I think that science will overtake religion as the thing that people believe in by default in our society. But I do not think it will replace "spirituality" or belief in the supernatural, because it seems to be ingrained into our psyche. And I will never try to fool myself into thinking that we are replacing primitive beliefs with "knowledge". We're not. We're replacing primitive beliefs with sophisticated beliefs, and that is all.
I have rarely read such a load of nonsense in a single post. You really haven't thought any of this through, and haven't even the slightest understanding of the philosophical implications of what you are saying, and most of what has been discovered and debated over the past millenium seems to have passed you by, if you really think that we aren't replacing primitive beliefs with knowledge.
If you really, truly, believe that, I suggest you avoid using any modern machinery. I suggest you avoid driving or flying. Because, guess what? They work because we replaced primitive beliefs with knowledge about mechanics. Or do you think that planes don't really fly - we only believe they do?
Dawkins believes that there is no God. He is a self-professed atheist. It has nothing to do with not knowing. It has to do with what he believes he does know. If he was agnostic he'd shut the hell up and write about what he has studied through experiment instead of attacking religion,
You also haven't even the slightest idea of what Richard Dawkins is trying to say. Dawkins has always said "I don't know" - he even says that about God. He is saying some very simple and clear things, and it is bizarre that so few people seem able to understand:
(1) Why should a belief or uncertainty in a God be given priority over a belief or uncertainly in any other thing (such as, for example, the existence of dragons)? Why do we give priority and run our society on such forms of mystical belief?
(2) A belief in God, as most people have, shuts people out from a deeper understanding of things. For example, religious belief for many people stops them having a true understanding of the wonder of evolution.
These should not be fundamentalist or controversial ideas.
He does not shut up because religion IS imposing on what he DOES know - evolution (his area of great expertise) is under daily attack in a country that is the worlds only superpower.
But harping on about God and stuff just makes his later books unreadable because the content is too much agenda, not enough fact.
Utter nonsense. His books are packed with facts. Facts about the age of the Earth, about evidence of evolution, about the nature of the fossil record. Unfortunately for some they are also packed tightly with facts about how religious belief denies such evidence, and is wildly contradictory.
I admire his bravery and courage, especially where there are so many people like you who are working so hard to misunderstand what he is saying.
Also, of course, I should point out my own bias here. My Master's thesis [virginia.edu] involved "solutions" of GR that removed these violations.
I should keep quiet about such things then!
I do think you are missing the point though. Of course we need axioms to create logical frameworks, but that does not imply that we have to believe in them or have faith in them in anything like the way that people have religious faith. They are just mechanisms to allow discussion and debate.
Causality, however, is an axiom, much as the axiom that straight lines never meet is an axiom of Euclidean geometry. And, just as with non-Euclidean geometry there are "sciences" (I'm only using quotes here to parallelize it to "geometries") that have been explored that do away with some components of causality (just as QM does away with some components of reproducibility). I'm not actually aware of any "sciences" that do away with all components of causality (or reproducibility), however. And, just as with non-Euclidean geometry there would still be other axioms left. It's hard to describe these axioms as they are, for the most part, so much a part of the fabric of what we believe that we don't even see them.
No, causuality is not an axiom. There are solutions of General Relativity that certainly do remove causuality - any closed time loop allows information to be generated from nothing, and effects without causes.
Let's get back to "don't work". How do you define that without resorting to some sort of circular reasoning?
I'll get you started:
* something doesn't work if...
* it requires at least X failures for me to say it doesn't work because...
* after X failures I can rule out the possibility that quantum probabilities aren't at fault because...
* this is still true if I assume an infinite number of universes because...
Now, don't get me wrong. I'm definitely not claiming to have all (or necessarily any) of the answers. I'm just saying that even science requires a few axioms to break oneself out of circular arguments.
We have agreed standards, such as statistical limits. Nothing is final, and nothing is certain. We may call what we use for such standards 'axioms', but that does not imply any kind of 'faith', just an agreed way of proceeding.
But seriously, you don't believe that there are a small handful of basic axioms in science that are absolute?
No, I don't.
Without these axioms, how do you question or challenge?
Don't don't need axioms to question or challenge.
