Posts Tagged Richard Dawkins
Dawkins’ “The Magic of Reality”
Posted by Dylan Casey in Reviewage on November 13, 2011
To the extent that we talked about Richard Dawkins at all in the new-athiesm podcast this summer, we never got around to properly discussing science as wonder. Dawkins makes this argument in a really beautiful new book “The Magic of Reality”. Illustrated by Dave McKean, it’s ostensibly a children’s book, structured around a series of basic questions like “Who was the first person, really?” and “What are things made of?”, but, as he presents in the introduction, it’s a book aimed at showing that there is distinction between myth and science and that the account of the world through science is astonishing and wonderful.
Though it’s out as a hard-cover book, you should check out the iPad version if at all possible. That version includes a number of clever and wonderful mini-apps to illustrate some key scientific concepts and discoveries. I particularly liked the scalable solar system and Newton’s light-splitting experiment.
You can read a review of paper book from the Guardian newspaper.
Dylan
Greg Ganssle (via Pale Blue Dot) on Dawkins’s “Fitness” Argument
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Misc. Philosophical Musings, Other (i.e. Lesser) Podcasts on October 21, 2011
Yale Professor Greg Ganssle provides in this Pale Blue Dot episode what is perhaps a more charitable response to the new atheists than we did.
First, he points out something I hadn’t quite considered in this way before: We at PEL complain about how difficult and tedious it is (or would be) to write something fit for a peer reviewed journal. On the one hand, there’s no substitute for a qualified professor to kick your ass and make you revise something 90 times until it’s right. But the sheer amount of second-guessing involved, of making sure you’ve read and incorporated anything anyone ever has written about what you’re trying to express: it makes it nearly impossible to express anything and surely saps the passion out of the endeavor. Ganssle points out that even in the case of the only bona fide philosopher among the group, Dan Dennett, all of these guys are taking the role of “public intellectual,” taking their message directly to the people instead of putting through the academic publishing process (Dennett is a well established philosopher, but does not publish in academic philosophy of religion journals). For some reason this way of phrasing it makes me like them a bit more, maybe because it’s comparable to what we’re trying to do with the podcast.
Swinburne Contra Dawkins on Complexity and Creation
Posted by Daniel Horne in Things to Watch on October 14, 2011
A name that popped up in Episode 43 and Episode 44 was that of Oxford philosophy professor Richard Swinburne. Swinburne has made his reputation positing analytic arguments in favor of Christian theism. As Robert pointed out toward the end of Episode 43, most Christians, even if sympathetic, would probably not find Swinburne’s arguments dispositive toward their belief. Even so, it’s only fair to allow serious scholars like Swinburne to frame their own arguments before rendering judgment. Swinburne’s approach reveals the strawman nature of the arguments deployed by Hitchens, Harris, et al. when they evoke the cartoonish “I believe because the [insert Holy Text] says so” stereotype. (I will cut Richard Dawkins some slack here; he’s actually done a pretty good job of engaging non-silly theists in civil debate.)
Episode 44: New Atheist Critiques of Religion
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on October 11, 2011
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:50:03 — 100.8MB)
Discussing selections from Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel C. Dennett.
Should we be religious, or is religion just a bunch of superstitious nonsense that it’s past time for us to outgrow? Does faith lead to ceding to authority and potential violence? Can a reasonable person be religious? We say lots of rude things about these authors, and at times about their targets in this listener-requested episode featuring Mark, Wes, Seth, and Dylan. Read more about the topic.
Buy/read what we did:
-Ch. 1-2 of Harris’s The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
-The last three chapters of Hitchens’s God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
End song: “Goddammit” by Mark Lint and the Simulacra, recorded partly in 2000 and partly just now.
Topic for #44: “New Atheism”
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in General Announcements on September 7, 2011
We have long promised to more systematically cover these guys who generate so much fun sniping on our blog here, and as of last Sunday, the full as-of-now-regular podcaster lineup (myself, Seth, Wes, and Dylan; we will still have some guests on, though) recorded a discussion of:
-The first two chapters of Sam Harris’s The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
-The last three chapters of Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
These fellows do not so much answer the question “is there a God?” as the question “should we be religious?”
Harris claims that faith, defined as believing something without evidence, is morally irresponsible: it leaves us open to believing all sorts of destructive things, and there are portions of all the major Western religious texts that, if taken literally and without the need for rational justification, command abominable things. Religious moderates, by extension, are on Harris’s view in the awkward position of not being able to condemn the extremists in the way that would be necessary to quash them: the extremists are, after all, just acting out fully the principles commanded by the faith that the moderates profess to embrace.
