RICHARD DAWKINGS: AN ATHEIST'S CALL TO ARMS

[galtgulch]

I found this delightful video on a site entitled: TED Ideas - worth spreading:

http://tinyurl.com/5sm5pd

I realize that atheism involves just one's position on merely one metaphysical question.

But it does suggest that it just might be a sign of intelligent life on this planet.

Take heart.

galt

Edited August 3, 2008 by galtgulch

[Darrell Hougen]

I found this delightful video on a site entitled: TED Ideas - worth spreading:

http://tinyurl.com/5sm5pd

I realize that atheism involves just one's position on merely one metaphysical question.

But it does suggest that it just might be a sign of intelligent life on this planet.

Take heart.

galt

The problem is that he doesn't offer anything positive with which to replace religion.

Darrell

[BaalChatzaf]

The problem is that he doesn't offer anything positive with which to replace religion.

Darrell

What about science and mathematics?

These two tell us most of what we know about the world.

I think Spinoza had the right idea. Comprehend the Cosmos and you comprehend God. Spinoza identified the Cosmos with God. Given that, the only form of worship to study the world and learn it.

Ba'al Chatzaf

Edited August 7, 2008 by BaalChatzaf

[kiaer.ts]

I agree that Dawkins' atheism is empty. I prefer this.

[BaalChatzaf]

I agree that Dawkins' atheism is empty. I prefer this.

I think you misjudge Dawkins. In his book -The Ancestor's Tale- he conveys the complexity and wonder of life on Earth. He shares Darwin's view and attitude. As Darwin wrote in -The Origins of Species-:

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

All that wonder and without any miracles. Not one.

That pretty well sums up the way Dawkins looks at life. You really should read -The Ancestor's Tale-. It is beautifully written, it covers the ground thoroughly and it is quite accessible to someone who is not scientifically trained.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Matus1976]

I was reading dawkins through most of my high school and college career and admired him a great deal. However, he seems to have become a scientific nihilist or material determinist, and his rebuttals to the Iraq War published in the Skeptical Inquirer were childishly naive. In the God Delusion though, Dawkins clearly wrestled with the moral relativism he was advocating, as he suggested that raising children to religious indoctrination amounted to pyschological torture and that 'something' should be done about it. Edge.org asked many famous scientists what they thought the worlds most dangerous idea was, Dawkins, disgustingly, answered that it is the concept of free will, and that we punish criminals for their crime.

from - http://www.edge.org/q2006/q06_9.html#dawkins

RICHARD DAWKINS

Evolutionary Biologist, Charles Simonyi Professor For The Understanding Of Science, Oxford University; Author, The Ancestor's Tale

Let's all stop beating Basil's car

Ask people why they support the death penalty or prolonged incarceration for serious crimes, and the reasons they give will usually involve retribution. There may be passing mention of deterrence or rehabilitation, but the surrounding rhetoric gives the game away. People want to kill a criminal as payback for the horrible things he did. Or they want to give "satisfaction' to the victims of the crime or their relatives. An especially warped and disgusting application of the flawed concept of retribution is Christian crucifixion as "atonement' for "sin'.

Retribution as a moral principle is incompatible with a scientific view of human behaviour. As scientists, we believe that human brains, though they may not work in the same way as man-made computers, are as surely governed by the laws of physics. When a computer malfunctions, we do not punish it. We track down the problem and fix it, usually by replacing a damaged component, either in hardware or software.

Basil Fawlty, British television's hotelier from hell created by the immortal John Cleese, was at the end of his tether when his car broke down and wouldn't start. He gave it fair warning, counted to three, gave it one more chance, and then acted. "Right! I warned you. You've had this coming to you!" He got out of the car, seized a tree branch and set about thrashing the car within an inch of its life. Of course we laugh at his irrationality. Instead of beating the car, we would investigate the problem. Is the carburettor flooded? Are the sparking plugs or distributor points damp? Has it simply run out of gas? Why do we not react in the same way to a defective man: a murderer, say, or a rapist? Why don't we laugh at a judge who punishes a criminal, just as heartily as we laugh at Basil Fawlty? Or at King Xerxes who, in 480 BC, sentenced the rough sea to 300 lashes for wrecking his bridge of ships? Isn't the murderer or the rapist just a machine with a defective component? Or a defective upbringing? Defective education? Defective genes?