How do you define "don't work"? Such axioms include such things as causality, reproducibility, the modern version of Occam's razor (as stated by Einstein - the explanation should be the simplest one that explains the phenomenon, but no simpler), etc. Just like with Euclidean or even non-Euclidean geometry, there must be a core set of unchanging axioms. These axioms have served us very well, but you can't prove them because they are axioms. Perhaps the best that can be said is that where these axioms are explicitly stated (e.g., causality) scientists (and/or philosophers) actually are willing to imagine the consequences of dropping that axiom. Still, we need a foundation of axioms upon which to build anything. It's true for geometry, set theory, and, yes, science.
You have a whole lot of things mixed up here. You are labelling principles as if they were axioms. For example, Occam's Razor is not an axiom - it is a general approach; an attitude. Causuality is nothing more than something we prefer to think is right, but it isn't an axiom - there are many long-established models used in Physics where causuality is absent (such as Godel's rotating universe solution of general relativity).
There is a great model of the way much science or math is done that I have heard recently - it is like building a house, but leaving the foundations until later, the foundations being the axioms.
The axioms aren't something we have faith in - they are simply places to start that seem useful. They are changeable.
I have a copy of the "Fundamentals of Neuroscience" and I don't see that fact mentioned anywhere.
I suspect you won't also find "adolescents can be a bit of a handful."
Actually, it IS a matter of neuroscience - there are major changes in brain functioning through childhood and adolescence.
But don't deny that believing in concepts such as causality, reproducibility, etc., are still beliefs. They may be beliefs of an arguably different nature, but still beliefs. Science is, in fact, based on a set of axioms. Those axioms are the cornerstones of the "faith".
No, no, no. They aren't faith! They are based on experience. They can be questioned, and challenged. If they don't work, they can be abandoned.
God is a common response to the holes science cannot fill in life (why are we here?) FSM is merely a mockery of thinking any such holes are important.
No, it isn't like that at all. No-one is saying that the holes science cannot fill in life aren't important. What is being questioned is why people feel the need to fill those holes with God. Also, there are well-established sets of belief labelled 'religion' held by millions of people that don't fill those holes with God, like Buddhism.
Religion has to be more than that. I am a hardcore atheist, and I think my beliefs have encouraged my tendecies towards depression, nihlism and very serious axiety. I believe in 'belief', I certainly believe that believing in God would improve my quality of life. But even so, its just not true - the narcotic might be pleasant but its still a fantasy.
But that is the point - so many who label themselves as religious really aren't.
The question is.. why are you assuming, and on what evidence, that God is the answer to those things? That is a big assumption, isn't it?"
It's about as valid a question as why you're assuming that He isn't.
No, it really isn't as valid a question. The reason is that an assumption of God has a phenomenal amount of intellectual, philosophical and moral baggage associated with it.
Assuming that an unanswered question simply has no answer we can yet (or ever discover) is in no measure the same as assuming the answer to that question is an all-powerful and unexplained intelligent and super-powerful being who determines our destinies, and to claim that it is equivalent is intellectually shallow and barren.
Some people choose to deny that it exists, some people choose to accept it. It really doesn't affect me one way or the other, as long as these people realise that it's a choice that they've made of their own free will.
Well, it should affect you. It should trouble you deeply. Supposing millions of people choose (of their own free will) to accept a belief (without evidence) that persecutes you.
I am gay. Millions of people choose of their own free will to belief that a Divine being considers me evil. It troubles me.
"Being a skeptic does not mean you have to be agnostic about everything."
But it does mean that you have faith in skepticism as the correct philosophy to live by.
No, it doesn't work like that. Skepticism is not a faith, it is a state of mind that we all achieve, to a greater or lesser extent, simply by growing up - it is part of mature human nature. When we are young, we are are trusting and naive.
So essentially, he still considers moderates to be illegitimate. He is just as much a fundamentalist as his enemies - in his view, you MUST be an atheist or you're "irrational".
A moderate religious belief is still a belief in an unprovable deity. It is still irrational. Since when has questioning the irrational, no matter how moderate, become fundamentalist?
Therefore, to imply that talking about God contradicts science is illogical. There are definitely things about our lives that science cannot understand and never will understand and though people may disagree about what these things are, it does not mean that these things have no answers and do not exist.