Hitchens presents a big book of anecdotes about terrible things done in the name of religion. Like Freud, he thinks the fundamental tenets of the worlds religion are superstitions that adults in the modern age have any business believing and thinks religious leaders to be for the most part a bunch of power-grabbing phonies.
Who’s Qualified to Speak about Religion?
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Misc. Philosophical Musings, Things to Watch on October 13, 2010
The most recent comment to yesterday’s post on atheism was a quote (thanks, Jonathan!) from Jose Ortega y Gasset used on this blog to argue that scientists shouldn’t be weighing in on matters of religion and ethics which are, after all, not their specialty.
The point is well taken, reflecting Socrates’s general criticism that every expert in one area thinks he’s an expert in everything. However, Ortega y Gasset’s critique is equally applicable to anyone who has not engaged in the requisite level of philosophical reflection, including any religious believers who have not studied epistemology and clergy who have not thought a lot about meta-ethics.
How much is “a lot” or “requisite?” I don’t know. Dawkins’s book is, unsurprisingly, at its strongest when talking about natural selection; his comments about ethics and other matters are certainly researched (much like Freud’s comments on anthropology and other subjects that make up his speculative work), but Dawkins is obviously not deeply familiar with the vast canon of philosophy in these areas.
Read the rest of this entry »
The Tedium Debates: Dawkins vs. the Pope
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Misc. Philosophical Musings, Web Detritus on October 12, 2010
How philosophically uninteresting are the atheist debates?
Yes, it’s nice that something akin to philosophy is actively debated in the media, that ongoing disputes about religious matters will hopefully keep the spirit of the times moving forward by providing active intellectual and/or spiritual alternatives to people beyond whatever religion they may have been brought up with.
But as a veteran now of Dawkins’s book The God Delusion,
In this 9/17 USA Today article, we see Dawkins “incandescent with rage” (and even though that phrase is a self-description from Dawkins, I’m still going to sneer at the media for always emphasizing how supposedly raving these generally calm atheists are supposed to be) at the Pope for equivocating atheism with Nazis, or (says the article) maybe Dawkins misinterpreted the Pope, so we’d better go look up the Pope’s actual speech to confirm but… wait… who the hell cares?
Read the rest of this entry »
Armstrong on Dawkins and Harris
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Misc. Philosophical Musings on August 17, 2010
This is a follow up to my last post, which you should look at the comments on for some good comments by Wes. I’ve now read the part in Armstrong where she addresses Dawkins directly (from p. 304 of “The Case for God”):
For Dawkins, religious faith rests on the idea that “there exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence, who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it.” Having set up this definition of God as Supernatural Designer, Dawkins only has to point out that there is in fact no design in nature in order to demolish it. But he is mistaken to assume that this is “the way people have generally understood the term” God.
In discussing Sam Harris, she says:
Like Dawkins and Hitchens, he defines faith as “belief without evidence,” an attitude that he regards as morally reprehensible. It is not surprising, perhaps, that he should confuse “faith” with “belief” (meaning the intellectual acceptance of a proposition) because the two have become unfortunately fused in modern consciousness.
Armstrong and Dawkins
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Misc. Philosophical Musings on August 16, 2010
Continuing my independent (i.e. not directly for the podcast) reading into the atheism debate:
Nearly done with the Karen Armstrong book. This is a good bit of secondary literature, with short summaries of the views re. God of a really impressively wide range of historical figures. Her overall view is that of apophatic, or negative theology, which is to say that an essential part of our experience is that language has limits, and that it helps us to get through life’s hardships if we can engage with this pull within us towards transcendence through devoted practice of some sort (ritual) and symbolic gestures (myths) towards this unknowable. Religious dogma and literalism entirely miss the point, and consequently atheistic attacks on these weak “fundamentalist” positions also miss the point. I’ve not sorted out exactly what I think about this but now have a number of potential authors for us to look at to explore this position.
I’ve also started a book Wes likes to bash, Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion. I am initially pretty amused by it: a great work of original philosophy it is not, but it’s more thorough than I expected (given that he’s a non-philosopher!), and given that I’m sympathetic with the position on a political level, it doesn’t make me gnash my teeth in the way that a pro-religion book of equal erudition might. (And if anyone wants to recommend such a book to me, I might take a look…) Read the rest of this entry »
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The Partially Examined Life is a philosophy podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living but then thought better of it. Each episode, we pick a text and chat about it with some balance between insight and flippancy. You don't have to know any philosophy, or even to have read the text we're talking about to (mostly) follow and (hopefully) enjoy the discussion. Discuss episodes and provide feedback here or via our Facebook group. You can also e-mail comments to mark@marklint.com or wesalwan@gmail.com.
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