Concepts like blame and responsibility are bandied about freely where human wrongdoers are concerned. When a child robs an old lady, should we blame the child himself or his parents? Or his school? Negligent social workers? In a court of law, feeble-mindedness is an accepted defence, as is insanity. Diminished responsibility is argued by the defence lawyer, who may also try to absolve his client of blame by pointing to his unhappy childhood, abuse by his father, or even unpropitious genes (not, so far as I am aware, unpropitious planetary conjunctions, though it wouldn't surprise me).

But doesn't a truly scientific, mechanistic view of the nervous system make nonsense of the very idea of responsibility, whether diminished or not? Any crime, however heinous, is in principle to be blamed on antecedent conditions acting through the accused's physiology, heredity and environment. Don't judicial hearings to decide questions of blame or diminished responsibility make as little sense for a faulty man as for a Fawlty car?

Why is it that we humans find it almost impossible to accept such conclusions? Why do we vent such visceral hatred on child murderers, or on thuggish vandals, when we should simply regard them as faulty units that need fixing or replacing? Presumably because mental constructs like blame and responsibility, indeed evil and good, are built into our brains by millennia of Darwinian evolution. Assigning blame and responsibility is an aspect of the useful fiction of intentional agents that we construct in our brains as a means of short-cutting a truer analysis of what is going on in the world in which we have to live. My dangerous idea is that we shall eventually grow out of all this and even learn to laugh at it, just as we laugh at Basil Fawlty when he beats his car. But I fear it is unlikely that I shall ever reach that level of enlightenment.

Contrast Dawkins with Matt Ridley, evolutionary biologist

MATT RIDLEY

Science Writer; Founding chairman of the International Centre for Life; Author, The Agile Gene: How Nature Turns on Nature

Government is the problem not the solution

In all times and in all places there has been too much government. We now know what prosperity is: it is the gradual extension of the division of labour through the free exchange of goods and ideas, and the consequent introduction of efficiencies by the invention of new technologies. This is the process that has given us health, wealth and wisdom on a scale unimagined by our ancestors. It not only raises material standards of living, it also fuels social integration, fairness and charity. It has never failed yet. No society has grown poorer or more unequal through trade, exchange and invention. Think of pre-Ming as opposed to Ming China, seventeenth century Holland as opposed to imperial Spain, eighteenth century England as opposed to Louis XIV's France, twentieth century America as opposed to Stalin's Russia, or post-war Japan, Hong Kong and Korea as opposed to Ghana, Cuba and Argentina. Think of the Phoenicians as opposed to the Egyptians, Athens as opposed to Sparta, the Hanseatic League as opposed to the Roman Empire. In every case, weak or decentralised government, but strong free trade led to surges in prosperity for all, whereas strong, central government led to parasitic, tax-fed officialdom, a stifling of innovation, relative economic decline and usually war.

Take Rome. It prospered because it was a free trade zone. But it repeatedly invested the proceeds of that prosperity in too much government and so wasted it in luxury, war, gladiators and public monuments. The Roman empire's list of innovations is derisory, even compared with that of the 'dark ages' that followed.

In every age and at every time there have been people who say we need more regulation, more government. Sometimes, they say we need it to protect exchange from corruption, to set the standards and police the rules, in which case they have a point, though often they exaggerate it. Self-policing standards and rules were developed by free-trading merchants in medieval Europe long before they were taken over and codified as laws (and often corrupted) by monarchs and governments.

