Richard Dawkins On Late Late Show

[Tormod]

I really love this video from the late late show. Richard Dawkins is a really cool guy. The entire concept of religious people being "deluded" is just brilliant when it comes to selling "science" to people.

 

[Tormod]

Part 2:

 

[Tormod]

Part 3

 

[Qfwfq]

The entire concept of religious people being "deluded" is just brilliant when it comes to selling "science" to people.

Still I don't see the point of being such a salesman.

 

I was gald to find his attitude less caustic and more reasonable in this video but I still disagree with many of his points and i wish he'd make less arguments based on misinformed grounds. He should also be clearer about what he is and isn't against and his attitude currently seems more for being agnostic than actually atheist and I get the idea that his participation in debates has been refining his perspectives.

[Vox]

I really love this video from the late late show. Richard Dawkins is a really cool guy. The entire concept of religious people being "deluded" is just brilliant when it comes to selling "science" to people.

 

 

Personally I did not find signs that I would admire concerning any of these people who presented "they ideas". There seems to be enforced gap created intentionally or unintentionally between these two different views and it is rather ridiculous to even include this kind of discussion to this timeframe which would inevitably lead to the emotional brawl. Does someone really think that you can really solve any of the "issues" between the religion and science in given timeframe and this media /form? For me this was just a show/entertainment, nothing more. If there would be real interest to try to generate more holistic views of the “exist” there would be sincere effort to find ”things/events” from “both realms”. Both "groups" seems to have set a position where it will be a loss if something is agreed or "given" to another group. My personal view was that this show was just a fighting of the egos, both sides defending the position they hold dear.

 

It is probably true quite generally that in the history of human

thinking the most fruitful developments frequently take place

at those points where two different lines of thought meet.

These lines may have their roots in quite different parts of

human culture, in different times or different cultural environments

or different religious traditions: hence if they actually

meet, that is, if they are at least so much related to each other

that a real interaction can take place, then one may hope that

new and interesting developments may follow.

Werner Heisenberg

[Tormod]

Still I don't see the point of being such a salesman.

 

I agree completely with you. That's why I call it "science". :) This show only illustrates how difficult it is to put science in a populistic perspective and get a meaningful debate out of it. Dawkins doesn't really help with his attitude.

[HydrogenBond]

Dawkins is too much into his career as a science evangelist. He is not addressing a group of rational scientists but semi-rational laymen. To create the illusion of rising above, he uses the time tested tactic of trying to lower the floor on your competition. If you put the other guy into a hole, you can fool the fools into believing you just got taller. That will sell more books and help with more bookings on the lecture tour. Atheists are not all rational, making it an easy sell.

[phision]

The trouble with this is, when you subject beliefs to scientific or statistical analysis, your results are going to marginalise individuals who are unwilling or unable to interpret the information gleaned from that process!

 

On a lighter note I was very entertained at the prospect of this:

http://www.theskinny.co.uk/comedy/reviews/103016-richard_dawkins_does_not_exist_we_can_prove_it

 

LOL :D

[chilehed]

Dawkins is an ignoramus.

[Moontanman]

Religion is quite real, it's trivially demonstrated to be true... hell there are two dozen churches with in 10 miles of me... gods on the other hand are nothing but horse feathers, no evidence what so ever for their existence anyplace except in your imagination.... But people behave in lock step to their imagination all the time, the disconnect was when they wrote down god and froze it in time...

[Qfwfq]

Dawkins is an ignoramus.

This is not a correct description of Dawkins and, most of all, it is not a great contribution to discussion of the topic. :naughty:

 

Are you able to offer a more constructive criticism than that?

[chilehed]

This is not a correct description of Dawkins and, most of all, it is not a great contribution to discussion of the topic. :naughty:

 

Are you able to offer a more constructive criticism than that?

Dawkins is a brilliant expositor of biology and evolutionary theory, but the fact is that he’s woefully ignorant about philosophy and theology in general and Christianity in particular.

 

For example, (this one’s in an interview he did with Richard Fidler) he says things like “Catholics don’t know anything about the bible at all, do they, the bible’s taboo in the Catholic Church, it always has been, it has to be interpreted by the priests, they don’t trust the people to read the bible”, which is not merely absolute nonsense but nonsense which is very easy to disprove. There’s quite simply no good excuse for someone to believe something like that. The Church was involved in making translations into the vernacular (well before the 13th Century) precisely so that laymen could read them, and there has long been a plenary indulgence granted for the reading of scripture. If only priests could interpret the bible there could be no female Doctors of the Church, and yet there are three: St. Catherine of Siena, St. Teresa of Avila and St. Therese of Lisieux. There’s so much evidence that Dawkins hasn’t the slightest clue that it’s difficult to know where to start, it would be like rebutting a claim that the United States was founded by people who fled a representative republic and wanted to institute a monarchy.

 

The bit about the belief in the virgin birth being due to a mistranslation of the prophet Isaiah is another one. The translation he speaks of was the Septuagent, which was done by Jewish scribes and rabbis who were fluent in both Greek and Hebrew. The Hebrew word alma indeed indicates a young woman of marriageable age, and in that culture it was the norm for such a woman to be a virgin. That passage in Isaiah speaks of a miracle that is to be given as a sign to the king, the miracle involving an alma giving birth. Not much of a miracle if she’s not a virgin. Sure, the word almah taken entirely by itself doesn’t demand that the woman is a virgin, but virgin is within the standard meaning of the word and the cultural and literary context of the passage in question indicates that it’s a good translation in this case. That’s what the Hebrew and Greek experts at the time thought, and it’s pompous for Dawkins to just blithely assert that they were wrong. Furthermore, there’s no indication whatsoever that the people in Jesus’ day believed that Mary was a virgin for any reason other than they thought it was true.

