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Oklahoma, Vatican Take Opposite Tacks On Evolution
nizcolas writes "Notable evolutionary biologist, author, and speaker Richard Dawkins was recently invited to speak on the campus of the University of Oklahoma as part of the school's celebration of Charles Darwin. However, Oklahoma lawmakers are working to silence Dawkins with the passage of House Bill 1015 (RTF), which reads in part: '... the University of Oklahoma ... has invited as a public speaker on campus, Richard Dawkins of Oxford University, whose published opinions, as represented in his 2006 book "The God Delusion," and public statements on the theory of evolution demonstrate an intolerance for cultural diversity and diversity of thinking and are views that are not shared and are not representative of the thinking of a majority of the citizens of Oklahoma ...'" Pending legal action, Dawkins is set to speak tonight at 7 pm. (Luckily, we no longer live in the era of Bertrand Russell's court-ordered dismissal on moral grounds from the College of the City of New York.) And reader thms sends word of the Vatican's Darwin conference (program): "The conference, marking the 150th anniversary of the publication of "The Origin of Species," has been criticized by advocates of Creationism or Intelligent Design for not inviting them. The Muslim creationist Harun Yahya, most famous for his Atlas of Creation, also complained about not being invited."
OMFG! This is after we had to put up with giant anti-abortion posters on campus during the presidential election week that just happened to have horrid pictures of late-term abortions that are already illegal everywhere as far as I know anyway. WTF. It's been a given for a long time that I'm leaving after graduating, but OK continues to find ways to make me worry less about what I leave behind.
"There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell them." ~ Louis Armstrong
No kidding. The resolution begins:
By paragraph THREE it is condemning Dawkins for, and I am not making this up:
Has anyone in the Oklahoma heard of the First Amendment? Cultural diversity? WTF does cultural diversity have to to do with science, anyway? Free speech was intended to protect offensive speech. This should apply especially when said offensive speech is based on solid scientific evidence.
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Still stupid. Not like they don't have real problems they could be trying to solve, rather than trying to condemn a guy for saying mean things about their imaginary friend.
When you're more conservative than the Vatican, there is a problem.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
If the majority of the citizens of Oklahoma believed in a vast government conspiracy to cover up the existence of extraterrestrials as a result of watching one too many episodes of The X-Files, would be it okay for them to pass legislation to squash the free speech rights of someone proving that no such conspiracy exists? C'mon, this is just completely ridiculous.
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Not surprised by the latter one. Catholic teaching has leaned hard towards "Science is 'what' and 'how.' God is 'why.'" for a long time now.
I admire his works and his point of view, but I find a lot of the time he can be callously disrespectful and religiously athiest. I'm an athiest myself but I find his pushy nature to be a bit much soemtimes.
I feel the way he handles some questions and situations doesn't help his cause.
Please don't forget that it is a subset of "religious people" who are fighting to discredit science and impose their beliefs via government and laws. There are plenty of religious people who don't support those more extreme views. Belief in God and a respect and enthusiasm for science are not mutually exclusive. Maybe you should try to be more careful about making that distinction when using your vehement means.
I guess the question is, are you fighting against anyone who believes in God, or are you fighting against people who use their beliefs to justify controlling other people? If it's the latter, then myself and many other people who believe in God will support you. If it's the former, then you're turning us into enemies.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
enlightened atheists shall have no remorse in discriminating against the religious, and making it known
That word, I don't think it means what you think it means. And if you were so truly enlightened you recognize how two wrongs do not make a right, or the irony of your dogmatic discrimination against those who disagree with you.
I laughed at the weak who considered themselves good because they lacked claws.
On the plus side, the resolution isn't forbidding that Dawkins speak. Unfortunately, it is a thinly veiled threat to the president of the university that funding or job could be on the line if he lets Dawkins speak.
"Whereas the University of Oklahoma is a publicly funded university..."
I read that the US has lost 650,000 jobs in the last month. Maybe enough bad debt, cold and hunger will finally get people to realize that real science can be a vehicle to productive jobs and accept that their 6000 year old Earth hypothesis doesn't hold water.
