Dawkins Interview; Atheism, Agnosticism, Etc. (page 2)

drwtsn32

Excellent article. Thanks for sharing!

LOL @ AlmostAtheist

rocketman

A: It's an interesting thought that in some remote time in the future, people may look back on the 20th and 21st centuries as a watershed in evolution -- the time when evolution stopped being an undirected force and became a design force. Already, for the past few centuries, maybe even millennia, agriculturalists have in a sense designed the evolution of domestic animals like pigs and cows and chickens. That's increasing and we're getting more technologically clever at that by manipulating not just the selection part of evolution but also the mutation part. That will be very different; one of the great features of biological evolution up to now is that there is no foresight.

Just a thought - could evolution have been a "design force" all along? Since humans can now "manipulate not just the selection part of evolution but also the mutation part" couldn't it be possible that God (or whatever one wishes to call him) has done the same thing?

...Wants to have his cake and eat it too Class...

OldSoul

Yes. It is possible, rocketman. But since it hasn't yet been proven and we don't yet have the comprehension to do more than guess along those lines it is futile to spend too much effort and mental energy in that direction. If that is true, we will arrive at that eventually.

Daunt

There's just as much proof that God initiated this as the possibility that the printer next to me did it. Jumping to conclusions ain't that cool. And yes him kind of labeling the people who voted for Bush like that was kinda low but oh well. the rest of the article made up for that

silentWatcher

As the English would say: SPOT ON!

>> new book called "The God Delusion."

Actually, that makes a lot of sense.

purplesofa

You can't statistically explain improbable things like living creatures by saying that they must have been designed because you're still left to explain the designer, who must be, if anything, an even more statistically improbable and elegant thing.

I liked this.

and this part helped me with my questions about the bible and scripting on a thread I started, which I have planned to do research on but have not had the time.

http://www.jehovahs-witness.com/12/90077/1.ashx

Q: So why do we insist on believing in God?
A: From a biological point of view, there are lots of different theories about why we have this extraordinary predisposition to believe in supernatural things. One suggestion is that the child mind is, for very good Darwinian reasons, susceptible to infection the same way a computer is. In order to be useful, a computer has to be programmable, to obey whatever it's told to do. That automatically makes it vulnerable to computer viruses, which are programs that say, "Spread me, copy me, pass me on." Once a viral program gets started, there is nothing to stop it.
A: Similarly, the child brain is preprogrammed by natural selection to obey and believe what parents and other adults tell it. In general, it's a good thing that child brains should be susceptible to being taught what to do and what to believe by adults. But this necessarily carries the down side that bad ideas, useless ideas, waste of time ideas like rain dances and other religious customs, will also be passed down the generations. The child brain is very susceptible to this kind of infection. And it also spreads sideways by cross infection when a charismatic preacher goes around infecting new minds that were previously uninfected.

It has helped me with something I was searching for in my own thought process. It is not what I had thought I would find, but makes sense to me at some level in my brain right now.

Thanks for the post,

purps

think41self

Fascinating read. Thanks for posting it Alan.

I have some new thoughts to pursue.

Tracy

Satanus

A disease of the mind, mind memes, i believe he called it. It makes sense, if you think about it. Animals in the wild have a lot of diseases and parasites and crap from which domestic animals are protected. Religion infected humans before they were really a civilisation, while they were still in a basically wild state. While we are a bit more civilised now, we will probably be much more so in a thousand yrs. Religion will slowly be cured as we develop civilisationally. Europe and england are a good examples of this process.

S

Seeker4

AlanF;

Thanks for posting the interview. Have been reading Dawkins a lot over the past decade. I'll pass this interview on to a few friends.

I've been watching with considerable trepidition the rise of the religious right here in America. In New England we're pretty shocked at what the rest of the country seems to be doing. I love the quote I heard on NPR after they had a debate on whether to teach intelligent design in schools. It was Ohio, I think, and these scientests had pretty much slammed the idea. There was a quick interview with a woman as she was leaving the debate, and she was obviously very confused. "I don't know what to believe," she said, "I just want my baby to go to heaven."

Interestingly, they say there is no creationist movement to speak of in Great Britian and Europe. Loved how Dawkins lumped America and the Moslem world together. Having a President who feels he's on a mission from God is very scary.

An interesting article I read the other day (can't remember where) said scientests are making a mistake not inviting the creationists in to the debate. Once creationists have to prove or disprove their ideas using the scientific method, down they go. He said that this new breed of creationist, which has mostly rejected young earth ideas, and accepts microevolution, is already headed down a slippery slope that leads to disproving a literal view of Genesis, and once that's gone, the rest soon follows. As I discovered, if there were no Adam, there's really no need for a redeeming Jesus to buy us back from sin.

Hope all is well. We need to talk.

S4

seattleniceguy

Great article, AlanF, thanks for posting!

SNG

Dawkins Interview; Atheism, Agnosticism, Etc.

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