As a scientist and a Christian, I hate it when he speaks for "all scientists." He decries religion and faith as mere superstition, and that only science, with its infallible logic and pure reason provides a clear view of the world. This is from the website "Enemies of Reason," the TV show that he's currently on.
There are two ways of looking at the world – through faith and superstition or through the rigours of logic, observation and evidence – in other words, through reason. Reason and a respect for evidence are precious commodities, the source of human progress and our safeguard against fundamentalists and those who profit from obscuring the truth.
As a biologist, I find his views regarding biology, evolution and genetics intriguing. I'm not totally sold on The Selfish Gene, but it's still interesting. But having him talk about religion irks the same nerve as when well-known Christian orators try to disprove evolution. It's out of your jurisdiction, and your courses are always biased.
I was very pleased when I visited The Panda's Thumb and found Dawkins under attack with his own sword. I don't know anything about this Rupert Sheldrake, but it's this that I find best describes my feelings.
The more attacks against his philosophy, demanding evidence for his viewpoints, the better.
However, when Dawkins and people like him promote their views in the name of science, they commit labeling fraud. Dawkins may be a scientist by trade, but when he acts and argues as a fundamentalist believer in materialism, ignoring evidence that challenges his belief system, then he commands no more credibility and scientific authority than any other kind of religious believer.
3 comments:
This topic is something I've been struggling with lately. Can logic and reason co-exist with faith?
I just had a thought when listening to a discussion of Kepler and Galileo and Copernicus, and realized that a lot of movement in the scientific world has been attacked by Christian groups. It's unsettling. I am no where near to making heads or tails of it, but it's definitely been bothering me lately.
First of all, regarding the attack of the scientific world it's important (as I'm sure you know) to consider the context. It wasn't so much that Galileo and Copernicus were de-centralizing humanity, but that they were going against the Ptolemic view, the authority that the Church had endorsed. The same thing happened to anatomists. They would try to write about a new feature not mentioned in Galen's books (at this point at least 500 years old) and be told, flat out, that they were wrong. Despite the obvious body lying on the table, they were still wrong. An example I like is that Galen thought human females were bi-uterine.
Stephen Jay Gould wrote an essay some years ago called "Nonoverlapping Magisteria." It can be found here.
It discusses the realms of science and religion, and how they teach us different things about the world, and look at the same world in different lights.
Can logic and reason co-exist with faith? I don't see why not. Linnaeus used a very logical setup to order all the organisms known. He also viewed it as an act of servitude to God; he was making sense and categorizing God's creation. Descartes reasoned that a watch implies a watchmaker; an argument still popular today. The idea of an atheist or agnostic scientist is fairly recent. There are many scientists that are devoted believers in a variety of religions.
Logic and reason are tools of science, but that doesn't mean that you have to use them in the rest of your life. One that did would lead a life lacking both surprise and beauty.
Logic and reasoning can go along quite nicely with both science and religion. You can use science to reason and make more sense (logic) of the Bible I find.
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