~Ben
Apart from his pro-atheist writings, speeches and such, Dr. Dawkins actually does do real scientific research. He has published numerous papers, as well as a number of rather good easy-to-understand books on evolution.
Rush Limbaugh is an entertainer. He isn't even a real politician.
So how is it exactly you can equate Limbaugh and Dawkins?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
A government taking a stance against free speech does effect someones right to free speech, and in this case it also violates freedom of Religion in the constitution.
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Include the next 2 paragraphs though and you can see what this actually has them doing.
(bolding is mine)
They're sending a strongly worded letter. That's it. This is a complete non-story and the sort of symbolic political crap that pols do so they can send out fund raising letters to the fundies saying how they fought the darwinists without actually having to do anything. If they're preventing him from speaking that's an issue but there's nothing here that at all suggests that.
I did. Whether they are simply advocating the squashing of Dawkins' freedom of speech or are actually squashing, if the University tells Dawkins' to pack it in, the end result is the same.
Let's also not forget that First Amendment also includes the freedom to practice a religion of one's choosing. This also includes the right to practice no religion at all. IOW, Dawkins' has a Constitutional right to be an atheist and to speak about his own beliefs (or non-beliefs) as an atheist.
I'm not an atheist myself, but I will defend the rights of atheists to believe (or not believe) what they choose.
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I'm not posting to argue for or against your point but to simply ask why you felt it was necessary to make your entire paragraph a hyperlink. Is it 1994 again?
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Houston TX, USA
You are correct: the state legislature is not banning the speaker. However, what happens if the university rescinds its invitation to the speaker for fear of losing any state funding? You don't have to state, "we forbid you for doing something we don't like" in order to get that message across.
I am not surprised at this turn of events because Dawkins' comments in the God delusion are widely considered to be hateful in nature. Consider that, in the United states, some 93-96 percent of people believe in God and some 40% of people believe in evolution. The intersection of these two is still significant, but the symmetric difference of these axioms is not. Dawkins holds that to be an intelligent scientific thinker you must hold to both strict naturalism and evolution apriori, which is not so subtly implying that all of the other 53-ish percent of humans living in the United states are basically drooling morons.
The truth hurts, news at 11.
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That makes it the product of the study of fairy tales with no basis in reality. Attempting to put science and fairy tales on the same level is ridiculous and is the same as passing laws banning kryptonite because it is harmful to Superman or allowing people to shoot at one another because in the cartoons it just makes one's face dirty.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Bah...if anything suggesting that only 53% of human beings living in the US are drooling morons is being generous. Or the world at large, for that matter.
Dawkins holds that to be an intelligent scientific thinker you must hold to both strict naturalism and evolution apriori, which is not so subtly implying that all of the other 53-ish percent of humans living in the United states are basically drooling morons.
No. You don't have to be a drooling moron to be Just Plain Wrong. Sometimes intelligent, honest people are Just Plain Wrong. Hundreds of years ago, the religious also honestly believed based on biblical evidence that the Sun revolved around the Earth. They deluded themselves, just as people today delude themselves about evolution, which is as absolutely factual as the Earth going around the Sun.
And hopefully someday people will realize they are Just Plain Wrong about the existence of God, but unfortunately that's not as easily proven beyond a reasonable doubt as evolution.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Dawkins holds that to be an intelligent scientific thinker you must hold to both strict naturalism and evolution apriori, which is not so subtly implying that all of the other 53-ish percent of humans living in the United states are basically drooling morons.
Perhaps Dawkins is not implying that these people are unintelligent, but that they are unscientific.
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The computer you're typing on, the principles behind the electricity and the circuit boards and the plastics and the manufacturing... are all products of the scientific method. Every single human advance that allows you to spend your days doing something other than sitting in the jungle naked waiting to be eaten by a big cat are the result of the scientific method.
The scientific method produces theories that make correct predictions about the world around us. Theology does not. Simplistic philosophical talking points like "Truth" have nothing to do with it, and maintaining that robust scientific theories that make such correct predictions are just "opinions" is hand-waving at best and intellectually dishonest at worst.
