Thomas Nagel "Fear of Religion" displays the holes and flaws in the well renown book from Richard Dawkins "the God delusion". this is a blog commentary but gives a good summary. this is not the actual "fear of religion, which i encourage all atheists to read it tho)
this is from a blog regarding the essay:
Following up on my last post, Thomas Nagel has an excellent review in The New Republic of Richard Dawkins' latest book, The God Delusion (subscription required). He describes the book as "a very uneven collection of scriptural ridicule, amateur philosophy, historical and contemporary horror stories, anthropological speculations, and cosmological scientific argument." While Nagel is not a religious person himself, he finds Dawkins' arguments for the non-existence of God unconvincing (incredibly, the book contains a chapter en led "Why There Almost Certainly Is No God". Well, then I guess we'd better cancel church this Sunday). According to Nagel, the primary flaw in Dawkins's thinking is a lack of imagination, in that he can only conceive of two grand explanations: a "physicalist naturalism" and "the God Hypothesis" (read, crude theism). But these "stark alternatives may not exhaust the possibilities". Moreover, Nagel points out that both perspectives require faith, notwithstanding Dawkin's outlandish claims for science:
"All explanations come to an end somewhere. The real opposition between Dawkins's physicalist naturalism and the God hypothesis is a disagreement over whether this end point is physical, extensional, and purposeless, or mental, intentional, and purposive. On either view, the ultimate explanation is not itself explained. The God hypothesis does not explain the existence of God, and naturalistic physicalism does not explain the laws of physics."
Dawkins is clearly perplexed and angry that, 400 years since the dawn of the Enlightenment, so many people continue believe in God. So why aren't people satisfied with a purely scientific understanding of the world? Are they deluded? Dawkins certainly thinks so. But for Nagel, the explanation lies in the fact that the reductionist worldview offered by modern science simply doesn't do justice to reality as experienced by actual humans:
Dawkins, like many of his contemporaries, is hobbled by the assumption that the only alternative to religion is to insist that the ultimate explanation of everything must lie in particle physics, string theory, or whatever purely extensional laws govern the elements of which the material world is composed.
This reductionist dream is nourished by the extraordinary success of the physical sciences in our time, not least in their recent application to the understanding of life through molecular biology. It is natural to try to take any successful intellectual method as far as it will go. Yet the impulse to find an explanation of everything in physics has over the last fifty years gotten out of control. The concepts of physical science provide a very special, and partial, description of the world that experience reveals to us. It is the world with all subjective consciousness, sensory appearances, thought, value, purpose, and will left out. What remains is the mathematically describable order of things and events in space and time.
That conceptual purification launched the extraordinary development of physics and chemistry that has taken place since the seventeenth century. But reductive physicalism turns this description into an exclusive ontology. The reductionist project usually tries to reclaim some of the originally excluded aspects of the world, by analyzing them in physical--that is, behavioral or neurophysiological--terms; but it denies reality to what cannot be so reduced. I believe the project is doomed--that conscious experience, thought, value, and so forth are not illusions, even though they cannot be identified with physical facts.
Dawkins fails to realize that science will never be able to provide an adequate basis for a complete understanding of human existence. It can only give us abstractions which, however useful they may be, are not the substance of life. What Johann Hamann says of historical events is also true of scientific theories and the law of nature; they "are like that wide valley full of dry bones - and lo, they were very dry. No one but a prophet could presage that veins and flesh would grow on these bones and that skin would cover them. As yet there is no breath in them, until the prophet prophesies unto the wind and the word of the Lord speaks..."
Last edited by Phil Hellmuth; 04-24-2007 at 08:59 PM.
I read the passage and I don't see anything in it that points to inconsistencies or flaws in in Dawkins' arguments. The only thing the article even attempts to establish is the reason that people prefer a belief in God to a purely natural or mechanical explanation of the universe.
I agree that many people prefer one explanation over another, but that says nothing about the validity of either.
it boils down to this and since dawkins is a newbie to philosophy he runs into this problem:
"Physics is ultimately about quan ies—quan ies that are calculated through equations or quan ies that are measured with instruments. However, from matter in motion through space and time, and from the equations that describe it, such things as consciousness and sensory experience cannot arise. So, as Nagel says, the project of “physicalist reductionism” is “doomed.”
if you can't explain why I have consciousness, beliefs, and other mental phenomena by physicalist reductionism science, then how can you use it as a premise to dispute a phenomena (supreme being)
Last edited by Phil Hellmuth; 04-24-2007 at 09:36 PM.
