Richard Dawkins: The God Delusion.

[shlomo]

To me atheism means being atheist until proven otherwise

now THATS an scientific way of thinking

I have the blessing/curse to live in the former atheist-communist country now being transformed to catholic one.
NO advance in morality achived! Even worse, the moral is lower than ever...

however, if we have the hardware (human body) and the wetware (genetic informations, social interactions, moral awareness) who the f*&k wrote the software?

[BoimB son of BoB]

But that is not really different than a religious person saying that their view is right, dont you see the irony? You could educate someone from years & years in the patterns you talk about & that knowledge but they could still come out at the end and say i can see god through these patterns, i believe Einstein himself saw it that way.

it's all in what you mean by god. i think i can agree how einstein sees 'god'.

but that is something completly different than a personal god or the 'higher force' you speak about. you could say einstein saw the universe as 'god'. that for me is something completely different.


there must be something. something can be anything. so you could thus give any definition to the word god you like. so speaking like that you actually say nothing at all.

[BoimB son of BoB]

however, if we have the hardware (human body) and the wetware (genetic informations, social interactions, moral awareness) who the f*&k wrote the software?

nobody. that's the beauty of it all and the point of the story

[BoimB son of BoB]

some food for the thinkerers:

http://www.amazon.com/Breaking-Spell-Re ... 067003472X

[shlomo]

nobody or no-body?

or if i am getting this right; its writing itself?

if does, howcome it has been denied by its own work?

[shlomo]

by itself!

[mdk]

But that is not really different than a religious person saying that their view is right, dont you see the irony? You could educate someone from years & years in the patterns you talk about & that knowledge but they could still come out at the end and say i can see god through these patterns, i believe Einstein himself saw it that way.

Interestingly Dawkins covers the often misquoted Einsteinian god very early in the book.

Its all to do with what you mean by god. He is talking very much about the religious (and particularly Christian) god. The all-knowing, ever-present being which listens to everyones prayers but either cant be bothered to do anything about them or doesnt exist

I had kind of gone off Dawkins a bit as he sometimes came across as a bit of a tit, but this book is very good. Clearly written and often funny.

I actually called myself agnostic before reading it, mainly because I found the very question of god tiresome, rather than believing there was no way to answer it, but Dawkins has re-invigorated my atheism and provided some very useful tools to help dissemble organised religion. (or you could say spread the vaccine against the god-virus)

Meef, Im interested by your earlier comment about spirituality, what exactly do you mean by spirituality?

[freqn]

Dawkins is the delusion.

[Meef Chaloin]

Meef, Im interested by your earlier comment about spirituality, what exactly do you mean by spirituality?

i mean that there is more to the whole subject than either believing organised religion and being atheist. Its possible to believe everything about evolution and still believe there is a god, or a higher force. I think that the truth is somewhere in between both extremes, i believe they are both true. Science knows so little about the mind and consciousness, its ludicrous to me to deny outright any possibility of a greater force/intelligence of some kind.

There;s a difference in believing in christianity/islam and believing there is more to life/death than we can perceive. Evolution doesn't disprove god, it just pushes the question (or paradox to be more accurate) further back.

[epiphanius]

BoimB son of BoB wrote:

"you do not need something like religion to have a 'clear' sense about what's right and wrong."

and: "morality for me doesn't need religion to have evolved..."

We are not talking about 'morality for you', we are talking about morality as scientific fact, independent of a particular observer.

You seem to be suggesting that morality itself has evolved, ie it is changing over time. This is an interesting idea, but it suggests that there is no particular morality at all: it can change over time, and the morality that sells hard drugs to children, for example, is just as valid as a morality that looks after people in need.

I had thought the concept of morality was that it was unchanging, like the laws of physics. We might discover new truths in physics, but the truth was always there, it just needed discovering. Is morality unchanging in this way? Is it a law of the universe, like the laws of physics, biology, and of evolution? Dawkins does not seem to address this. I agree with the observation from Meef Chaloin that Dawkins "method is very wrong and looks to me like someone who is out of his league".

And mdk mentions:
"He is talking very much about the religious (and particularly Christian) god."

If he is attacking Christianity in particular, he should say so. One thing I always find funny about people who trash religion is their assumption that religion always involves God. Religion does not necessarily involve God at all, as many millions of Buddhist religionists will be happy to inform you (or Dawkins). Buddhism is non-theistic, but it is very much a religion.