The fact that you and I are even able to converse about this subject over an electronic network is a direct result of the discoveries of science. Theology may give emotional comfort, but it is not, and never will be, in the same realm as science. Don't drag rational thinking people into the navel-gazing fairly tale world of theology.
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That's precisely how the First Amendment *does not work*. If it is funded by the government, then it must remain neutral (a-theistic if you will), regardless of the religious affiliations of any or all taxpayers. That is the point of the First Amendment.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The religious don't have a logical leg to stand on, so attack the messenger. That's their idea of debate.
There's nothing hateful about arguing against mere ideas. Especially bizarre and plain wrong ones.
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And you think that they would edit him to look non pompous and intelligent? That would have defeated the entire purpose of the movie.
Jack Valenti and Orrin Hatch will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
to put it simply:
A "god" answer is an answer to /who/ and maybe /why/. Science is about asking /how/.
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Name one of Dawkin's "fallacies". Go ahead.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
How on Earth do you think it could be possible to prove the non-existence of an omnipotent entity?
I didn't say "prove", I said, "prove beyond a reasonable doubt." You can't prove it beyond all doubt. You can only continue to remove all the superstitious nonsense and hope that when people see that absolutely nothing is left that they decide for themselves that it's most rational to conclude that nothing was ever there.
We don't have "proof" that the Egyptian god Ra never existed, or that Zeus was never real, but most people accept those. Someday (hopefully) people will accept that the Abrahamic God was every bit as real as Ra and Zeus -- not real at all.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
That science, which is the systematic and empirical study of the natural world, can prove the non-existence of a supernatural entity. ("Supernatural" being, by definition, outside of the purview of science.)
Dawkins is an impressive scientist, but when he ventures into theology, he reminds me of a Feynman quote: "I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy."
The intersection of people who find The God Delusion hateful and the people who have actually read The God Delusion is probably less than 1% of the total population.
Dawkins holds that he is correct, as does everyone else with a position on any given issue. It's hardly his fault that the logical consequence is that people who disagree with him are incorrect.
If this were, say, a political discussion, Dawkins' message and tone would positively mild compared to partisans like Rush Limbaugh. Political partisans don't bother with implication. They directly insult the other side's intelligence all the time and no one really bats an eye. I don't seem to Dawkins ever telling someone from the opposition to go fuck himself, for example.
I think you have suffered the results of the Evangelical atheist. You have Abiogenesis and the bubble theories of evolution which are scientific theories. You have scientific works done by Young earth scientists which is now actually the accepted idea for the creation of some canyons and low lands in western the United states that were created in weeks and days instead of millions of years.
The problems isn't really the lack of other theories to compete with Evolutions, it's alternatives within evolution that could lead to a better understanding of the process. The evangelist evolutionist or evangelist atheist seem to want to lock understanding into what we know of today and only refine those processes instead of allowing other theories to play out to their validity if it might upset what he believes. It's like saying Science is the pursuit of the truth because it is always evaluating the weight of the facts and review them across the community, then saying shut up, this is the way things are, the way they always are, and I don't care what you or your evidence says. It sort of makes a religion out of science, especially concerning evolution which is apparent with Dawkins.
Quotes please.
Dawkins freely admits you can't disprove the existance of a God or any other supnernatural being, no more than you can disprove the existance of pink unicorns, FSM or Santa Claus.
For all intensive porpoises your a bunch of rediculous loosers
Full disclosure: I'm an athiest
What the hell do you think religious people have been doing? They've gone a hell of a lot further than 'bashing atheism and nonreligious people'.
I'm not a huge fan of Dawkins, but to be fair, there's a lot less of 'evangelical' atheists (and I'd bet a smaller percentage) than evangelical Christians/Muslims/etc.
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I didn't say "prove", I said, "prove beyond a reasonable doubt." You can't prove it beyond all doubt. You can only continue to remove all the superstitious nonsense and hope that when people see that absolutely nothing is left that they decide for themselves that it's most rational to conclude that nothing was ever there.
