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[Phys-L] Re: A Letter to Juliet from Richard Dawkins - part 2



How nice; a long, apparently reasonable message from Richard Dawkins that
goes out of its way to insult religion of all kinds. Especially appropriate
here in a physics forum during the holiest time of the Judeo-Christian year!
No doubt this appealed to you because you see religious people as enemies of
science? A Wonderful self-fulfilling prophecy, since that attitude will
ensure the outcome. Richard makes his personal opinions clear, and makes a
few errors as well:

"Scientists - the specialists in discovering what is true".

Really? What is "true". I always thought we determined what was untrue.

"First, tradition. A few months ago, I went on television to have a
discussion with about fifty children. These children were invited because
they had been brought up in lots of different religions. Some had been
brought up as Christians, others as Jews, Muslims, Hindus, or Sikhs. The man
with the microphone went from child to child, asking them what they
believed. What they said shows up exactly what I mean by "tradition." Their
beliefs turned out to have no connection with evidence. They just trotted
out the beliefs of their parents and
grandparents which, in turn, were not based upon evidence either."

I suspect that one could argue about the nature of "evidence" here and
whether the believer had to personally experience the "evidence". Certainly
Richard is not the arbiter of what is "evidence".

"Of course, since they all believed different things, they couldn't all be
right."

Not in every detail, of course, and some beliefs are clearly contradictory,
but that does not preclude the possibility that one or more are essentially
correct.

"Traditional beliefs often start from almost nothing; perhaps somebody just
makes them up originally, like
the stories about Thor and Zeus."

By all means, let's imply that all religious beliefs are "made up".

"Most people in England have been baptized into the Church of England, but
this is only one of the branches of the Christian religion. There are other
branches such as Russian Orthodox, the Roman Catholic, and
the Methodist churches. They all believe different things."

Not fundamentally they don't.

" The Jewish religion and the Muslim religion are a bit more different
still; and there are different kinds of Jews and of Muslims. People who
believe even slightly different things from each other go to war over their
disagreements. So you might think that they must have some pretty good
reasons - evidence - for believing what they believe. But actually, their
different beliefs are entirely due to different traditions."

And Richard, the world famous religious expert knows this - how? Oh, it
must be "faith"..

"Of course, even in science, sometimes we haven't seen the evidence
ourselves and we have to take somebody else's word for it. I haven't, with
my own eyes, seen the evidence that light travels at a speed of
186,000 miles per second. Instead, I believe books that tell me the speed of
light. This looks like "authority."

Why yes, Richard, it does indeed. But Richard has an answer to that
criticism:

"But actually, it is much better than authority, because the people who
wrote the books have seen the evidence and anyone is free to look carefully
at the evidence whenever they want."

And as we have ALL seen, evidence is ALWAYS unambiguous, unslanted and
scrupulously interpreted. No one has ever fudged the data or written
something that was untrue or exaggerated. And the "writers of books" ALWAYS
review the evidence (and are knowledgeable enough to understand it), and
CERTAINLY have no personal bias - Just like Richard.

On revelation:

"People sometimes say that you must believe in feelings deep inside,
otherwise, you' d never be confident of things like "My wife loves me." But
this is a bad argument. There can be plenty of evidence that somebody loves
you. All through the day when you are with somebody who loves you, you see
and hear lots of little titbits of evidence, and they all add up. It isn't a
purely inside feeling, like the feeling that priests call revelation. There
are outside things to back up the inside feeling: looks in the eye, tender
notes in the
voice, little favors and kindnesses; this is all real evidence."

I'm certainly uncomfortable with "revealed knowledge", but the above seems
to apply equally well to religion as there are lots of little pieces of
"evidence" to support this or that belief. And of course I do not have to
appeal to "authority" since it's written down in a book, and we've seen how
Richard reveres books.

"So, once something gets itself strongly believed - even if it is completely
untrue and there never was any reason to believe it in the first place - it
can go on forever. Could this be what has happened with religions? Belief
that there is a god or gods, belief in Heaven, belief that Mary never died,
belief that Jesus never had a human father, belief that prayers are
answered, belief that wine turns into blood - not one of these beliefs is
backed up by any good evidence."

And, being the sole arbiter of what is good evidence, Richard at a stroke
denounces all religion as "completely untrue".

Whatever Richard's private motives, this diatribe is insulting to anyone
with religious beliefs. I come on here to discuss physics, not to have my
beliefs insulted. That you felt it worthy of posting here, Brian, makes me
wonder if this forum shouldn't be the "US against THEM" forum. I don't know
your personal beliefs, nor are they any of my business, but I certainly
would not post something that I KNOW would be insulting to others. Some
time back I posted about my concern that the militant, anti-religious
attitude that some science people demonstrate is responsible for pushing
reasonable religious people into supporting such things as ID or eliminating
the teaching of evolution. It is still my opinion that ID would be nothing
more than a footnote in history (if it even surfaced) if some science people
hadn't gone out of their way to alienate religious people. This posting
goes a long way toward making my point, and I'm sorry you felt it necessary
to post it here. It would have been better to point to where it could be
found so that the anti-religious people could go there and feel better
reading Richard sticking it to those religious fools. If people who feel
strongly about religion are going to be made to feel unwelcome here, then
that says something about the motivations of this group.
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