Sometimes, they say we need it to protect the weak, the victims of technological change or trade flows. But throughout history such intervention, though well meant, has usually proved misguided — because its progenitors refuse to believe in (or find out about) David Ricardo's Law of Comparative Advantage: even if China is better at making everything than France, there will still be a million things it pays China to buy from France rather than make itself. Why? Because rather than invent, say, luxury goods or insurance services itself, China will find it pays to make more T shirts and use the proceeds to import luxury goods and insurance.

Government is a very dangerous toy. It is used to fight wars, impose ideologies and enrich rulers. True, nowadays, our leaders do not enrich themselves (at least not on the scale of the Sun King), but they enrich their clients: they preside over vast and insatiable parasitic bureaucracies that grow by Parkinson's Law and live off true wealth creators such as traders and inventors.

Sure, it is possible to have too little government. Only, that has not been the world's problem for millennia. After the century of Mao, Hitler and Stalin, can anybody really say that the risk of too little government is greater than the risk of too much? The dangerous idea we all need to learn is that the more we limit the growth of government, the better off we will all be.

[kiaer.ts]

I have a bachelor's in biology and philosophy from Rutgers. I have read every one of Dawkins' books, except God Delusion. Ancestor's Tale was good when it stuck to biology. When Dawkins ventures into human foibles, I fear he projects. For example, he showed a picture of Bush, Cheney, Poweel and Rice,and asked us to subclassify them. The obvious biological answer was that Rice is a woman, the rest are men. But no, he expected us to be racist automatons, and to classify Rice and Powell as blacks. Just as I don't read Christopher Hitchens to learn biology, I am not interested in reading Dawkins (a leftist (post-(?)-Marxist)) about matters in ethics and the humanities. Like Chomsky, Dawkins has enough on his plate defending his own controversial ideas within his field. These two men, with their ham-fisted moralizing done from the secure pulpit of a tenured position and with the acclaim of the academic left - outside their own fields - are a testament to the corruption of the incestuous tenure system.

[tjohnson]

I think both Dawkings and Ridley both make very good points.

[kiaer.ts]

Basil Fawlty, British television's hotelier from hell created by the immortal John Cleese, was at the end of his tether when his car broke down and wouldn't start. He gave it fair warning, counted to three, gave it one more chance, and then acted. "Right! I warned you. You've had this coming to you!" He got out of the car, seized a tree branch and set about thrashing the car within an inch of its life. Of course we laugh at his irrationality. Instead of beating the car, we would investigate the problem. Is the carburettor flooded? Are the sparking plugs or distributor points damp? Has it simply run out of gas? Why do we not react in the same way to a defective man: a murderer, say, or a rapist? Why don't we laugh at a judge who punishes a criminal, just as heartily as we laugh at Basil Fawlty? Or at King Xerxes who, in 480 BC, sentenced the rough sea to 300 lashes for wrecking his bridge of ships? Isn't the murderer or the rapist just a machine with a defective component? Or a defective upbringing? Defective education? Defective genes?

We laugh at Fawlty not because we do not understand what he is doing, but because he is treating a car as if it were animate. Dawkins' and the reductive materialists' view is just as laughable; he treats people as if they are inanimate. Punishment is the way one properly addresses a defective will.

[tjohnson]

There is no such thing as "a will', let alone a defective one . What do you mean?

[kiaer.ts]

Given I have no will, I cannot choose to answer your question.

[BaalChatzaf]

We laugh at Fawlty not because we do not understand what he is doing, but because he is treating a car as if it were animate. Dawkins' and the reductive materialists' view is just as laughable; he treats people as if they are inanimate. Punishment is the way one properly addresses a defective will.

Dawkins regards people as physical and material. That is not the same as inanimate. If we are not physical, then what are we? What is your body and brain made of? They are made of atoms, whose physical properties can be looked up in any periodic table of elements. Our bodies and brains operate as described by physical laws.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Brant Gaede]

We laugh at Fawlty not because we do not understand what he is doing, but because he is treating a car as if it were animate. Dawkins' and the reductive materialists' view is just as laughable; he treats people as if they are inanimate. Punishment is the way one properly addresses a defective will.

