Liberal Debutante

1 | gordo

March 8th, 2008 at 3:48 am

Grr…

Dawkins really is a dickhead. I don’t see why some people can’t say, “I don’t believe that” or “there’s no evidence for that” without adding, “and if YOU believe that, you’re an idiot.”

2 | Pseudonym

March 8th, 2008 at 9:09 am

The thing that I find bizarre about Dawkins (and people like him, but let’s concentrate on him for now) is just how unscientific he gets when on the topic of religion.

Let’s suppose you’re selling something pseudoscientific or outright fraudulent like, oh, I dunno, crystal healing or something. Obviously, your crap won’t pass muster in a scientific journal, so you don’t try and publish anything there. Instead, you write a popular book and try to appeal to the general public.

So along comes Prof. Dawkins and his “religious questions are SCIENTIFIC questions!” theory. Does he write a scientific paper on this? Why no, he writes a popular book.

The hypothetical pseudoscientist will not provide evidence. Well, not exactly. They will use selective evidence or, even better, anecodtal “evidence”. No actual data. OK, maybe a bad or misleading statistic, but actually, the best kind of number to supply is no number.

Does Dawkins provide data? Well, not where it counts.

There are a bunch of anecdotes, naturally. He claims that fundamentalism is on the rise. Why? Because he’s managed to find every corner case and fringe lunatic that he could. That proves it, of course.

Never mind that the fastest-growing religious group in the English-speaking world is people who self-identify as Christian, but don’t regularly attend any place of worship. This is a group which doesn’t get included in the standard statistics.

Or, one of my favourites, is his assertion in the preface that “decent, understated religion is numerically negligible”. Nice way to avoid giving an actual number!

The woo-meister will set up their opponents with impossible standards. Scientists are never 100% absolutely sure of anything, so citing this lack of perfect knowledge on their part is, naturally, evidence for where the quackery fits.

Naturally, Prof. Dawkins’ standard for the existence of deities is scientific proof. For the God of Pat Robertson, fair enough. A deity who made the world in 7 days 6000 years ago is something you can test. But for a “God of the Philosophers”, that’s an impossible standard to achieve.

The quack will propose a conspiracy theory. Those evil scientists conspire to keep his superior theories from seeing the light of day. And just about everyone is in on it, too!

To his credit, Dawkins doesn’t do this. He is correct that people are nervous to challenge specific religious beliefs out of sensitivity, but that falls well short of a conspiracy theory.

So in summary: Richard Dawkins, one of the best popular science book authors ever, and a damn good scientist, seems to trip my bullshit detector kit every time he discusses religion. That’s not encouraging.

3 | gordo

March 8th, 2008 at 3:12 pm

I just heard an interview with Dawkins on an atheist radio show. I was a little surprised, because he was really nice and answered some of the creationist arguments that they discussed without any vitriol or spurious logic.

I think the reason Dawkins came across so well is that he wasn’t attacking belief in God, he was defending the theory of natural selection. And he wasn’t talking to an intellectual fraud like Duane Gish or Michael Behe, he was talking to people who were genuinely interested in finding truth by having a rational discussion of the facts.

When he gets ill tempered, boorish, and illogical, it seems that it’s when he’s trying to prove something that isn’t true (e.g., that there are only a small number of non-fundamentalist Christians), or that can’t be proven. And he’s especially grumpy when he’s talking to or about someone who engages in scientific fraud in order to “disprove” evolution.

4 | Alon Levy

March 8th, 2008 at 8:42 pm

He spoke at a conference I went to last November. The sheer radicalism was disgusting. He openly admitted maybe his tactics weren’t politically effective, but said he wanted to keep on in order to raise consciousness. This was even though the anti-atheism he said he was fighting was entirely political; the only case of discrimination he cited was the statistic that about half of Americans wouldn’t vote for an atheist for President.

In an article on Free Inquiry, he happily quoted his “God is a [17 different adjectives] bully” passage as a way of arguing that no, he wasn’t that shrill. That sums him up to me.

5 | Pseudonym

March 8th, 2008 at 11:39 pm

gordo:

I think the reason Dawkins came across so well is that he wasn’t attacking belief in God, he was defending the theory of natural selection.

And I think that’s the crucial difference. When he’s talking science, he’s the best thing since Sliced Sagan. When he’s talking religion, he’s just another guy with a rant.