The question is.. why are you assuming, and on what evidence, that God is the answer to those things? That is a big assumption, isn't it?
Just because there is a gap in knowledge, why fill it with God?
The Church of England is so far away from the fundies it's not funny. Although they didn't want poofters (that's faggots in the US) to be priests so they're still reactionary in some ways.
Being a poofter/faggot myself, I do find this a little reactionary, but they are reactionary in a mild and English kind of way.
So essentially, he still considers moderates to be illegitimate. He is just as much a fundamentalist as his enemies - in his view, you MUST be an atheist or you're "irrational". Just like how the Christian fundies think everyone MUST be a Christian.
Don't be fooled by the rhetoric that atheism is inherently more rational. Neither the belief that God exists nor the belief that God doesn't exist have any scientifically admissible evidence behind them. A real skeptic would therefore believe neither. Dawkins, however, has a ton of faith in the latter.
This is a rather strange definition of skeptic.
Let's try an analogy.
The Earth is filled with custard - lots of it, hot and molten.
What do you mean, you don't think so? Surely a good skeptic should neither believe or not believe in that?
It is hard to be a skeptic by your definition - all those (possibly infinite) number of things to neither believe and also not believe!
All Dawkins is doing is being a true skeptic, and saying that he doesn't believe in anything without evidence.
Being a skeptic does not mean you have to be agnostic about everything.
Everything I've read by Dawkins suggests that he has no concept what non-fundamentalist Christians are; he's talking only about apathetic fundamentalists.
He and the fundamentalists need each other, so he treats fundamentalists as the essential definition of Christianity (rather than as a modernist group under two hundred years old, and a definite minority among Christians in general), and they treat people like him as the essential definition of atheism. Both get the bogeyman they need to have people buy their "cure".
There is a huge difference between reading about him, and reading what he actually wrote.
This is so wrong. Dawkins is British, and knows well the Church of England, a far from fundamentalist branch of Christianity. He has spoken at length about what he feels about Christianity and religion in general, even moderate versions. If you think Dawkins is only targetting minorities in religious, you really haven't read him in any detail.
It's a clash between science and stupidity. You'll never hear someone like Dawkins talk about the millions of Christians who don't oppose science, because he wants to limit the debate to right-wing fundie atheists vs. right-wing fundie Christians.
Quite the contrary. Dawkins talks a lot about the 'moderate' Christians, as he considers that a large number of those have a 'soft' belief that is succeptible to rational argument. He describes the antics of the fundamentalists in an attempt to get through to the millions. And good luck to him.
Yet the evolutionary construct is applied across the animal and plant kingdoms. One could argue for animals' ability to apply intelligence to the process of selection, but how would this apply in the plant kingdom? Then consider the multitude of plant-animal interdependencies. If they did not evolve in concert, neither species would have survived. Humans can cultivate plants to bring forth desirable traits. Should we infer that cultivation is not limited to our species?
The point was that what appears to require human intelligent (or other intelligent) intervention doesn't. Some things can be explained by animal intelligence. But then, you have to distinguish between intelligence and instinct. Animal instinct can also select things, and select very carefully: For example, how to tell if a prey animal is less fit than another, so will involve less energy to hunt. Any behaviour at all can select things.
Even plants have behaviour: trees in a forest can grow very tall. Why do they do this? Because other trees before them have grown nearly as tall, and if you can grow just a bit taller you can get more light, grow more and produce more seeds. Do they have to think about this? No.. all that has to happen is that the offspring of each tree vary a bit - some are taller, some are less tall. What can other plants do? They either grown up the tall trees (like ivy does) or adapt to less light (like ferns).
None of this is intentional, but there is still... behaviour. Even single cells have behaviour - they chase, they hunt, they select. By doing this, even single cells can weed out the less fit.
Remember how long this has to work. Not centuries, not millenia, not even millions of years, but tens of millions of centuries.
In effect, species cultivate each other, and have been doing so for an unimaginably long time.
The piano has gone through numerous iterations, changes, and improvements, but these were the result of applied human intelligence, not a process of natural selection that weeded out the inferior from the superior. Human intelligence made the determination as to which designs, innovations, and improvements would be incorporated in the next generation of instruments.
