The presence or absence of God cannot be proven. That’s a pretty absolute statement but I think it’s valid. Consider, if everything is an omnipotent God’s doing then the situation is indistinguishable from a universe in which there is no God and nothing is God’s doing. It all goes back to the quandary that to tell the difference between two things - you need at least two, eh? A discussion of light is meaningless to a man profoundly blind from birth since he has always and only ever experienced blackness. In fact, he doesn’t even know he’s experiencing blackness because he’s never experienced anything else to differ it against. In one universe, everything is God and so we cannot experience not-God. In the other, nothing is God and therefore, we cannot experience God.

So, for me, it all comes down to making an a-priori choice and admitting full well that I have no basis other than that it is what I want to believe. I choose to live in a world where I think God is everywhere and everything and that this God-force is benevolent. And, for me, since I believe it to be so, it seems to be so. It is all beyond science and I make no quibbles that it is otherwise.

So to me, Dawkins is shrill because he believes there is no God and he can’t seem to recognize that his position is a choice - just an a-priori choice like mine - because he cannot know if there is or there is not a God anymore than I can. He still wants to argue with the same faith-based passion that the religious fanatics enjoy - he’s just on the other side of the argument doing the same thing.

I agree with you that Dawkins is shrill but not on the “identicalness” of a God driven world and a Godless world. That would depend on the definition of God you were using. If your God run universe is 6,000 years old and consists a of flat earth encapsulated by a dome then that world is going to be fundamentaly different than a world described by Copernicus and Darwin.

That’s an archaic example of course, but there are more subtle interpretations of reality that are religious in nature (intelligent design, man has been given dominion over nature) that are at fundamentaly at odds with other interpretations of reality.

My beef isn’t with the idea of God its with people who attempt to disguise their religious beliefs as rational/scientific discourse for political purposes. If you don’t believe in evolution because of religious dogma just say so. If you don’t believe in the Global Warming Hypothesis because you think God gave man complete dominion over the earth to do with as he saw fit until judgement day then just come out and say so. If you want to see [insert faith here] wiped out of your chosen holy land just say so. Don’t pretend that you’re some kind of scientific skeptic or political realist when you are just acting out of your religious beliefs. I’m not saying that people don’t have a right to act based on their religious beliefs they obviously do. I’d simply prefer that they be honest about it.

In a way I can see why Dawkins is so upset. If you consider the religious underpinnings behind a good chunk of the world’s political violence and the religious objections to the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis then it becomes easy to see religion as a force for evil. But that’s a big oversimplification and it’s a bit too easy to simply say “if everyone subscribed to my worldview the whole world would be better”. That in itself smacks of theism.

And he’s dead wrong to lump scientificaly literate christians in with the crowd that think the dinosaurs got wiped out because there wasn’t room for them on Noah’s Ark. Someone can believe in a god and still be a perfectly rational, reasonable human being.

So even though I have a lot of reservations about religion I’m simply not willing to go join Dawkins in the land of the Pissed off at Everyone Else Athiests. Because ultimately I’m much more concerned with how people behave than in what they believe. So if you want peace and would like to see something done about Global Warming you’re alright in my books irrespective of what you do on a Sunday morning.

“if everyone subscribed to my worldview the whole world would be better”. That in itself smacks of theism.

Are you sure it smacks of “the belief in the existence of one or more Gods or deities”?

There’s a lot more to some religious mindset than the belief in a God. I can’t fault your definition of course except to say that you can have a religion or a mindset that resembles religious dogma without necessarily believing in a god.

I’m glad that Dawkins is being so agressive - I find it astounding that religion is allowed to play such a major part in the modern world and think that atheists who are concerned about the direction of the world need to start making some noise.

If we sit quietly in the corner, the irrational fundamentalists will continue to grow more powerful instead of being marginalised as they deserve.

The man who has his finger on the button of the most powerful nuclear arsenal in the world believes that the universe was created by an invisible man who lives in the sky. I’m glad there are people like Dawkins who share my absolute horror at this thought and are prepared to make their voices heard.

At the end of the day we don’t really know what any President of the United States’ religious beliefs are. Public professions of religious faith being a prequisite for the most highly coveted job in the country it isn’t outside the realm of possibility that some of them might be faked.

Heh. I was just nitpicking your choice of words. I’d suggest that the attitude you percieve in Dawkins smacks of fundamentalism, dogmatism, or fanaticism.

Not theism necessarily.

[…] 14 - The New Athiesm “Rather than attacking religion shouldn’t the Evangelists of Reason be focusing their efforts on exposing religious beliefs that are cross-dressing as Science and Reason?” Meme Therapist Jose takes the pulpit. (tags: Dawkins reason science evangelism faith belief debate fundamentalism Christianism religion atheism) […]

Hmm…I’ve been staying out of this debate so far, but since I did actually do a degree in Religion (though I know little about Christianity Islam et al. as asian religion was my main area of study) I thought I might throw my 2p in…actually, I can’t be bothered…had enough of this sort of thing as an undergrad. Suffice to say, I went into the course coming from a very Dawkinsian scientific rationalist perspective and left three years later no longer an atheist (agnostic, though…as in, the Universe is very big, very strange, and we understand very little of it, so who knows? Though the core philosophy of Buddhism, as disseminated for around the first thousand years after the death of Sakyamuni, is pretty hard to argue with…) and with a tendency to get rather irritated with people who blame the evils of the world on religion. I’m more inclined to blame the evils of the world on greed, indifference, intransigence and a host of other petty human failings, magnified by powerful individuals and organisations. And I’d certainly be more inclined to look towards the fetishisation of greed and indifference by the l’aissez faire economic system we currently favour as the tap-root of the climate change crisis the world is currently facing (despite the best efforts of the Shrub and cronies to distract us with a nice long war…).

Steve,

Point taken about choice of words. I don’t really see the New Athiesm as a “religion” but it does share an attitude that you normaly associate with a fundamentalist religious mindset.

But you have to give the New Athiests credit on one score. None of the leading lights in the movement have been caught out in practicing the contrary to what they preach in private unlike a certain other breed of fundamentalists.