Richard Dawkins is a rock-star, or better to say: a science-star. That adjective for scientists is like “sober” for writers, something that hypothetically could happens but in practice doesn’t exist. He wrote the best seller “The selfish gene” introducing us the idea of the “memes”. At the present He is a professorial fellow of New College of Oxford university.
Dr. Dawkins has been focused the last years in a new project, the divulgation of a pure science without any contamination of beliefs. As is written in his internet site: a clear-thinking oasis. The Richard Dawkins foundation in collaboration with the Skeptics Society have been developing several campaigns against religious thinking, -which is basically… NOT THINKING! The main hypothesis behind is that religious ideas contaminate the search of the physical truth. On the other hand it is precisely in the name of religion that most of the biggest atrocities of history has been done, therefore, ironically religion could be the root of all evil.
Dawkins’s last campaign has become suddenly very famous because it is a little more aggressive than just seminars and lectures in universities. He has putted some ads in the London public transport with the slogan “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” In the words of Professor Dawkins: “Religion is accustomed to getting a free ride – automatic tax breaks, unearned respect and the right not to be offended, the right to brainwash children. Even on the buses, nobody thinks twice when they see a religious slogan plastered across the side. This campaign to put alternative slogans on London buses will make people think – and thinking is anathema to religion.”
It is amazing how religion has survived unprosecutable so many years when it is just a thing of probes, there is no probe that God exists. The main problem is that religion say to you that “if you don’t believe in God you re going to hell”, but if you just let your brain work for a few seconds you will find that there is no reason to believe, not a single probe! Then, the words of Dawkins seem to be right, there is probably no God!
It is the time of debate, religions always avoid debate because they try to impose us that they have the reason (curiously a reason without any reasoning ) and when someone tries fight against that is accused of intolerance. I leave here a little cartoon to point out this last idea.
Faedojury
I’m curious to understand what you mean by “probes”. As in, “There are no probes that God exists”.
I’m also curious to know how many “religions” run from debate when I know several Christial thinkers in theology, philosophy and science that wouldn’t run from any cordial debate. Perhaps you’ve actually never tried to debate someone defending the Christian worldview? And yes, that’s an open invitation.
Eric Kemp
Hi Eric, Thanks for your comment.
When I say “probes”, I mean “physical” probes, direct evidence that demonstrate the presence of a god. A picture, a fingerprint, real witnesses, etc. Any normal physical evidence (not theoretical arguments) that probes there is a God.
One common argumentation is that God is not a physical entity; therefore you can’t probe physically his existence. But opposite, you can think… Ok, we are physical entities. So, how can we be connected with a non-physical God? We necessarily need a physical part that connects us with our non-physical side. A soul maybe? Where is it?
About how religions are open to the debate, I think the cartoon explains very well my position. There are some progressive theorists that are open to debate, but still the large majority is “wrapped up” in their own dogmas without any possibility to open the eyes to reality. The best evidence for that is the Islamism or the christian communities en USA (where they still rejects the evolution and strongly believes in creationism).
Regards,
F.
Faedojury
“When I say “probes”, I mean “physical” probes, direct evidence that demonstrate the presence of a god. A picture, a fingerprint, real witnesses, etc. Any normal physical evidence (not theoretical arguments) that probes there is a God.”
I think there are two sides to this issue.
1. You’re statement isn’t EXACTLY accurate. An accurate statement would be “There are no physical probes that demonstrate the presence of God that I will accept”. When scientists like Dembski and Behe present you with physical evidence pointing to a god (neither are Christians btw) you say, “Nope, impossible, you aren’t doing science.” So it isn’t that there IS NO physical evidence, it’s that there is no physical evidence that you will accept. You’ve already decided that there isn’t any physical evidence for a god, so anything that claims to be as such, CAN’T be real evidence.
2. There are no physical probes for “molecules-to-man” evolution. That is, we can test the evolution we see around us, but not the evolution that takes hundreds of thousands of years to take place. That kind of evolution happened in the unobservable, untestable past.
Now, you may say that with current physical evidence we can observe what happened in the past. I would argue that it’s not that concrete. Current physical evidence could NEVER tell you exactly what happened in the past for sure. Through current physical evidence we are able to INFER what possibly/could have happened in the unobservable past. These inferences are based upon the assumptions of naturalism (God didn’t start the process at any point in the past) and uniformitarianism (the rates of growth and decay haven’t change for all of time). In fact, we’ve only been studying rates of decay for less than one hundred years, and we’re assuming they’ve stayed the same way for BILLIONS of years!
What this means to us, is that although there is no direct physical probe to God, there also is no direct physical prob to “no God” or to molecules-to-man evolution. Both are based upon assumptions and inferences. The question becomes, then, which assumptions and inferences make more sense and allow us to better explain the world around us?
“Ok, we are physical entities. So, how can we be connected with a non-physical God?”
Only naturalism assumes that we are made of nothing but matter. In fact, naturalism has a hard time explaining some things if our brain’s are nothing but chemical interactions.
“There are some progressive theorists that are open to debate, but still the large majority is “wrapped up” in their own dogmas without any possibility to open the eyes to reality.”
Now, this makes me wonder if by “open to debate” you actually mean “rejecting God and accepting atheism” since, apparently, atheism is “reality”.
Also, I know of no educated theists who reject the evolution we can test and see around us. We just reject the naturalistic, uniformitarian philosophical conclusion of “therefore we came from pond scum” and especially the “therefore DNA can form itself from none living matter”.