The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins

Ditto

 

I'd have to disagree with you on that one. The world is so beautiful, and so many things are so perfect that I can't help but believe there is a designer.

 

http://richarddawkins.net/video/growingUpClip2all.mov

 

listen fuckface speak for yourself .......again i leave you in peace .............ditto? yer bollocks ........ whats the matter mathew man is the word peace foreign to you or what ? ..........sorry ............back to dawkins ..............peace

 

Ok, I wouldn't go as far as to say everything on earth is purely there to look pretty for us. And I'm vegetarian, so clearly I don't think the only purpose of animals is for us to eat them. But I do think that the world has the mark of a designer. I had a very good example, but I've forgotten it, which sucks a bit. I'll post when I remember

 

I don't think we should drop religions from the curriculum. Our civilisation, language, art and culture is so steeped in religious and biblical thinking that it would be a great loss to fail to include these great ideas in our teaching. It would render a vast proportion of our history, literature and art unintelligible!

What I do object to is the teaching of religion as science. Religion is inherently unscientific, and to suggest religion and science have equal claim to truth is to give children a fundamental misunderstanding of the way we go about gaining knowledge, to disable their minds from proper critical thinking. To muddy the waters of the scientific method with the confusing implication that the Bible is in some way an accurate, literal historical account of the creation of the universe is deeply irresponsible and damaging to young minds. Teaching the bible as literal truth not only undermines the study of science, it undermines the study of history and literature, and it has one intention - to indoctrinate impressionable young minds with falsehoods and to keep this pernicious mind virus alive.

We should study our religious cultural heritage, and the various different religious cultures of the world, but these should be kept totally separate from science.

 

I would recommend you read the Dawkins book, he deals extensively with the teleological argument (argument from design) and shows how it has been demonstrated to be false.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleological_argument

 

I've wanted to read some Dawkins for a while, it was suggested reading for one of my courses this year, but I couldn't afford them, and they were never in the library when I went. Have you read any of his other work? I'd like to read the Dawkins delusion as well, just because I'd like to see how McGrath responds to Dawkins.

 

I haven't read any of his other books, but have been a reader of his articles for some time. I would like to read The Selfish Gene and The Extended Phenotype because they are such seminal scientific works. As I said in my review I think he writes best when he's discussing his own field of expertise which is evolutionary biology. The God Delusion is well worth reading and I think a lot of what Dawkins says in it on the place of religion in society needed to be said, but much of what he says is based on inferences we can draw from a close look at the science itself without the need to bring religion in at all: it just doesn't explain anything and is therefore quite redundant. The awe inspiring wonder of the details of evolutionary theory speak for themselves; once you read and understand Darwin's Origin of Species, its beautiful simplicity and explanatory force more than makes up for anything you lose in ridding yourself of religious ideas. Origin of Species was the book that truly opened my eyes to the wonder of existence!

 

I didn't even make it all of the way through origin of species, and last semester one of my courses was origins and diversity of life, oops. I'm not great at reading non-fiction, I've always read fiction, and loved it, so never saw the need to read anything else. I think I'm missing out though. I'd like to read the selfish gene, and maybe the blind watchmaker. I don't think there's a chance of me ridding myself of religious ideas, but evolution really interests me, I don't think that 7 day creation necessarily means 7 24hour periods, so I think evolution and creation can sit alongside each other. It's something I don't know enough about I think. There are also plenty of Christians who would say evolution is right, but that doesn't mean it wasn't caused by God. I think evolution is an awesome concept, and Darwin is one of the greatest thinkers to ever have lived. So yeah, maybe getting all of the way through origin of species would be a start, then selfish gene and God delusion.

 

Yes, I think it's worthwhile to remind ourselves that a majority of Christians do not believe that the world is 6,000 years old and that it was created in seven days by a floating bearded sky-magician. It's a minority in the West who believe in the literal infallible truth of the Bible (except in the USA where I think it's at least 50/50...). Are you aware of Stephen Jay Gould's theory of "Non-overlapping magesteria"? Dawkins does take issue with Gould's seperation of religion and science by stating (quite convincingly I think) that almost by definition religion makes 'scientific' claims about the fundamental nature of existence, claims which can be tested. But nonetheless, Gould's attempt is to reconcile science with religion not by denying science as creationists do but by stating that religion deals with matters of ultimate meaning and morality, questions about which science is neutral. This is at least an attempt to deal with the empirical evidence and to accept the overwhelming likelihood of evolution and big bang theory etc.

