Faith and Belief: Richard Dawkins evolves his arguments
latimes.com
latimes.com
Evolution is a biological process. It would have no bearing on a being who created space and time.
Biologists should not presume to trump philosophy and theology, any more than preachers should dictate which biological theories are acceptable.
(And is it really that difficult to discern which reading of "basic" gives a non-contradictory reading in that context? Hint: a near-synonym is "fundamental".)
I like religion-as-sociology, however, and there's where the "evolution of God" concept is most fascinating. If you haven't read Douglas Adams's speech "Is There An Artificial God?", it's worth the read.
Evolution is a biological process. It would have no bearing on a being who created space and time.
And bullets bounce off of Superman because he's from Krypton.
You then have kids.
Do you defend that truth by instructing them to wash their hands, cover their mouths when they cough, avoid contact with faeces, etc., to stop germs spreading? Or, do you have to wait until that child is old enough to discover germs for themselves?
The Church has always sponsored scientific enquiry as Christians believe that knowing more about the created enables us to know more about the creator.
Indeed if we consider Einsteins relativity then we might argue that the anti's were right to hold reservations as without an ether it is no more correct to say that the Earth revolves around the Sun than it is to say the Earth is static. I doubt they had this in mind though.
The Catholic Church still operates at least one observatory which has been going since the 16 Century.
As highlighted in the Merton-Weber thesis scientific enquiry in the 17, 18 Century appears to have been pushed on by Protestant philosophy.
The study of philosophy for most undergraduates taking a few classes can be thought of as the history of human thought.
What makes you think that philosophers are any better at asking questions than scientists?
Of course it is a reasonable thing to do, e.g. "Is there any milk left in the fridge?"
I suppose you're asking whether it's reasonable to ask "deep" questions without scientific training. I think that it is -- moral questions are an obvious example -- but in any case, bear in mind that most philosophers whose work touches on scientific issues _do_ have some scientific training.
It's really not possible to consider all this at such an abstract level. If you have something against philosophy or philosophers, you'd do well to point out some concrete examples of what you're talking about, instead of engaging in this sort of generic scientistic whining.
The biggest irony here is that your views are taken almost verbatim from a philosophical movement of the early 20th century (logical positivism). One benefit of reading some philosophy is coming to a realization of how unoriginal virtually all of your ideas are, and how much they owe to the intellectual culture you were brought up in.
I'd say that I don't hold philosophers or scientists or mathematicians as the ultimate questioner. I believe that they are each skilled in different areas, and are probably best at asking questions in those areas.
Philosophy is the birth of inquiry. Science is the attempt to find the rational answer.
I think that's a little harsh on philosophy. Scientists don't have a monopoly on rationality. There are many areas of philosophy (e.g. moral philosophy) where scientific methods are far from sufficient (though useful), but where we still benefit from clear and rational thinking.
Based on the standard scientific and logical axioms the cause of the progression of weather is quite discoverable except that the chaotic nature makes it practically (at present at least) unpredictable.
Perhaps you believe the world is entirely Newtonian??
I await your answer with baited breath.
How much philosophy have you read?
If the answer is "none" or "very little", don't ask people here what the accomplishments of philosophy are, but go and actually _read some_ and find out for yourself.
Modern philosophy is important because it targets common assumptions and attempts to debate and verify them. The whole point of common assumption is that if you believe something that's wrong, you don't necessarily realize it without a lot of work. Philosophy attempts to shine light in those unknown recesses.
But "accomplishments"? I'd say the biggest casual accomplishment is that it serves as a great topic of discussion for people, gets people thinking together, and as a result brings them closer together. Might as well ask what accomplishments Shakespeare gave us, or Hitchcock. Not everything can be verified with an award and a metric.
"Philosophy requires no 'givens', which is to say it is a valid field without requiring you to make any assumptions to partake in it."
In 1748, David Hume explained why this isn't right. Hume was a philosopher himself. The most important assumption that you must make in the natural sciences and in every brand of philosophy with which I'm familiar is causality. Check out http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume/ for more.
That's just not true. There's plenty of theology which you can enter into without a prior assumption of the existence of god. The most obvious example would be arguments _for_ the existence of God! But in general, most of theology can be appreciated while taking God's existence as a hypothetical. E.g. you can consider whether or not the existence of evil is compatible with the presence of an omnipotent and wholly good God. (And indeed, theologians spend a lot of time considering arguments _against_ God's existence based on the existence of evil, and these arguments clearly cannot presuppose his existence.)
By the way, have you ever read any theology?
>because I don't believe in God or in evil.
You don't believe that evil things happen?
Do theologians consider the case for all of concievable gods? Multiple gods? Only one god?
Obviously, as has been explained, the problem arises in connection with all gods who are perfectly good and also omnipotent, so I don't quite see what you're getting at here.
Without first establishing the number of gods and their qualities, questions about how they deal with evil seems pointless.
It's worth repeating that the scope of the problem is very narrow with respect to classes of deity. There is basically only one kind of God for whom the problem of evil arises -- a God who is omnipotent and wholly good. The problem doesn't really arise in any interesting way for the Gods of non-Judeo-Christian-Islamic religions. For this reason, it's not the case that we have to catalog many kinds of god, one-by-one, and then consider the problem separately in relation to each kind of God.
No, not really. Apples and oranges.
"The problem doesn't really arise in any interesting way for the Gods of non-Judeo-Christian-Islamic religions."
Lack of imagination here. You really can't imagine various gods for whom the question of evil arises in any interesting way?
No, they come down to almost the same thing. If God is both good and omnipotent, it's obvious that evil should only exist if it is logically necessary for some amount of evil to exist in order for the maximum amount of good to exist. (God's omnipotence doesn't allow him to do things which are _logically_ impossible, such as creating a square circles, so if some degree of evil is a logically necessary corollary of maximal good, it follows that the best world that God can possibly make must still contain some evil.)
> You really can't imagine various gods for whom the question of evil arises in any interesting way?
It only arises in an interesting way for the kind of God I mentioned, so far as I can see. Can you suggest another kind of God for whom it arises? If God is not 100% omnipotent, we can put down the existence of evil to his inability to fix it. If he's not 100% good, we don't expect the world to be 100% good in the first place. I suppose you could argue that the world is in some sense "too evil" to have been created by a God who is (say) only 99% good, and pose the problem of evil in that way for a non-maximally-good God (and similarly for a non-maximally-potent God); but that seems like a pretty uninteresting variant. I think it is a fairly accurate historical statement that the problem of evil is really one that only came to be posed with the advent of monotheistic religions, which all have a broadly similar conception of god.
In any case, what would it matter if the problem of evil arose for other kinds of god? It would not make the hypothetical questions any less interesting. At the very least, it's a cute way of framing questions about good, evil and various kinds of necessity.
As much as I am an atheist, I still think no one can ever make that claim. He should have said, there is no evidence yet of a master plan, or there probably is no master plan. This same thing would apply to the existence of God. Unfortunately this logical fallacy (of prematurely concluding the nonexistence of something that theoretically can't be proved to not exist) beholds too many atheists.
But when making the claim that God does not exist, that claim itself is 100% certain to be uncertain.
So it's safe to assume he does not exist if no evidence has shown he does exist, but we still must acknowledge the possibility of his existence just as you must still acknowledge the possibility, however minute, that the sun will not come up tomorrow.
Other sites (such as reddit) became pretty useless with people submitting these (and other) articles and turning the whole site into an unpleasant experience.
Why not follow the same rules that we do when at work? Don't discuss politics or religion.