

God vs. Science - b-man
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1555132-1,00.html

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jpwagner
Dawkins is so thick-headed. He has a bias about how believers think, and
applies this to all of his arguments.

Check out this passage from page 6:

    
    
      DAWKINS: There could be something incredibly grand and
      incomprehensible and beyond our present understanding.
    
      COLLINS: That's God.
    
      DAWKINS: Yes. But it could be any of a billion Gods. It
      could be God of the Martians or of the inhabitants of
      Alpha Centauri. The chance of its being a particular God,
      Yahweh, the God of Jesus, is vanishingly small--at the
      least, the onus is on you to demonstrate why you think
      that's the case.
    

Collins has just told him his definition of God and Dawkins rejects it.

I honestly don't want to jump into an argument on the merits of each side, but
intolerance is unacceptable. There certainly exist religious nuts, but this
God-delusion belief is itself dogma and is blind to the articulate believers.

PS--in that Ben Stein movie (Expelled) Dawkins himself states that life could
have been brought to this universe from a higher being, but that that higher
being itself had to come from somewhere. This IS "God" for many people. Not
very many people believe God is some guy with a white beard who yells and
throws lightning bolts.

~~~
jpwagner
Oh...awesome passage:

    
    
      DAWKINS: If ever there was a slamming of the door in the
      face of constructive investigation, it is the word
      miracle. To a medieval peasant, a radio would have seemed
      like a miracle. All kinds of things may happen which we by
      the lights of today's science would classify as a miracle
      just as medieval science might a Boeing 747. Francis keeps
      saying things like "From the perspective of a believer."
      Once you buy into the position of faith, then suddenly you
      find yourself losing all of your natural skepticism and
      your scientific--really scientific--credibility. I'm sorry
      to be so blunt.
    
      COLLINS: Richard, I actually agree with the first part of
      what you said. But I would challenge the statement that my
      scientific instincts are any less rigorous than yours. The
      difference is that my presumption of the possibility of
      God and therefore the supernatural is not zero, and yours
      is.
    

Dawkins is again ridiculous. He's defining "miracle" as "impossible event"
which is absurd. He's also supposing that people of faith lose scientific
skepticism. The retort that he's the only one denouncing something is
brilliant.

~~~
TrevorJ
Agreed. From my studies, it seems that miracles are generally seen as
demonstrations of power over / understanding of the laws by which the universe
operates, they needn't be magical in nature. More akin to me being able to
change parameter of a computer program I wrote becasue I have intimate
knowledge of how it is built and have access to the source code.

------
pmichaud
On another note, responding to the statements that no one "knows" religion
isn't true, I offer this:

My friend Billy and I were sitting in my living room the other day when I told
him that in the kitchen, there was a bottle of tequila. He went into the
kitchen and saw some El Jimador, and when he came back he knew there really
was a bottle of tequila in the kitchen. So we didn't need to go to ABC to pick
some up for later.

Now, in a technical sense, Billy doesn't actually /know/ there is a bottle of
tequila. He saw it, but many possibilities exist:

1) He was mistaken, and the power of my suggestion made him mistake a bottle
of bourbon for a bottle of tequila all the way across the kitchen.

2) He actually hallucinated, maybe he doesn't realize that he's Schizophrenic.

3) I tricked him by placing a fake bottle of tequila in the kitchen.

4) etc.

So in the pure technical sense, Billy can't say for certain that there's no
bottle of tequila. However, for the purposes of planning a party for later
that night, we'll be utterly shocked if the bottle isn't there. I'm not going
to grill him: "But dude, how do you KNOW the bottle is there?" -- he saw it,
it's there. We'll say the probability of the bottle being there is ~1 (which
means approaching 1, a la a mathematical limit. Mathematically we can treat it
as 100% probable, but the ~ acknowledges that it's not literally 100%)

So let's say a religion formed around the idea that my kitchen contains a
bottle of tequila. Someone who didn't believe it could plausibly say: No one
really knows if the tequila exists, because that would require a PERFECT
knowledge of the kitchen, and no one can have an absolutely perfect knowledge
of Pete's kitchen. Humans are fallible, therefore we will never TRULY know if
the bottle exists or not.

So to that person I say, you are correct. Instead of there being a probability
of 1 that the bottle exists, there is instead a probability of ~1. So the
rational thing to do is behave as though the bottle is present, because the
overwhelming weight of the evidence suggests that it's there. There is maybe a
one in a billion or one in a trillion chance that it's not. When we have the
party later that night, I enjoy a Margarita on the rocks, with sea salt around
the edges of the glass. I add my drunkenness (I had several margaritas) to the
evidence that the tequila bottle exists. The party is a success. Yay!

So, my point is that it's not correct to act like ~1 is the same as .5 -- many
people try to say that because perfect knowledge doesn't exist, that the
chance of God (the God of the Book, anyway) existing is 50/50. It's actually
more like ~0.

------
pmichaud
The articles poses a question at the beginning about science sort of replacing
religion in the popular psyche. It implies that as science explains more and
more about our world, people will naturally accept it as obviously true.

It just doesn't work that way.

Overcomingbias.com and lesswrong.com spend a bunch of time talking about how
religion isn't a position chosen after careful consideration of evidence. It's
a social cohesion, tribal thing that operates in a totally different process
of the brain, and serves an entirely different purpose than logic serves.

If science were going to replace dogma because of the overwhelming weight of
the evidence, it would have done so already.

~~~
lhorie
I agree. It's worth noting that the vast majority of religious people don't
actually _care_ about how the universe ticks; it simply makes no difference to
their daily lives.

It's too bad that only the loud extremist minorities get all this passive
aggressive press.