And intelligence can also be a factor weeing out inferior designs in nature. Animals don't hunt or mate blindly. They choose, and consider. If human selection works, why shouldn't animal selection?
Won't it be impossible to know "if there is less than a 1 in 20 (5%) chance that they are wrong", until we've actually waited, say, 100 years to see if the 100-year predictions really are that accurate?
No, because that is what modelling is for! Models aren't taken out of the air. They are based on proven theories of physics, chemistry, biology and so on, and tested by running against historical data
What's been the predictive success of these methods so far, and what's the longest time period for which predictions using these models have proven accurate?
Do we have accurate 100-year prediction results already on record, to validate these confidence limits and future 100-year predictions?
First of all, can I say... woah! Hold on! Why are you assuming that climate modellers are for any reason less rigorous than any other scientists? This sounds rather like special pleading.
Climate models are based on a vast amount of historical data, including solar radiation measurements (both direct and indirect), atmospheric temperature measurements (both direct and indirect), ice amounts, atomospheric gas levels and so on.
What I would ask is why are people so suspect about climate modelling in particular, yet so (justifiably) trusting of other scientific areas? Why do people assume that climate modellers are somehow stupid, and have not taken into account solar radiation changes or tested against historical data?
How sensible are the statistics? What is their predictive success right now?
To simplify, there is a scientifically accepted standard for all statistics, called 'confidence limits'. Ranges are predicted (such as ranges in temperature in 100 years time), they are only shown if there is less than a 1 in 20 (5%) chance that they are wrong.
I would argue, however, that there is enough evidence in the physical world to point to his existance. IMO, the absolute complexity of life itself, and the fact that current forms would have needed to go through innumerable evolutionary changes in concert with other forms (where symbiotic relationships exist), is enough to make me ask "who made this?" You may not agree, but that is where I stand.
It is good that it makes you ask that, but it is no longer acceptable to fall back on 'God' as the answer, because this question was dealt with over a century ago, by Darwin and Huxley. Natural selection really can produce the complexity of life and evolve all that you see. The problem is that it is hard to believe because we simply can't visualise the time in which it has happened; billions of years. The reality of the universe is beyond what we can easily think or feel.
Yet reason would tell the atheist that there had been an artist, for the complexity of the work demands it and the athiest would be hard pressed to find a natural cause for(if considering a painting) the extraction of pigments, their application to a canvas (which, itself, was woven), its placement on a frame, etc.
The truth is that we have found natural causes for much of what we see in nature; for example, the evolution of the eye (something that is often raised as being of irreducible complexity) is now well understood, and can be easily explained. Reason now tells the atheist that things can easily look designed that aren't.
Where you stand is not just shaky ground, but ground that was taken away over a hundred years ago.
It's my understanding that the high number of variables and the extreme sensitivity to initial conditions, make climate modeling much more resource-intensive, and much less consistent in its predictive power, than the same modelilng techniques in other, less complex fields.
No, this isn't the case. Statistical ensembles are used in equally (or far more) complex fields, such as the simulation of quantum mechanical interactions or large molecular complexes.
but have you considered the possibility that the modeling technique might have limits, and the global climate modeling pushes or even exceeds those limits?
This is not how statistical ensembles work. The modelling takes into account the initial sensitivities; in fact part of the reason for doing the model is to examine the effects of such sensitivities.
The way you model (to put it very simply) is to vary initial parameters over a reasonable range, then run the model for a certain length of time, to see the outcome. You repeatedly run the model until a certain range of outcomes is known within good statistical limits. What has happened with climate modelling is that enough models have been run for long enough to give a consensus about the outcome - or, to be accurate, about the range of outcomes, which is why temperature changes are given as ranges, not one figure.
The modelling would be pushed beyond its limits if you couldn't get sensible statistics for the outcome, even after running models for a long, long time.
That's exactly what I keep saying about the experts responsible for our modern translations of the Bible, but your advice doesn't seem to be taken very seriously in that context. Why should it be taken any more seriously in the context of global climate modeling?
Because the techniques that they use have shown to work very well in other situations. For example, the type of modelling used for climate situations (statistical ensembles) is also used for things like modelling of chemical reactions, and is a superb tool.
It seems rather odd when all these techniques work so well in other situations, to claim that they don't work when applied to climate. Why should climate modelling be uniquely bad in this respect? Of course, it isn't.
