Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins argues that the universe is uncreated because creationists read Genesis 1-2 literally, which contradicts the science of biology.
Richard Dawkins studied and taught at Oxford University.
Oxford University has a department dedicated to teaching Anglican theology.
The Anglican communion is historically a via media between Roman Catholic and Calvinist interpretations of the Bible.
The Pope and Calvin are both Augustinian.
Augustine taught that it's a scandalous error to interpret the Bible literally where doing so would be unscientific.
Therefore, Richard Dawkins seems never to have walked across campus to talk to an Oxford theologian.
I suspect this is a specific case of a general problem of contemporary people (at least WEIRD people) forming their beliefs based on what they see on the telly over interaction with the local community.
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though it does strike me as weird how many atheists over here seem to make assumptions about British Christians based on what they know of fundamentalists in the Southern US (which is unlikely to be very much)
particularly weird when they're making these assumptions about Catholics
Also, Southern US evangelicals are spreading rapidly in Africa, where fundamentalism and tribal beliefs tend to mix in the most counterintuitive yet horrifying ways. So it's not quite as far from Dawkins's soil as one would hope.
Oxford University has a philosophy department, where professors would probably be happy to discuss principles of logic like why begging the question is a fallcy, challenging the strongest rather than the weakest formulation of an opponent's position, etc.
Or whether realism is more compatible with the scientific enterprise than nominalism. An educated English atheist may be forgiven for not having formulated a rebuttal of, say, Taoism, but to never grapple with Plato? How recently was it that you'd have to read Plato and/or Aristotle in Attic Greek to meet the general education requirements at Oxford?
I'm reminded of Vizzini:
"I can't compete with you physically, and you're no match for my brains."
"You're that smart?"
"Let me put it this way: you ever heard of Plato, Aristotle, Socrates? Morons."
"Really?"
In short, "Two Cultures" has been a disaster for intellect in our culture.
although Dawkins himself seems to have little real interest in anything outside his own discipline, although he's happy to behave as though he's an expert on everything philosophical or theological
i would expect physicists and mathematicians to incline towards realism, but it doesn't necessarily follow
MURDER
YOU'LL BE GUILTY
AND YOU'RE DOING IT FOR NOTHING, RICHARD
KILLING RELIGION WON'T BRING BACK YOUR GODDAMN HONEY
I have met many fanatical, overly literalist, and otherwise just stupid Christians in my lifetime, and Dawkins' method of thinking is almost exactly the same as theirs. You seem to be assuming I'm defending Dawkins.
I am not defending Dawkins.
I've only ever met a single person who admired him, and said person would be a strawman if not for the fact that he wasn't fictional.
i seem to remember Jethro saying positive things about him, too
i think a lot of his admirers take an interest in him even younger
when you don't know a lot about the world, a celebrated scientist saying things that you agree with is pretty encouraging
i get so angry sometimes i just punch plankton --Klinotaxis
I mean, he probably did, because airport security consists exclusively of racist assholes, but maybe he didn't and there is hope for the world.
Also, I didn't know who started this thread before I clicked on it.
"African Americans" are of mixed race. Yet so entrenched is our
essentialist mindset that American official forms require everyone to
tick one race/ethnicity box or another: no room for intermediates. A
different but also pernicious point is that a person will be called
"African American" even if only, say, one of his eight great
grandparents was of African descent. As Lionel Tiger put it to me, we
have here a reprehensible "contamination metaphor". But I mainly want to
call attention to our society's essentialist determination to dragoon a
person into one discrete category or another. We seem ill-equipped to
deal mentally with a continuous spectrum of intermediates. We are still
infected with the plague of Plato's essentialism."
See, if Dawkins kept with stuff like this, and not stuff about religion, I think he'd be remembered as a pretty cool guy.
And while irrational constants like pi do present challenges for non-Platonist mathematics, i don't think it's right to suggest that they're intrinsically Platonic.