Quote of the day

Thursday 8th January, 2009

“There is about as much likelihood of there being a god as there is a tooth fairy”

- Richard Dawkins



17 Comments

  1. Candid January 8th, 2009 at 8:16 am

    A fair point. I’d rather believe in the tooth fairies they are much more generous, modest, humble and magical – God however is ruthless, attention seeking and demanding of both money and time. There’s no contest really.

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  2. patently January 8th, 2009 at 9:19 am

    Dawkins is a scientist. He’s entitled to his view, as we all are, but I’ll start to regard it as noteworthy once Rowan Wiliams is able to present an understandable exposition of General Relativity.

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  3. Madeley January 8th, 2009 at 12:41 pm

    Why the notability of an Oxford professor and Fellow of the Royal Society’s views on probability and reality should be based on a bloke in a dress’s grasp of gravitational theory is completely beyond me.

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  4. patently January 8th, 2009 at 1:31 pm

    Mainly because they’re not views on probability and reality; they are views on theology. If he, a scientist, confined his opinions to the scientific issues of probability and reality then I’d regard them as noteworthy. When he wanders off into realms in which he has no more expertise than I do, then I regard his opinions as no more authoritative than my own.

    So I’ll allow my opinions on theology to be moulded by his sometime after I allow Rowan Williams to mould my views on science.

    a bloke in a dress

    Not much respect for Rowan Williams there. Just wondering if you expect others to grant respect to you and your opinions, when you do not offer others the same respect?

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  5. Stu January 8th, 2009 at 2:00 pm

    patently, I’ve been trying, but I just can’t seem to work out what your point is. Correct me if I’m wrong, but you seem to be saying that because Rowan Williams doesn’t write about General Relativity, Richard Dawkins shouldn’t write about philosophy. That’s complete rubbish.

    It’s like saying Arnold Schwarzenegger or Ronald Reagan can’t be politicians: they must stick only to acting. Or that Bob Dylan shouldn’t be a singer: he’s a guitarist. That Da Vinci had no business designing helicopters.

    There’s absolutely nothing to suggest that Dawkin’s is incapable of thinking philosophically – just as there is nothing preventing Rowan Williams from advancing the forefront of physics, should he so wish. Are you suggesting that Greek philosophers should have abstained from making scientific observations?

    You’ve completely lost me.

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  6. patently January 8th, 2009 at 2:24 pm

    Fair enough, the reference to RW pontificating about science is perhaps too rhetorical. I’ll try again.

    Dawkins is an accomplished scientist. When he speaks on scientific issues, he knows what he is talking about. His opinions therefore command respect, and I am quite content to grant them that.

    He is also quite welcome to think about theology. He is equally welcome to publish those views. However, he is no more accomplished as a theologian or a philosopher than I am. So, I do not grant his views on theology any greater weight than I would grant to my own views, or (indeed) the views of some bloke I met in the pub. What I find irritating about Dawkins is the apparent assumption by him and others that I should regard his views on theology as persuasive because he is an accomplished scientist. To my mind, this is simply irrelevant; his accomplishments as a scientist do not serve to inform him as to issues of theology. When he speaks on theology, he steps outside his expertise and his opinions carry no more weight than those of the rest of us.

    If Rowan Williams stood up and announced that he had just had a great idea for an experiment at CERN, we’d think it absurd if his idea was thrown to the front of the queue because “gosh, well, he’s the Archbishop – he should know!”. We’d expect his idea to be looked at on its own merits, as if it were from any other member of the public. The same applies to Dawkins’ view on theology.

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  7. Shaun Pilkington January 8th, 2009 at 3:02 pm

    To a point, Patently. Dawkins critique, tho, is based on the total absence of scientific evidence for either a God or biblical accounts of creation and attendant ‘theology’ in Christianity which attempts to describe the natural world from its ‘faith’ position.

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  8. LFAT January 8th, 2009 at 3:14 pm

    I’ve heard Madeley wears a dress.

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  9. Madeley January 8th, 2009 at 3:22 pm

    And very fetching it is too.

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  10. Stu January 8th, 2009 at 3:30 pm

    Perhaps he’s an executive transvestite – not some weirdo transvestite…

    Anyway, The God Delusion is, in some ways, a natural progression from Dawkins’ earlier more science based work (The Blind Watchmaker, Unweaving the Rainbow, etc). I do agree with you, patently, that he is better at writing about zooology, and that his philosophical viewpoints at times more arrogant than is necessary, but I still think he is in a better position than most to explain the likelihood of the existence of God, since his particular field is rather instrumental in explaining the origins of life on Earth.