I never actually understood the fight between creationism and evolution. It's not like they have to be polar opposites. The Bible never actually says anything about how long it took to create the world (unless, of course, you take a literal look at the Bible, and then it's 6 days). However, it's quite feasible that evolution was used in the creation of the world. Why not use some excellent tools that would allow growth and expansion of so many billions of creatures? I can't see God just saying, "Let me do things the hard way, when there's this really awesome way of doing things..."
Maybe that's just me.
As to your "prove beyond a reasonable doubt" and "no real" remarks - whether God is or is not real (and I believe that he is), is it really such a big deal that people want something to believe in, even if you don't particularly want or need that?
Suppose you believed that Snow White and the Seven Dwarves are real. Is me calling you an idiot fair or bigotry?
If you do what you always did, you get what you always got.
It is a fallacy because it is inductive logic, which is not always true.
...
Immanuel Kant proved that you cannot prove God exists or does not exist by Science long ago. Anything else is pure logical fallacies like inductive logic, which Dawkins uses as well as circular references and wishful thinking.
Well, go ahead and explain how Kant's proof is still valid today (and will still be valid tomorrow). I bet you'll say something like "well, clearly logic isn't changing" but I dare you to use anything other than induction to prove such a statement. Humans inherently use induction when they assume that the universe, logic, or anything maintains its form over time. Specifically, you believe that because the proof has always been valid in the past (P(i), i<N, for the current time N), and a valid proof now is a valid proof in the near future (P(N) -> P(N+epsilon)), inductively the same proof will always be valid (P(t) for all times t).
I was Catholic for 17 years, then became an EMT and decided a God wouldn't create a world like this - and if he did, we shouldn't worship him for it. I sure don't claim to know everybody's beliefs, but I know the official positions and most of the sub-positions.
And I'm sorry if I came off as personally insulting. That 'you' was meant as 'one', as in people in general.
Having said that, I think what Dawkins is saying is that some people are religious and nonscientific. He's calling those people stupid (really, it's ignorance).
Then he's saying there are people who believe in a God whose existence is unprovable and undetectable, and a scientific method that says he is irrelevant (if he does exist) because his existence is unprovable and undetectable.
No matter how you say it, those two ideas conflict with each other. Christianity holds that God exists, and we can't know his ways. Science holds that we shouldn't give a shit if we can't observe anything about it.
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Clearly you've never watched anything that Dawkins has done, or read anything that he's written.
Dawkins explicitly admits that he can't disprove the existence of God. He's said so many, many times.
He also admits that he can't disprove the existence of a teapot in orbit around the sun.
You have the same problem that many theists have - you seem believe that your theology is above criticism. Dawkins may not be able to prove the non-existence of your God(s), but he can certainly criticize your religion in the context of the actions it promotes.
I'm sure you're one of the reasonable theists who would never try to repress science, harm public health, or oppress the rights of a minority. But the fact is that there are people who want to do those things in the name of their religion. And many of those people are in the highest levels of the US and other governments.
That's what Dawkins is criticizing. If you want to argue that Dawkins is wrong, that's valid. But Dawkins' arguments don't hinge on the belief that science can disprove religion.
Who's to say that there isn't a god, and he/she/it didn't design evolution?
Nietzsche, and very brilliantly.
The argument goes roughly like this (though he puts it a lot better than I can):
Existence is defined by the effects something has on the rest of the world. If we take a hypothetical something, call it "thing an sich" or "god" or whatever else you like, which has no effect on anything else, then due to it not affecting anything, we can not verify its existence. Also, its existence makes no difference whatsoever. Therefore, it does not exist in any meaningful sense of the word.
Now you might have noticed that "god" is on the retreat. Vast areas that were clearly "gods domain" a thousand years ago are now the domain of science. Science does not only prove "how", it also proves "who" in the sense that there is no "who". Evolution works perfectly well without any guiding hand. It rains due to atmospherics, not because god is angry. Kids are made by biological events, not given by a supreme being. Whenever science is sufficiently "done" with any of its research areas, there is no "effect" of a hypothetical god left. In the end, we will end up with a "god" that has no effect whatsoever, and therefore does not exist.