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I think that science will overtake religion as the thing that people believe in by default in our society. But I do not think it will replace "spirituality" or belief in the supernatural, because it seems to be ingrained into our psyche. And I will never try to fool myself into thinking that we are replacing primitive beliefs with "knowledge". We're not. We're replacing primitive beliefs with sophisticated beliefs, and that is all.
I have rarely read such a load of nonsense in a single post. You really haven't thought any of this through, and haven't even the slightest understanding of the philosophical implications of what you are saying, and most of what has been discovered and debated over the past millenium seems to have passed you by, if you really think that we aren't replacing primitive beliefs with knowledge.
If you really, truly, believe that, I suggest you avoid using any modern machinery. I suggest you avoid driving or flying. Because, guess what? They work because we replaced primitive beliefs with knowledge about mechanics. Or do you think that planes don't really fly - we only believe they do?
Dawkins believes that there is no God. He is a self-professed atheist. It has nothing to do with not knowing. It has to do with what he believes he does know. If he was agnostic he'd shut the hell up and write about what he has studied through experiment instead of attacking religion,
You also haven't even the slightest idea of what Richard Dawkins is trying to say. Dawkins has always said "I don't know" - he even says that about God. He is saying some very simple and clear things, and it is bizarre that so few people seem able to understand:
(1) Why should a belief or uncertainty in a God be given priority over a belief or uncertainly in any other thing (such as, for example, the existence of dragons)? Why do we give priority and run our society on such forms of mystical belief?
(2) A belief in God, as most people have, shuts people out from a deeper understanding of things. For example, religious belief for many people stops them having a true understanding of the wonder of evolution.
These should not be fundamentalist or controversial ideas.
He does not shut up because religion IS imposing on what he DOES know - evolution (his area of great expertise) is under daily attack in a country that is the worlds only superpower.
But harping on about God and stuff just makes his later books unreadable because the content is too much agenda, not enough fact.
Utter nonsense. His books are packed with facts. Facts about the age of the Earth, about evidence of evolution, about the nature of the fossil record. Unfortunately for some they are also packed tightly with facts about how religious belief denies such evidence, and is wildly contradictory.
I admire his bravery and courage, especially where there are so many people like you who are working so hard to misunderstand what he is saying.
Also, of course, I should point out my own bias here. My Master's thesis [virginia.edu] involved "solutions" of GR that removed these violations.
I should keep quiet about such things then!
I do think you are missing the point though. Of course we need axioms to create logical frameworks, but that does not imply that we have to believe in them or have faith in them in anything like the way that people have religious faith. They are just mechanisms to allow discussion and debate.
Causality, however, is an axiom, much as the axiom that straight lines never meet is an axiom of Euclidean geometry. And, just as with non-Euclidean geometry there are "sciences" (I'm only using quotes here to parallelize it to "geometries") that have been explored that do away with some components of causality (just as QM does away with some components of reproducibility). I'm not actually aware of any "sciences" that do away with all components of causality (or reproducibility), however. And, just as with non-Euclidean geometry there would still be other axioms left. It's hard to describe these axioms as they are, for the most part, so much a part of the fabric of what we believe that we don't even see them.
No, causuality is not an axiom. There are solutions of General Relativity that certainly do remove causuality - any closed time loop allows information to be generated from nothing, and effects without causes.
Let's get back to "don't work". How do you define that without resorting to some sort of circular reasoning?
I'll get you started:
* something doesn't work if...
* it requires at least X failures for me to say it doesn't work because...
* after X failures I can rule out the possibility that quantum probabilities aren't at fault because...
* this is still true if I assume an infinite number of universes because...
Now, don't get me wrong. I'm definitely not claiming to have all (or necessarily any) of the answers. I'm just saying that even science requires a few axioms to break oneself out of circular arguments.
We have agreed standards, such as statistical limits. Nothing is final, and nothing is certain. We may call what we use for such standards 'axioms', but that does not imply any kind of 'faith', just an agreed way of proceeding.
But seriously, you don't believe that there are a small handful of basic axioms in science that are absolute?
No, I don't.
Without these axioms, how do you question or challenge?
Don't don't need axioms to question or challenge.
