Dawkins had a pretty good stint as the Professor of the Public Understanding of Science, but when it comes to the public understanding of Atheism, you often need to turn him upside down to get any sense out of him. (You perhaps have to wonder whether he actually understands the concept himself.)
In this clip we witness one of his most-shared and basically rather wrongheaded polemics against the belief in God.
What he fails to acknowledge is that behind every concrete representation of divinity, there lurks a more abstract question, such that it’s not in fact scientists all the way down when it comes to debunking the notions leading us back to the primary metaphysical issue.
And what is that? Well, most of us implicitly or explicitly believe one of three things. 1) The cosmos we experience is eternal and total. It’s all there is and all there ever was or can be. It is its own explanation. 2) The cosmos was instigated by a something or a someone and derives its meaning from the latter’s own essence, good, bad or indifferent 3) It just popped into existence randomly and possesses neither a purpose nor a path towards meaning.
I suppose there is a kind of fourth option, a set of hybrids between 2 and 3, in which there is a Creator who made a cosmos that is essentially purposeless, and maybe also meaningless. Because it could.
Anyway, if one chooses to express these preferences culturally, one is inevitably more likely drawn to the body of myths in one’s own culture. This is perfectly a natural human tendency and in no way represents any fundamental failure of logic.
If one opts for Jesus, the fact that one is at least agnostic towards Mohammed does not somehow immediately invalidate the entire notion of Deism, as Dawkins suggests here, because that intuition ultimately rests on the abstract questions which take shape beneath all faith systems.
One can reject all religions and still not be an atheist, just as one can be a kind of atheist content to wallow within the mythologies that we have constructed from the primary existential anxieties that all sentient humans experience, making use of the ways that they approach ultimate truth from one stage removed.
Dawkins has an even sillier argument against belief in a creator: his Flying Spaghetti Monster analogy, which is patently false, because this imagined supernatural marauder is not the same kind of placeholder for an explanation, not just of the origin of Being itself, but also of how we individual beings ought go about being — while we can — which most of our extant gods tend to be.
2 comments:
There is a great deal of anecdotal testimony from people who almost croaked, brought back from the brink of the void by a shock or shear will, that claim a light at the end of the tunnel. The rest would seem to be about political control of a very ornery species.
As to the physics of creation, we have little concept of what is there and how it works. As is my moto: We don't know shit.
Indeed.
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