[strictlyplaid]

[EDIT: Please move to the Poli Lounge -- somehow got here by mistake.]

I stumbled on an article about Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist and outspoken atheist, this evening. Here's the link: http://onegoodmove.org/1gm/1gmarchive/002086.html.

Now I am a pretty hard-core naturalist and reductionist, and I am very sympathetic to his arguments. But does it really help spread scientific understanding and intelligent inquiry to have Dawkins running around doing things like this:

"...Dawkins doesn't shy from controversy, nor does he suffer fools gladly. He recently met a minister who was on the opposite side of a British political debate. When the minister put out his hand, Dawkins kept his hands at his side and said, "You, sir, are an ignorant bigot." "

I don't deny that there are a lot of rude and ignorant people out there, and dealing with them can be extremely frustrating. (I once had a religious person tell me that the heliocentric model of the solar system couldn't be definitively proven!) But I really can't see how being obnoxious in return is going to do anything but further polarize the situation.

[Apple Pro Underwear]

There is no excuse for treating other people badly. Unless there is a direct valid reason that they are a "ignorant bigot".

This is like the guy who scratched up Hummers. You do more harm than good in the end.

[Mithras]

Yeah, he's a jerk. But he's my kind of jerk.

[ReggieX]

Originally Posted by Mithras

Yeah, he's a jerk. But he's my kind of jerk.

Ha, couldn't have said it any better myself. Dawkins is a great mind.

[Weyland-Yutani]

Dawkins is mixing his religious opinion with science. What one has to do with the other, I do not know

[Judge_Fire]

I wouldn't call those 'his religious beliefs'.

He's expressing his opinions on religion, that's all.

Non-religion is not a religion. Atheism is not a group you join.

J

[boots]

I have a problem with reductionist beliefs of Dawkin's magnitude. The fact that he's a jerk makes him no different than a lot of other @ssh0les. There's too much we don't know to hold that strongly to reductionism. Religion doesn't just have to be about theism. Dawkin's religion is scientific reductionism, and that requires just as much faith as a lot of other religious beliefs. (I make no value jusgement on that, just making a statement.)

Overall, I don't think he's helping or hurting the cause of scientific inquiry. He's just another jerk. No profession has a monoply on that.

[Millennium]

He's clearly a jerk, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. I'd say he's a plus for scientific knowledge, but a minus for the reputation of scientists in general.

[Millennium]

Originally Posted by Judge_Fire

I wouldn't call those 'his religious beliefs'.

He's expressing his opinions on religion, that's all.

Non-religion is not a religion. Atheism is not a group you join.

That depends. Just as there are many sects of Christianity, there are many kinds of atheism, and some of them are groups you join. Consider secular humanism, for example.

[strictlyplaid]

Originally Posted by boots

There's too much we don't know to hold that strongly to reductionism. Religion doesn't just have to be about theism. Dawkin's religion is scientific reductionism, and that requires just as much faith as a lot of other religious beliefs. (I make no value jusgement on that, just making a statement.)

I'm not sure I agree with you there. Certainly any piece of evidence for scientific reductionism, taken individually, has flaws. Even taken as a whole, they can't definitively prove that reductionism is correct. However, from a Lakatosian perspective, reductionism is a winning research program (paradigm, if you like Kuhn's language) and religion is a losing one. Reductionism as a perspective has allowed us to make the discoveries that we have made, and it is the philosophical wellspring of what understanding of what natural world we possess. By contrast, religious explanations of the world have been in retreat since Galileo, and to my knowledge no theological theory has ever predicted a heretofore unobserved phenomenon. A reductionist perspective has allowed us to open up new frontiers of research, to ask new scientific questions and pose new problems than we never would have thought of without it. By contrast, the scope of questions covered by religious explanations has been steadily shrinking since the Middle Ages, and indeed religious explanations have had to revise themselves to become consistent with new facts.

Lakatos' point is that, though the core assumptions of a research paradigm can never be falsified, we can draw some inductive conclusions about the viability of a program from these sorts of performance measures. If a theory finds itself having to constantly explain away new discoveries to resolve inconsistencies -- which can always be done -- it is in trouble. So the question is shifted, from "Is there a theology consistent with what we know?" -- and, mutatis mutandis, one can always be created -- to "Does theology equip us to effectively increase our understanding of the world?" It was a very clever argument, IMHO.

For me, it's what Dawkins does with reductionism that is so troubling to me. Being a jerk makes you a very poor advertisement for science, of course, but that's not the only thing I mean. Isn't there something about patience, opennness, and tolerance of dissent that is at the heart of reasoned inquiry? Or is it that weak-willed attitude that's facilitating the siege of science that's now underway?

[boots]

Originally Posted by strictlyplaid

I'm not sure I agree with you there. Certainly any piece of evidence for scientific reductionism, taken individually, has flaws. Even taken as a whole, they can't definitively prove that reductionism is correct. However, from a Lakatosian perspective, reductionism is a winning research program (paradigm, if you like Kuhn's language) and religion is a losing one. Reductionism as a perspective has allowed us to make the discoveries that we have made, and it is the philosophical wellspring of what understanding of what natural world we possess. By contrast, religious explanations of the world have been in retreat since Galileo, and to my knowledge no theological theory has ever predicted a heretofore unobserved phenomenon. A reductionist perspective has allowed us to open up new frontiers of research, to ask new scientific questions and pose new problems than we never would have thought of without it. By contrast, the scope of questions covered by religious explanations has been steadily shrinking since the Middle Ages, and indeed religious explanations have had to revise themselves to become consistent with new facts.

While I agree with everything you said, I will argue the paradigm of theism to make a point. Theism, by it's nature, is an unprovable. It has no testable hypotheses, so anyone claiming that it has made correct or false predictions is misusing/misunderstanding the nature of theism. This includes the creation science wackos. The sacred texts themselves make this abundantly clear. The hit rate for predictions is similar to the hit rate for social science predictions. There is no definable "this will happen on this date at this time for this reason" kind of prediction like science strives to provide.

The "beauty" of a theist ideal is that it can always be altered to account for present knowledge.

Reductionism, while "winning," is also an abuse of epistemology. The best example of that is the idea that sprung from Newton's work that one could, conceivably, predict the future if one simply had the position and trajectory/momentum information of every particle. Quantum mechanics came along a squashed that abuse of knowledge by showing that those two values are orthogonal. That's my meaning of reductionism as a religion.

Science (and the scientific method) tells us how (and a little about why) things happen. Theologians try to make sense of that information. Both are useful, and both are dangerous when they become dogmatic. There is enough unknown that I will retain an open mind. That's about all I can say.