 

Another thing is the absurd notion that faith is “believing something without having any evidence”. That’s not what the word means, it’s never been what the word meant, it’s absolutely inconsistent with the historical development of the word and is not the way any of the cognates are used in everyday language. “Believing something without having any evidence” is actually called credulity. If Dawkins were correct, then then phrases such as "being faithful to your spouse" would be meaningless unless one had no evidence that one's spouse existed... which would strain credulity.

 

There’s a lot more, but I find it tedious to listen to him and I can't spare the time it would take to rebut him on everything he's got wrong.

 

I’ve always understood ignoramus to indicate someone who is not merely ignorant of a topic (which Dawkins manifestly is) but one who is intentionally ignorant. And while I can think of no good excuse for someone to spout the kind of inane nonsense he’s prone to, I admit that I’m not privy to his subjective intentions. So I shouldn’t call him an ignoramus.

 

He does, however, bear a very strong resemblance to one.

[sigurdV]

Chilehed bears a strong resemblance to a Christian, probably a Catholic:

He finds Dawkins "tedious to listen to" and concentrates on finding trivial errors...

Thereby sidestepping the real issues:

He does not and is probably not able to present them in here since that would question his own apprehension of reality.

Who then is an Ignoramus?

[Qfwfq]

Dawkins is a brilliant expositor of biology and evolutionary theory, but the fact is that he’s woefully ignorant about philosophy and theology in general and Christianity in particular.

I quite agree with this, why did you not say so in the first place?

 

The Hebrew word alma indeed indicates a young woman of marriageable age, and in that culture it was the norm for such a woman to be a virgin.

Much like the Latin virgo.

 

Another thing is the absurd notion that faith is “believing something without having any evidence”. That’s not what the word means, it’s never been what the word meant, it’s absolutely inconsistent with the historical development of the word and is not the way any of the cognates are used in everyday language. “Believing something without having any evidence” is actually called credulity. If Dawkins were correct, then then phrases such as "being faithful to your spouse" would be meaningless unless one had no evidence that one's spouse existed... which would strain credulity.

I'm not with you on this one, the word faith is from the latin for trust and hence belief without proof. It's by extension that it means allegiance and we use faithful to also describe someone loyal, i. e. who can be trusted.

 

There’s a lot more, but I find it tedious to listen to him and I can't spare the time it would take to rebut him on everything he's got wrong.

Same with me, it would be useless to argue with him over each and every fallacy he commits, but a lesson or two would serve him.

 

I’ve always understood ignoramus to indicate someone who is not merely ignorant of a topic (which Dawkins manifestly is) but one who is intentionally ignorant.

Not according to Merriam Webster Edited January 12, 2012 by Qfwfq
bum link fixed

[chilehed]

Chilehed bears a strong resemblance to a Christian, probably a Catholic:

He finds Dawkins "tedious to listen to" and concentrates on finding trivial errors...

So it wasn’t trivial for Dawkins to give them as reasons why theists are delusional, but it was trivial for me to point out that his reasoning is pitiably flawed?

[chilehed]

I quite agree with this, why did you not say so in the first place?

Maybe I was feeling a bit cranky. Usually I’ve got enough judgment to not post at all if I’m going to be overly terse, but I guess I fell off the wagon.

 

I have the same reaction when I hear Kent Hovind bloviating about how entropy is synonymous with disorder, so evolution must be false because it requires more information to be generated which is a violation of the Second Law. The guy doesn’t know a damn thing about either thermodynamics or information theory, and he’s so sure that he does that he’s unteachable.

 

I'm not with you on this one, the word faith is from the latin for trust and hence belief without proof.

You've substituted the word "proof" for the word "evidence" (which is what Dawkins actually said). They're not the same.

 

In real personal relationships we come to trust someone because we have some evidence that they're worthy of trust. And while that doesn’t prove that they’ll be trustworthy in the future, it is certainly evidence that they will be, and proof that they were in the past. And so we make an act of the will to adhere to the other. That’s what faith is: an act of the will by which we adhere to another who is known.

 

Faith is historically used as the translation of the Hebrew emunah. And notice how the word’s actually used: the characters in the bible are said to have faith in God, a god with whom they’ve been speaking! They most certainly do have evidence that he exists, because they’ve seen it with their own eyes and heard it with their own ears. You might not believe that the story is true, but that doesn’t change the fact that within the context of the story it is true and that it shows the proper use of the word faith. That's how it's always been used in Hebrew, Latin and English.

 

In English, when speaking of an absurd belief that is completely without foundation, it is never said that such a belief strains faith. We say that it strains credulity. That’s because “believing something without having evidence or in the face of evidence to the contrary” is the definition of credulity; it is NOT the definition of faith and it never has been.

[dduckwessel]

While I agree with Richard Dawkins that religion is "lethally dangerous nonsense", he appears to be making the same mistakes as religious people do.

 

Due to past associations with a topic a person assumes that future associations will be the same. Anything and everything associated with the topic becomes "tainted with the same brush" and a person becomes closed-minded to it.

 

I think we always need to be at least open to examine something before we judge it:

http://scholar.googleusercontent.com/scholar?q=cache:2IfnXn3IMxsJ:scholar.google.com/+emotional+evidence+of+indoctrination&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&as_vis=1