Dawkins regards people as physical and material. That is not the same as inanimate. If we are not physical, then what are we? What is your body and brain made of? They are made of atoms, whose physical properties can be looked up in any periodic table of elements. Our bodies and brains operate as described by physical laws.

"Looked up" by what?

--Brant

[BaalChatzaf]

We laugh at Fawlty not because we do not understand what he is doing, but because he is treating a car as if it were animate. Dawkins' and the reductive materialists' view is just as laughable; he treats people as if they are inanimate. Punishment is the way one properly addresses a defective will.

Dawkins regards people as physical and material. That is not the same as inanimate. If we are not physical, then what are we? What is your body and brain made of? They are made of atoms, whose physical properties can be looked up in any periodic table of elements. Our bodies and brains operate as described by physical laws.

"Looked up" by what?

--Brant

By a brain driven sentient all of whose operations are within the scope of physical law. Our brains are made of atoms all of who interactions are governed by physical laws. There is nothing "mysterious" going on. Every bit of what we are and do is natural.

Do you have a problem with a material/physical entity exhibiting sentience?

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Brant Gaede]

We laugh at Fawlty not because we do not understand what he is doing, but because he is treating a car as if it were animate. Dawkins' and the reductive materialists' view is just as laughable; he treats people as if they are inanimate. Punishment is the way one properly addresses a defective will.

Dawkins regards people as physical and material. That is not the same as inanimate. If we are not physical, then what are we? What is your body and brain made of? They are made of atoms, whose physical properties can be looked up in any periodic table of elements. Our bodies and brains operate as described by physical laws.

"Looked up" by what?

--Brant

By a brain driven sentient all of whose operations are within the scope of physical law. Our brains are made of atoms all of who interactions are governed by physical laws. There is nothing "mysterious" going on. Every bit of what we are and do is natural.

Do you have a problem with a material/physical entity exhibiting sentience?

Do you have a problem with "mind"? Consciousness? Free will? Moral agency? You make "sentience" sound like sediment.

--Brant

[kiaer.ts]

Fawlty is not treating the car as if it is immaterial. The issue is reductionism, not the truth or falsehood of atomic theory. Dawkins wants to deny any fundamental difference between the behaviors of cars and minds because he sees their behaviors as reducible to physical laws. Punishment can work with humans, just not always, because they do have free will and can be intentionally perverse. Cars are not able to be perverse. How does Dawkins explain that punishment does (if applied before one is old enough to apply for the dole) often work? Random chance? Objectivism is not reductionist, and is not essentially atheist, but rather essentially pro-reason and pro-individual. Dawkins is interesting, but his mere atheism. in tandem with his other objectionable baggage makes him a poor ally.

[BaalChatzaf]

We laugh at Fawlty not because we do not understand what he is doing, but because he is treating a car as if it were animate. Dawkins' and the reductive materialists' view is just as laughable; he treats people as if they are inanimate. Punishment is the way one properly addresses a defective will.

Dawkins regards people as physical and material. That is not the same as inanimate. If we are not physical, then what are we? What is your body and brain made of? They are made of atoms, whose physical properties can be looked up in any periodic table of elements. Our bodies and brains operate as described by physical laws.

"Looked up" by what?

--Brant

By a brain driven sentient all of whose operations are within the scope of physical law. Our brains are made of atoms all of who interactions are governed by physical laws. There is nothing "mysterious" going on. Every bit of what we are and do is natural.

Do you have a problem with a material/physical entity exhibiting sentience?

Do you have a problem with "mind"? Consciousness? Free will? Moral agency? You make "sentience" sound like sediment.

--Brant

Yes, when mind is asserted to be an object not subject to physical law. "Mind" is a subset of the functions carried out in your very physical brain. It is not a self standing object or substance. It is the physical effect of physical causes.

I prefer the term "minding" to "mind" because "minding" is a brain process. It happens nowhere else and can be scanned and tracked with all sorts of fancy physical gear like MRI scanners, CAT scanners and such like.