[shtreimel]

I look forward to the day when someone, somewhere attacks the notion of "love" because you can't "see it", "measure it", "smell it". Yet we all spend time and money (hell, the whole pop industry is fueled by it) chasing it. All this time and money for something that is...what...a human creation, no?

All I know is my ancestors had an experience that changed the world. And as empires come and go, Jews have not only survived, but spawned two of the world's largest religions. Not bad for a delusion. Anyway, check out Collins vs. Dawkins in Time:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/artic ... -1,00.html
While neither win the debate, Collins doesn't resort to name calling and "put downs".

[ethios4]

Basically, you're saying he hasn't studied the bible? I seriously doubt you can argue that?

Though I think it's very short sighted to say that Dawkins doesn't understand religion. He probably has studied it more than you have. But this goes back to the faith concept, because Dawkins doesn't "know god he can't understand god", which leaves anybody who is an atheist thinking you're argument is a bit one sided isn't it?

I'm sure he's read the bible a lot, and studied religion far more than I, but that doesn't mean get "got it", and he doesn't seem to get some basic concepts, which makes his arguments sound like straw-man falacies to me. At the beginning of the video he is talking about whether the universe "contains God". I can't speak for other religions, but orthodox Christianity does not claim that the universe "conatins God". God is outside the universe, eternal and infinite, but has a relation to the universe. While this may seem like a trifling issue, or that Dawkins really does understand religion but I'm reading him wrong, but from everything Ive read of his he seems to misrepresent the religion side and then attack his misrepresentations.

Its the same for all of the arguments here on this forum. The Bible says the universe is 6000 years old? I haven't read that. I know some humans came up with a dumb idea to try to figure out how old the universe is by adding together years in the bible. Faith is portrayed as some ridiculous thing that only an idiot would engage in, yet every single person engages in faith-based activity each and every day. Faith is the practical outworking of a person's worldview. If you don't believe in the existence of a God, that will be the basis for your actions, the same as believing the sun will come up the next day. If you believe the universe was created by a personal God that is pure actuality, being, and love, and that this being specifically loves you regardless of what you do, that will certainly influence you behavior too.

I haven't seen a proper response from Dawkins on the question of the origin of the universe, and how something could come from nothing. Mathematically speaking, anything that has temporal and spatial extent must have a beginning in time. Going with the big bang theory, what caused the universe to come into being from nothingness or potentiality? And no escaping into infinite regress either....

I'm not saying that you have to believe in God to be able to argue against believing in God. I'm just saying that most atheist arguments are based on misrepresentations or misunderstandings, IMO. If you don't believe in God, then attacking the idea of a virgin birth, or any other concept following from the foundational ideas is redundant and comes across as bullying as far as I'm concerned.

[Machinesworking]

If you don't believe in the existence of a God, that will be the basis for your actions, the same as believing the sun will come up the next day. If you believe the universe was created by a personal God that is pure actuality, being, and love, and that this being specifically loves you regardless of what you do, that will certainly influence you behavior too.

I don't think so. It took years for me to realize that a person's belief system simply doesn't relate to their behavior in any meaningful way. I can tell you I'm the nicest most positive person alive, and after knowing me for months the simple fact that I'm a negative selfish jerk emerges as my real nature.
Basically, religion to a large degree to me is a outward projected stance on the world, and in no way bears any real relation to the inner workings of a person.
I have a friend who is a born again christian whom I would say is a better friend than a lot of the atheists I know, the same is true in reverse, a lot of atheists are morally superior to most Christians I meet.

AFA you arguing that Dawkins is getting it wrong etc. well you're looking to find where he's wrong. You're reading him to find his faults. Then you complain that atheists do that to the bible, yet your example with Dawkins is most definitely splitting hairs.
Anyway, I have no interest in "converting" you to atheism. Like I said before I just don't see mankind as emotionally evolved enough to abandon religious thinking.
In my opinion the universe simply has gone through many big bangs, and has no beginning or end; we cannot grasp that concept without giving it a personality, therefore religion.

[ethios4]

Just finished watching Contact....that movie captures it so well...

[Machinesworking]

Basically, religion to a large degree to me is a outward projected stance on the world, and in no way bears any real relation to the inner workings of a person.

OK this took out of context is poorly worded, what I was trying to say is one's take on religion, whether atheist or muslim, jewish, or whatever, has little bearing on their moral and ethical behavior in the real world. Though these are supposedly deep and to many, very meaningful and personal parts of a person, in my experience with people, they don't play much of a role in individual behavior, whether they are supposed to or not.