting Regiment

13:38 / 01.10.07

The "Aaaah - but we all have faith in something, doyousee?" line, while it probably isn't quite being employed by Haus above, is quite irritating because it assumes that the person in question is assuming they're an entirely reasonable being, which unless they've managed to avoid Freud and leave out Lacan is probably not quite how they're seeing things.

14:56 / 01.10.07

@haus:
The difference lies in detail, as stated above.

To believe that one´s belief is the absolute truth, or to know that one´s belief is belief, nothing else, and therefore prone to error. Error which can be demonstrated and thereby causes the "believer" to change his theory. Good old Popper. I hope I´m not being too redundant.

The relativistic stance is the loophole in which the creationists seek to find support for their own "theory", which incidentially assumes it is absolutely true as it is based on holy scripture. (Thus quite far away from anything scientific, needless to say but said anyway.)

And now, some bash-inciting proverbs of my own providence:

Reality is per definitionem not safe. Safety is sought by believers in the maximum absolute, but reality generally is quite relative.
Embracing the belief in a finite life can be quite satisfying, even without any pleasant (or unpleasant) assumptions about possible non-material existance.

ONLY NICE THINGS

15:05 / 01.10.07

I don't quite understand who the agents are in the sentence above, allecto. Is it all the same person?

Either way, in this case evade has faith in Richard Dawkins' claim that he will be convinced by evidence, and otherwise will not be convinced. He also has faith in an entity without defined physical existence (the fundamentalist Christian), but that's a less interesting avenue. Without somehow inserting oneself into Dawkins, in the manner of an adventurous Time Lady, I am uncertain how useful that claim can in itself be.

However. Evidence is tricky stuff. For example, Twig the Wonder Kid has access to evidence, and has decided that that evidence is the basis for his decision that evolution cannot be proven scientifically, and that a belief in evolution is therefore an act of faith - that is, not evidence-based. Personally, I don't think that this is the case. So, what does that do with evidence? We can say that Twig does not have enough evidence, or we can say that Twig has failed to interpret the evidence correctly, either through a cognitive malfunction of some sort or some other cause - for example, through a desire for attention, or a instinct for contrarianism. So, we can see here, evidentially, Twig's response to evidence.

However, we haven't really seen Dawkins' response to evidence. We have only his word to go on. It is perfectly credible that, confronted with evidence that a large number of others find convincing, Dawkins would indeed change his beliefs. However, it is conjecture. In the case of evolution, it is not a conjecture I would expect to be tried, because I doubt very much that incontrovertable evidence for the Creationist position is likely to materialise, because the reality of what is discovered is trending so hard away from it.

However, evade's position here is one of faith, taking Dawkins' statement at face value in order to create a notional figure of Dawkins to compare with "the fundamentalist Christian", who is also based uncritically on Dawkins' representation of him. Which I think is complicated.

Closed for Business Time

17:07 / 01.10.07

On the evidence debacle that CHaus brings up - and this goes for all kinds of statements made by experts, I believe: the lay person is most often reduced to accepting one "expert opinion" over that of another.

Point in thread: Evolution. The evidence for and against. Now, I'm no biologist, geneticist, nor indeed a natural scientist. I personally have no way at this moment, or at any time in the near future of personally and empirically verifying the merits of the proposition "All life shares common descent from one or a few primordial organisms".

And the same goes for nearly all theories, axioms and proofs in nearly all the natural sciences, plus a good few in the social sciences and humanities. I am always, at every juncture, accepting evidence (as distinct from proof) about some state of affairs based more often than not on a social convention - that of trust in the moral and technical fidelity of experts. At the very least, I trust them to not knowingly deceive.

I shan't get into the whole epistemological debate on justification - I just want to point out that on a very simple level we trust scientists to truthfully do as they say, and say what they do. We have faith in them as witnesses and interpreters. This does not detract from the truthfulness of the results that the scientific methods can provide.

And so, in debates like global warming and evolution vs creation these levels are muddled. Scientists are accused of having faith too, but this somewhat trivial state of affairs is transformed into an indictment of the scientific methods themselves. And that's where things go wrong.

All Acting Regiment

18:12 / 01.10.07

I don't quite understand who the agents are in the sentence above, allecto. Is it all the same person?

I meant, essentially, when someone makes the "Aaaah - but we all have faith in something, doyousee?" line, or the "Ahhh, but science is just the same as faith" (which I know is a generalization, but it is a common bit of rhetoric usually coming from the silly side of this debate) line, at, say, me, it assumes that the people (in this hypothetical case me) arguing for the value of scientific knowledge are a) not aware of the complications (which you give us examples of above) of the ways in which science, and going off scientific evidence, is more complicated than just being "purely reasonable"; and b) it assumes that the "scientist" considers themselves to be an entirely reasonable being, which as I said "unless they've managed to avoid Freud and leave out Lacan is probably not quite how they're seeing things".

That sentence is horribly complicated, and could have been avoided if I'd been more clear upthread, for which I apologize.

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