I can say for sure I have no non-material non-physical mind in my physical body. I have been CAT scanned, MRI scanned, PET scanned and there is not one hint of anything non-physical going on inside of my body. I have no ectoplasmic bats in my belfry. Maybe you do, but I don't. How do I know? I checked.

Everything about me is reducible to the interaction of atoms and fields.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[tjohnson]

Punishment can work with humans, just not always, because they do have free will and can be intentionally perverse.

That depends on what you mean by 'work', in my opinion, punishment is a very poor behaviour modification tool, in general. How convenient to call someone 'perverse' when they don't accept your point of view.

Objectivism is not reductionist, and is not essentially atheist, but rather essentially pro-reason and pro-individual.

So what is neurology, anti-reason?? Neurologists will tell you there is no thing called "a will" or "a mind". This does not mean people don't make choices.

[kiaer.ts]

For someone who styles himself a student of Korzybski, one would expect you to know the difference between using "neurologists will tell you" as a universal or an existential. Sure, there exist all sorts of perverse, "mindless," neurologists. And quite a few (Damasio, Sacks...) reasonable ones, even more recent than B.F.Skinner. By their own words the mindless ones who don't mean what they say (do you not get the fallacy of the stolen concept yet?) refute themselves. Good luck with that.

[BaalChatzaf]

For someone who styles himself a student of Korzybski, one would expect you to know the difference between using "neurologists will tell you" as a universal or an existential. Sure, there exist all sorts of perverse, "mindless," neurologists. And quite a few (Damasio, Sacks...) reasonable ones, even more recent than B.F.Skinner. By their own words the mindless ones who don't mean what they say (do you not get the fallacy of the stolen concept yet?) refute themselves. Good luck with that.

Not one neurologist has ever found a mind in someone else's body. There is no empirical evidence for the existence of a mind as a separate substance from the material of the human body. See if you can reference a journal article which gives evidence for a mind that is not a physical substance.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Brant Gaede]

For someone who styles himself a student of Korzybski, one would expect you to know the difference between using "neurologists will tell you" as a universal or an existential. Sure, there exist all sorts of perverse, "mindless," neurologists. And quite a few (Damasio, Sacks...) reasonable ones, even more recent than B.F.Skinner. By their own words the mindless ones who don't mean what they say (do you not get the fallacy of the stolen concept yet?) refute themselves. Good luck with that.

Not one neurologist has ever found a mind in someone else's body. There is no empirical evidence for the existence of a mind as a separate substance from the material of the human body. See if you can reference a journal article which gives evidence for a mind that is not a physical substance.

Call in the vivisectionists!

--Brant

[kiaer.ts]

To exist, and to be a substance are two different things. (See Aristotle.) Or, I suppose, shadows don't exist? In any case, your arguments, GS, (what is their mass in grams?) certainly don't, they are just the non-existent tinkling of brass.

[BaalChatzaf]

To exist, and to be a substance are two different things. (See Aristotle.) Or, I suppose, shadows don't exist? In any case, your arguments (what is their mass in grams?) certainly don't, they are just the non-existent tinkling of brass.

Tinkling brass exists and there is empirical evidence for it. There is no -objective- empirical evidence for the existence of non-material minds. Not a bit. Not a dight. Not a smidgeon. None. Zero. Zip.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[tjohnson]

To exist, and to be a substance are two different things. (See Aristotle.) Or, I suppose, shadows don't exist? In any case, your arguments, GS, (what is their mass in grams?) certainly don't, they are just the non-existent tinkling of brass.

See Science & Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics. Don't waste your time with Aristotle, it's the 21st century!

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

There is no -objective- empirical evidence for the existence of non-material minds. Not a bit. Not a dight. Not a smidgeon. None. Zero. Zip.

Bob,

Of course there is. It's called a holon and it is not in the form you want it to be. But it is.

The metaphysics you preach is limited by your whim, not by observation.

You are evidence of it.