    Of course, I happen to agree with his point of view, which helps.

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  11. patently January 8th, 2009 at 3:30 pm

    Shaun ….. Quite. Which means that Dawkin’s argument for the non-existence of God is, to a theologian, no more persuasive that that of Douglas Adams.

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  12. patently January 8th, 2009 at 3:50 pm

    Stu – our posts crossed.

    Dawkins is probably more expert than I in explaining the how questions of life, but is just one of the many trying to explain the why…

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  13. Shaun Pilkington January 8th, 2009 at 3:52 pm

    That’s missing the point and miring the debate in meaningless humanities driven relativism. Dawkin’s starting point, as a scientist, is that unless there’s evidence FOR something, you can’t really say that its true. Ergo his argument that there is no evidence for the existence of God is a valid scientific assertion. God, Santa, the Tooth Fairy and Death – no evidence for any of these fellas.

    Theologians are fine until they start making pronouncements about the natural world based on their fairy stories (God made the world in 6 days, God said heterosexuality is the only natural way and so on)…

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  14. patently January 8th, 2009 at 5:11 pm

    Logically, it is not valid to conclude that the absence of evidence is evidence of absence.

    Dawkin’s use of this premise is valid for the purposes of scientific research, but not otherwise. It is why I would not rely on him as a theologian any more than I would rely on him as (say) a lawyer or a politician. The problem lies in Dawkin’s insistence on using an exclusively scientific frame of mind to approach non-scientific issues. You criticise (as I would) theologians who use an exclusively theological frame of mind to approach scientific issues; Dawkins is making the same mistake.

    So if a theologian told me that God literally made the world in 6 days, I’d regard him as a blinkered extremist and pay him no more attention than I pay Dawkins. There is a middle ground in which scientists can enquire how things happen and theologians can discuss why, and in which they will (sometimes) be the same person.

    PS – My background is science with (secular) philosophy, not theology. :-)

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  15. Shaun Pilkington January 8th, 2009 at 5:19 pm

    The problem, I would guess, is that by postulating the existence of a God you are making certain assertions about physical laws that just aren’t borne out by our best methods of examining those laws. As we all know, its very difficult to prove a negative but were there a God you’d expect a few demonstrable proofs of his existence to be lying around. Instead, what you have is EVERY SINGLE ONE of his believer’s assertions about the physical world disproved by the scientific method. 6 day creation? Nope. Noah’s Ark? Hmm let’s compute the space and conclude it was either bullsh*t or Noah’s Tardis. Sexuality? Lets not go there (I think my dog is gay!).

    So within those parameters, I’m quite happy (and enjoy) speaking to theologians about how they interpret their stories but I have to object when they make assertions about measurable reality based upon demonstrably false claims in those tales.

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  16. asquith January 8th, 2009 at 6:30 pm

    I am looking forward to the new Richard Dawkins book: he is really nothing like the stereotype some have of him, as a thorough reading of his work will reveal.

    Patently, you seem to have fallen into what Dawkins calls “non-overlapping magisteria”, which is an argument along the lines of “let science be science & God be God”. Seems attractive at first, but surely supernatural claims should be questioned & challenged as others are.

    They also make claims about the physical world, such as in creationism, & this is where the argument side comes in. It isn’t right to fence some things off & say they should be left to theologians.

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  17. patently January 8th, 2009 at 11:41 pm

    were there a God you’d expect a few demonstrable proofs of his existence to be lying around

    Yes, I thought that might soon be pointed out. On that basis, quantum theory and relativity were disprovable until about 1880, as science had no means of detecting any evidence of their existence.

    All scientific laws are either probably wrong or definitely wrong. We hold to them because they explain the things we understand so far, and because they are useful approximations to reality that allow us to progress. So if you hold up science as an unchallengable absolute, you fall into the same trap as does a religious extremist.

    “non-overlapping magisteria”

    Yes, an argument considered long before Dawkins’ works in the form of the “God of the Gaps” approach to religion.

    As ever, attaching a label to an argument enables one to oversimplify it and dismiss it. I would resist an argument which said that scientists could never wonder whether there was (or was not) a God and that theologians could only ever consider the choreographic possibilities of pinheads. The truth lies somewhere between; that the tools and approaches of science have been developed in order to answer a specific type of question. Likewise for theology. Given that the nature of the tools differ, the result of using them to answer other sorts of questions will inevitably differ. So, if someone believes that his tools are perfect and applicable to all questions, he will conclude that the other tools are useless. But the problem may not be with the tools as such, but with the manner of their use.

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