Truth vs Acceptability

"In point of epistemological footing, the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conceptions only as cultural posits" > Willard Van Orman Quine. 

For an ontological relativist like Quine, both objects and supernatural beings were artifacts of culture — fictions if you like — but he considered the former superior in that they are more efficient for predicting events i.e. useful fictions. Treated the right way, they work.

Philosophy is born with the human desire to know the world as it really is. In the West Thales of Miletus is credited with being the first person to suggest a discrepancy between appearances and reality, and thus the first true philosopher.

Religion then, could be seen to originate with the notion that life will always be better and simpler if we pretend that we already know how the world really is. And, I would suggest, survives today in the West out partly of a fear of recognising the world for what it might be.

Anyway, the whole universe could be a grand illusion, but I'm still here putting the cat out at 4am every morning. Science works, bitches...but that does not (necessarily) make it True. It can be trusted, but one is not obliged to BELIEVE in it.

This is because while philosophy is the quest to know the world as it really is, science involves constructing an ever-improving approximation between our knowledge and objective reality...if such a thing exists. It's certainly a moving target if ever there was one.

Of course it's a perfectly valid philosophical position to suggest an identity between these two projects, but that it not really what Richard Dawkins is up to, because all philosophical positions tend to be inside his blind spot. The open scorn he pours on theology is thus accompanied by an more unstated disregard for philosophy - and not just metaphysics, but any attempt to take an intellectual leap out beyond the strictly pragmatic approach.

You'll find he refers to the latter as 'reason', but his is a rationalism with artificial barriers at both ends. Comfortably still inhabiting a largely Newtonian universe, he's disinclined to allow reason to soar upwards into the increasingly counterintuitive fields of quantum physics and cosmology, and he doesn't seem to like it either when, down below in the real world, practical applications of scientific theory also appear to require the attentions of (moral) philosophers. I once heard Dawkins in a live Q&A session squirming a bit on the issue of cloning, and he ended up with a formulation that sounded depressingly Werner Von Braun: i.e. "Vunce ze rocketz go up, who carez vair zey come down?".

Needless to say, when Britain needed a professional verdict on human embryo experiments they turned to a philosopher, Girton's former Mistress Baroness Warnock. I have a sneaking suspicion that Richard Dawkins must at the time have thought that only a scientist ought to be allowed to take such decisions. It works bitches, what more do you need to know?