The God Delusion is an athiest manifesto for dummies. It's written in the 21st-century style of provocation over substance, providing self-gratification for people who are already athiests and pissing off Christians; enough to attract attention and drive sales, but enlightening to no one.
Anything that attempts to prove or disprove the existence of God through scientific or philosophical means can be immediately dismissed. I don't care how educated the author is. If there is a God, He will make it known to the world in His own time. If not, then there will continue to be believers and unbelievers until mankind destroys itself. Either way, it's incredibly vain to believe we can figure it out on our own.
Last edited by Spurminator; 04-24-2007 at 09:51 PM.
Richard Deem has a similar critique of Dawkin's book.
http://www.godandscience.org/apologe..._delusion1.php
I do agree that Dawkins tries to take on too much in The God Delusion. He devotes mere paragraphs to arguments that would take volumes to fully develop (e.g., the cosmological argument, recent discoveries in physics, etc.).
The funny things is that I don't think he needs to disprove anything to support his position as an atheist. He must feel some need to do this, however, as he does attempt to solve philosophical dilemmas that existed for hundreds, if a couple of thousand, of years.
hyeah but The Selfish Gene should be an interesting read to athiets and theists alike.
That's a pretty bold statement considering that many people believe that recent discoveries in biology lend credence to the notion of a creator.
I haven't read the book but from his posts on the HuffPo what you said sounds about right. He just seems like an arrogant and angry man who has a personal vendetta against religion and blames it for all of history's problems. He should focus his anger on government; it's caused much more problems for humanity than religion ever will.
As far as I can tell, there are only 3 possible explanations for the existence of the universe:
1.) An atom always existed in some way we can't explain and then exploded in the big bang.
2.) There was nothing, then an atom appeared somehow and exploded in the big bang.
3.) God has always existed in some way we can't explain and He created the universe.
All of these explanations are illogical. They are all belief systems. No one should think anyone is that stupid for believing any of them, because you must believe in one of the three.
"Lend credence" =/= scientific proof.
However, according to your statement, even if there were scientific proof, it would be completely irrelevant and should be "immediately dismissed," correct?
I'm not Spurminator.
Ha. Sorry for that.
There can't be scientific proof of a creator.
I guess I didn't know the ledge.
I don't know if that's necessarily true. Maybe, if you're saying that we cannot have proof in the sense that science doesn't "prove" anything, but I think it is possible to find evidence that would make the existence of a creator highly probable. For example, what if one day while studying a subatomic particle, scientists notice an inscription on the particle that reads "Designed by God, Copyright 13 billion BCE"? That would be pretty good evidence.
Last edited by Mr. Peabody; 04-25-2007 at 09:44 AM.
Propose an experiment.
Well, that's probably too definitive. Who knows where science will take us in the centuries to come...
I just think God falls outside the scope of Science. Ultimately, you have to rely on interpretation.
Are you going to give me funding?
You might be right. Maybe God does fall outside the scope of science. But I would think that if he could act on the universe then that's something we could measure or detect. Of course that's assuming that he chooses to act on the universe and does so while we are observing. I don't know.
Sometimes seeing is believing.
True, perhaps that is how He would choose to eventually reveal Himself. But I have a hard time imagining a scenario that couldn't/wouldn't be dismissed as a scientific anomaly.Of course that's assuming that he chooses to act on the universe and does so while we are observing.
That depends upon one's conception of God. In order to measure and detect God acting on the universe, he would have to do so in a way outside of natural laws, i.e. miraculously. Improbable happenstances, unprovoked acts of generosity, religious experiences, and other occurrences typically attributed to God either can be explained within the existing framework, or cannot be reduced to merely physical data.
However, even in the event of an alleged miracle, how would the scientist determine that the observed data were in fact due to the action of God, as opposed to a yet-unexplained physical phenomena? In other words, how do you try to detect the existence of God without falling into the "God-of-the-gaps" fallacy?
That's a very good point that I hadn't considered.
If science could hunt and track down the creator, IMO, it would be a huge disappointment to millions. Kind of like following the yellow brick road that led to Oz.
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