How do you define "don't work"? Such axioms include such things as causality, reproducibility, the modern version of Occam's razor (as stated by Einstein - the explanation should be the simplest one that explains the phenomenon, but no simpler), etc. Just like with Euclidean or even non-Euclidean geometry, there must be a core set of unchanging axioms. These axioms have served us very well, but you can't prove them because they are axioms. Perhaps the best that can be said is that where these axioms are explicitly stated (e.g., causality) scientists (and/or philosophers) actually are willing to imagine the consequences of dropping that axiom. Still, we need a foundation of axioms upon which to build anything. It's true for geometry, set theory, and, yes, science.
You have a whole lot of things mixed up here. You are labelling principles as if they were axioms. For example, Occam's Razor is not an axiom - it is a general approach; an attitude. Causuality is nothing more than something we prefer to think is right, but it isn't an axiom - there are many long-established models used in Physics where causuality is absent (such as Godel's rotating universe solution of general relativity).
There is a great model of the way much science or math is done that I have heard recently - it is like building a house, but leaving the foundations until later, the foundations being the axioms.
The axioms aren't something we have faith in - they are simply places to start that seem useful. They are changeable.
I have a copy of the "Fundamentals of Neuroscience" and I don't see that fact mentioned anywhere.
I suspect you won't also find "adolescents can be a bit of a handful."
Actually, it IS a matter of neuroscience - there are major changes in brain functioning through childhood and adolescence.
But don't deny that believing in concepts such as causality, reproducibility, etc., are still beliefs. They may be beliefs of an arguably different nature, but still beliefs. Science is, in fact, based on a set of axioms. Those axioms are the cornerstones of the "faith".
No, no, no. They aren't faith! They are based on experience. They can be questioned, and challenged. If they don't work, they can be abandoned.
God is a common response to the holes science cannot fill in life (why are we here?) FSM is merely a mockery of thinking any such holes are important.
No, it isn't like that at all. No-one is saying that the holes science cannot fill in life aren't important. What is being questioned is why people feel the need to fill those holes with God. Also, there are well-established sets of belief labelled 'religion' held by millions of people that don't fill those holes with God, like Buddhism.
I am, in fact, agnostic about everything
Are you - are you really?
You are really unsure about, say, pink flying invisible dragons?
Religion has to be more than that. I am a hardcore atheist, and I think my beliefs have encouraged my tendecies towards depression, nihlism and very serious axiety. I believe in 'belief', I certainly believe that believing in God would improve my quality of life. But even so, its just not true - the narcotic might be pleasant but its still a fantasy.
But that is the point - so many who label themselves as religious really aren't.
What is faith is this belief you hold:
- it is part of mature human nature.
It isn't faith, or belief. It is a fact of neurology.
The question is.. why are you assuming, and on what evidence, that God is the answer to those things? That is a big assumption, isn't it?"
It's about as valid a question as why you're assuming that He isn't.
No, it really isn't as valid a question. The reason is that an assumption of God has a phenomenal amount of intellectual, philosophical and moral baggage associated with it.
Assuming that an unanswered question simply has no answer we can yet (or ever discover) is in no measure the same as assuming the answer to that question is an all-powerful and unexplained intelligent and super-powerful being who determines our destinies, and to claim that it is equivalent is intellectually shallow and barren.
Some people choose to deny that it exists, some people choose to accept it. It really doesn't affect me one way or the other, as long as these people realise that it's a choice that they've made of their own free will.
Well, it should affect you. It should trouble you deeply. Supposing millions of people choose (of their own free will) to accept a belief (without evidence) that persecutes you.
I am gay. Millions of people choose of their own free will to belief that a Divine being considers me evil. It troubles me.
Irrational views can be dangerous.
Most Christians don't believe in God, they believe in -belief- in God which is quite a different matter.
Wonderfully put! They feel kind of mildly skeptic or agnostic, but believe that a belief is a good thing to have...
"Being a skeptic does not mean you have to be agnostic about everything."
But it does mean that you have faith in skepticism as the correct philosophy to live by.
No, it doesn't work like that. Skepticism is not a faith, it is a state of mind that we all achieve, to a greater or lesser extent, simply by growing up - it is part of mature human nature. When we are young, we are are trusting and naive.