It's the fundamentalist minority who believe in the absolute literal truth of the Bible and claim that all scientific knowledge is wrong, and that God planted fossils to fool us, who are the really scary loony ones...

 

Yep, the headmaster of my primary school was convinced dinosaurs had never existed, and the fossils were just there for confusion. That confused me more than dinosaurs ever would. Gould's theory sounds interesting, I'll have to take a look at that.

 

I don't think i'll give up the day job :jester: - i was only kidding Paul - Taketh a chill pill - man .

I do not doubt the wonder of the cosmos as a whole.
The glory / beauty of each and every atom on this planet is breathtaking - but it is a mere evolutionary process that happened to turn out 'ok' - it has gone horrible wrong [in comparison] hundreds if not thousands screw it - billions of times - all over the cosmos.

NOTHING is perfect but i have to say it is a 'miracle' that it all fits together and works - especialy the animal kingdom the planets and moons spinning around and around and the galaxy spinning around around erm yeah spinning around and around erm black holes i'd imagine.

I'm a vegeterian - BUT
Don't animals eat animals [on the whole] ?. The whole food chain thingy me bob.
I know people will say ''we do not need to eat meat'' - ''were not 'designed' to eat meat'' and all that baloney - but come on - animals eat animals - always have always will.

 

I'd agree that it's a miracle. Do you mean it's all gone horribly wrong in that we're the only planet, as far as we know, on which life has managed to happen? What I meant was I don't think animals were put on the planet just for us to eat. I know animals eat animals, and that's perfectly natural. I would also say that humans eating meat is pretty natural. But it's not the only reason animals exist.

 

At last - we agree on something

Yes - the diversity of THIS planet is breathtaking - just far away from a sun to keep us warm - just far enough away so are arses do not fry.
The fluke of a moon to keep us in equilibrium - the list goes on and on.

Oh no - to be honest us humans are on this planet waaaaay to long . I'd much prefer to have lived a short life and passed on my DNA to a wide variety of females [if you know what i mean].

Sorry - yeah i agree with you.
I do wonder why snakes are on this planet - nasty evil things - buy yeah each animal has a place and a 'purpose' or no purpose at all [just like us] i'd imagine. I do not think we are particularly special - or above any other species on this lovely planet we all inhabit.

 

"Miracle" is the wrong word, for fairly obvious reasons! What we can say is that it is staggeringly improbable that life would occur out of the chemistry of any particular planet. But when you have (at a conservative estimate) a billion billion planets in the universe, even an event as improbable as one in a billion will result in a billion instances of that event being probable throughout the universe. And you only need it to happen once in order to explain our existence. The origin of life in the universe is therefore an exceptionally likely outcome!

All you need is one instance of this rare chemical event resulting in molecule replication with heredity, and the whole process of evolution begins from there.

As for the unlikely nature of the universe being "just so" so that planets can form and chemical elements exist etc, the anthropic principle tells us that by definition the universe must be this way because of the fact we are here observing it, and we must be on a planet like Earth which is conducive to the proliferation of life, because we are alive here...

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

 

So it must be possible for life to occur in the universe, because it has. That's immense. And I don't mean that in a sarcastic way, it's so hard to tell on these things.

 

Self-evidently! Here's a quote from one of its proponents on that wiki page which explains it:

It doesn't explain how life came about, just that if the nature of the universe were not such that it could support life, there would be no life, by definition. Devastatingly simple. The origin of life is still not explained other than probabilistically, though biochemistry / abiogenesis is such a fruitful area for research that it's reasonable to assume it will be discovered soon. Once we have recreated the genesis of life from simple molecules in the laboratory, we will understand the key to the existence of life itself:stunned:

 

Ah wikipedia, how I love thee. It's quite scary how close we seem to be to working all of everything out. How probable is recreating the beginning of life? I know people are trying, I'm just not sure how close they are

 

That is of course impossible to say, it's one of the big questions for which we don't yet have an answer. One thing that's striking is that when you try to look up scientific information about current research on abiogenesis or biopoesis, you find an astonishing number of references to god. It seems like wherever there is an area of current research where we don't yet have satisfactory answers, that's where god gets pushed back to as an explanation. Until we work out a falsifiable theory, at which point god gets pushed back even further into the next gap in knowledge. Dawkins refers to this as "gap theology"...