QED.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I think what a lot of religious people forget is that religion can be a very oppressive force for those that don't accept the majority view. I have personally found religion to be a very hostile force against me in my life.
The Catholic church still runs 90% of the schools in Ireland, and I, like virtually everyone else in the country, had no choice but to attend a Catholic primary and secondary school. It is not a happy experience to be marched down to mass when you don't believe in any of it, and don't practice any religion at home. The situation was in no way restricted to schools. Up to the 1980's it was common for non-Catholics in the workplace to stand up and make motions of prayer during the Angelus at noon so as not to stand out.
It is a very difficult thing to be a non-believer amid believers. I can tell you that dissension in these matters will evoke severe hostility. The situation that I and many others else in Ireland found ourselves in is the exact situation that the American first amendment was designed to avoid.
When religious people argue for prayers in schools, or courts, or legislature, they rarely consider the effect on non-believers. Religion does create a hostile work environment for just about anyone except the devout, and that's not something that any Government office should promote or enforce. If you want to go and pray or need time to do so, absolutely. But don't force a hostile environment on the people that don't want it.
Your first amendment is as much about freedom from religion as it is about freedom of religion.
May the Maths Be with you!
"God" is nebulous, and inherently impossible to disprove. So is anything else anyone could make up that is untestable! That was kind of the whole point of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
It's perfectly fair for Dawkins to use the term "delusion", because theists have made an outlandish claim with no evidence to back it up. You can't assert something, provide no evidence for it, then claim you're right until someone proves you wrong. That's literally the logic of an insane person. The sane person observes a phenomenon, comes up with a testable hypothesis, and tests it, and doesn't claim their hypothesis is true unless it holds up to repeated and rigorous testing, and even then, there's no 100% "proven."
By reading this you acknowledge that you have read it.
I believe my reading of the remark was more reasonable than yours. The remark says that it is ironic if a theist accuses an atheist of being intellectually lazy. It doesn't in any way single out the article author, nor provide any particular reason for us to conclude that the remark must have been meant to single out the article author.
Well, the problem here is that the participants in this discussion are being quite unspecific about what they mean by "bashing someone." I certainly know for sure that Dawkins regularly labels theists as being, as a general rule, superstitious, ignorant, unintelligent, unsubtle, simpletons, archaic, unprogressive, etc. And what's more, he seems to be in a crusade to go all over the world giving talks where he does so.
My problem with that is very simple: while I very much agreed with him when I was around 18, over the past 12 years or so I've gradually come to see that Dawkins, while quite intelligent, isn't really very knowledgeable outside a very narrow field, but goes around acting as if he is, and won't listen to reason when people try to enlighten him about his errors and misunderstandings. He doesn't know enough about, for example, philosophy or the social sciences to understand that the scientistic, atheistic worldview he's crusading for is not nearly as solid as he thinks it is. It's like he lives in a time-warp where none of the philosophy of the second half of the 20th century happened. No Wittengstein; no Quine-Duhem hypothesis; no anti-foundationalism; no Kuhn, Lakatos nor Feyerabend.
Once you realize how many problems Dawkins' whole worldview has, you start to think that perhaps he is a bit intellectually lazy. Basically, he picks on the theistic crowd very loudly while pretending that there are no serious secular objections to what he wants us to believe.
Are you adequate?
You kidding me? I've never seen a blurry photograph of God running through the woods.
I see your informative link, and raise you a pithy comment.
Here in the USA, I think that the attitude you are describing is a result of atheists feeling like they have been backed into a corner lately.
Think about the likes of:
Jack Thompson, Tipper Gore, the whole teaching ID/Creationism in science classes in Kansas(that was fortuneatly derailed), the 'think of the children' war on well, everything, the 'Moral Majority' sponsored legislation, 'Family Values' legislation, etc. being constantly hurled at us in a country that is supposedly run by a 'seperation of church and state', secular philosophy that has broken down and headed the opposite direction.(attempted theism by the Moral Majority/Family Values camp)
It's a defensive backlash, and IMO, justifiable.
The 'other side' seems to not realize that 'freedom of religion' also implies the right of 'freedom from religion...'My way, or the highway' gets old after a while!
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