So essentially, he still considers moderates to be illegitimate. He is just as much a fundamentalist as his enemies - in his view, you MUST be an atheist or you're "irrational".
A moderate religious belief is still a belief in an unprovable deity. It is still irrational. Since when has questioning the irrational, no matter how moderate, become fundamentalist?
Therefore, to imply that talking about God contradicts science is illogical. There are definitely things about our lives that science cannot understand and never will understand and though people may disagree about what these things are, it does not mean that these things have no answers and do not exist.
The question is.. why are you assuming, and on what evidence, that God is the answer to those things? That is a big assumption, isn't it?
Just because there is a gap in knowledge, why fill it with God?
The Church of England is so far away from the fundies it's not funny. Although they didn't want poofters (that's faggots in the US) to be priests so they're still reactionary in some ways.
Being a poofter/faggot myself, I do find this a little reactionary, but they are reactionary in a mild and English kind of way.
So essentially, he still considers moderates to be illegitimate. He is just as much a fundamentalist as his enemies - in his view, you MUST be an atheist or you're "irrational". Just like how the Christian fundies think everyone MUST be a Christian.
Don't be fooled by the rhetoric that atheism is inherently more rational. Neither the belief that God exists nor the belief that God doesn't exist have any scientifically admissible evidence behind them. A real skeptic would therefore believe neither. Dawkins, however, has a ton of faith in the latter.
This is a rather strange definition of skeptic.
Let's try an analogy.
The Earth is filled with custard - lots of it, hot and molten.
What do you mean, you don't think so? Surely a good skeptic should neither believe or not believe in that?
It is hard to be a skeptic by your definition - all those (possibly infinite) number of things to neither believe and also not believe!
All Dawkins is doing is being a true skeptic, and saying that he doesn't believe in anything without evidence.
Being a skeptic does not mean you have to be agnostic about everything.
Everything I've read by Dawkins suggests that he has no concept what non-fundamentalist Christians are; he's talking only about apathetic fundamentalists.
He and the fundamentalists need each other, so he treats fundamentalists as the essential definition of Christianity (rather than as a modernist group under two hundred years old, and a definite minority among Christians in general), and they treat people like him as the essential definition of atheism. Both get the bogeyman they need to have people buy their "cure".
There is a huge difference between reading about him, and reading what he actually wrote.
This is so wrong. Dawkins is British, and knows well the Church of England, a far from fundamentalist branch of Christianity. He has spoken at length about what he feels about Christianity and religion in general, even moderate versions. If you think Dawkins is only targetting minorities in religious, you really haven't read him in any detail.
It's a clash between science and stupidity. You'll never hear someone like Dawkins talk about the millions of Christians who don't oppose science, because he wants to limit the debate to right-wing fundie atheists vs. right-wing fundie Christians.
Quite the contrary. Dawkins talks a lot about the 'moderate' Christians, as he considers that a large number of those have a 'soft' belief that is succeptible to rational argument. He describes the antics of the fundamentalists in an attempt to get through to the millions. And good luck to him.
Yet the evolutionary construct is applied across the animal and plant kingdoms. One could argue for animals' ability to apply intelligence to the process of selection, but how would this apply in the plant kingdom? Then consider the multitude of plant-animal interdependencies. If they did not evolve in concert, neither species would have survived. Humans can cultivate plants to bring forth desirable traits. Should we infer that cultivation is not limited to our species?
.. all that has to happen is that the offspring of each tree vary a bit - some are taller, some are less tall. What can other plants do? They either grown up the tall trees (like ivy does) or adapt to less light (like ferns).
The point was that what appears to require human intelligent (or other intelligent) intervention doesn't. Some things can be explained by animal intelligence. But then, you have to distinguish between intelligence and instinct. Animal instinct can also select things, and select very carefully: For example, how to tell if a prey animal is less fit than another, so will involve less energy to hunt. Any behaviour at all can select things.
Even plants have behaviour: trees in a forest can grow very tall. Why do they do this? Because other trees before them have grown nearly as tall, and if you can grow just a bit taller you can get more light, grow more and produce more seeds. Do they have to think about this? No
None of this is intentional, but there is still... behaviour. Even single cells have behaviour - they chase, they hunt, they select. By doing this, even single cells can weed out the less fit.
Remember how long this has to work. Not centuries, not millenia, not even millions of years, but tens of millions of centuries.
In effect, species cultivate each other, and have been doing so for an unimaginably long time.
The piano has gone through numerous iterations, changes, and improvements, but these were the result of applied human intelligence, not a process of natural selection that weeded out the inferior from the superior. Human intelligence made the determination as to which designs, innovations, and improvements would be incorporated in the next generation of instruments.
And intelligence can also be a factor weeing out inferior designs in nature. Animals don't hunt or mate blindly. They choose, and consider. If human selection works, why shouldn't animal selection?
Won't it be impossible to know "if there is less than a 1 in 20 (5%) chance that they are wrong", until we've actually waited, say, 100 years to see if the 100-year predictions really are that accurate?
No, because that is what modelling is for! Models aren't taken out of the air. They are based on proven theories of physics, chemistry, biology and so on, and tested by running against historical data
What's been the predictive success of these methods so far, and what's the longest time period for which predictions using these models have proven accurate?
Do we have accurate 100-year prediction results already on record, to validate these confidence limits and future 100-year predictions?
First of all, can I say... woah! Hold on! Why are you assuming that climate modellers are for any reason less rigorous than any other scientists? This sounds rather like special pleading.
Climate models are based on a vast amount of historical data, including solar radiation measurements (both direct and indirect), atmospheric temperature measurements (both direct and indirect), ice amounts, atomospheric gas levels and so on.
What I would ask is why are people so suspect about climate modelling in particular, yet so (justifiably) trusting of other scientific areas? Why do people assume that climate modellers are somehow stupid, and have not taken into account solar radiation changes or tested against historical data?
How sensible are the statistics? What is their predictive success right now?
To simplify, there is a scientifically accepted standard for all statistics, called 'confidence limits'. Ranges are predicted (such as ranges in temperature in 100 years time), they are only shown if there is less than a 1 in 20 (5%) chance that they are wrong.
It is good that it makes you ask that, but it is no longer acceptable to fall back on 'God' as the answer, because this question was dealt with over a century ago, by Darwin and Huxley. Natural selection really can produce the complexity of life and evolve all that you see. The problem is that it is hard to believe because we simply can't visualise the time in which it has happened; billions of years. The reality of the universe is beyond what we can easily think or feel.
The truth is that we have found natural causes for much of what we see in nature; for example, the evolution of the eye (something that is often raised as being of irreducible complexity) is now well understood, and can be easily explained. Reason now tells the atheist that things can easily look designed that aren't.
Where you stand is not just shaky ground, but ground that was taken away over a hundred years ago.
It's my understanding that the high number of variables and the extreme sensitivity to initial conditions, make climate modeling much more resource-intensive, and much less consistent in its predictive power, than the same modelilng techniques in other, less complex fields.
No, this isn't the case. Statistical ensembles are used in equally (or far more) complex fields, such as the simulation of quantum mechanical interactions or large molecular complexes.
but have you considered the possibility that the modeling technique might have limits, and the global climate modeling pushes or even exceeds those limits?
This is not how statistical ensembles work. The modelling takes into account the initial sensitivities; in fact part of the reason for doing the model is to examine the effects of such sensitivities.
The way you model (to put it very simply) is to vary initial parameters over a reasonable range, then run the model for a certain length of time, to see the outcome. You repeatedly run the model until a certain range of outcomes is known within good statistical limits. What has happened with climate modelling is that enough models have been run for long enough to give a consensus about the outcome - or, to be accurate, about the range of outcomes, which is why temperature changes are given as ranges, not one figure.
The modelling would be pushed beyond its limits if you couldn't get sensible statistics for the outcome, even after running models for a long, long time.
That's exactly what I keep saying about the experts responsible for our modern translations of the Bible, but your advice doesn't seem to be taken very seriously in that context. Why should it be taken any more seriously in the context of global climate modeling?
Because the techniques that they use have shown to work very well in other situations. For example, the type of modelling used for climate situations (statistical ensembles) is also used for things like modelling of chemical reactions, and is a superb tool.
It seems rather odd when all these techniques work so well in other situations, to claim that they don't work when applied to climate. Why should climate modelling be uniquely bad in this respect? Of course, it isn't.