A Whole Lot About Mostly Nothing

(WordPress is being idiotic, so there are no links available for this post. I will either post actual URLs you can copy and paste, or you’ll have to Google particular names.

Not that you need to, you’ve seen them before)

I have actually mixed the Kool-Aid, took a good look at it, poured myself a glass, held it to my lips and taken a taste.

I cannot drink it. The lack of nutritional value, combined with the overwhelmingly bitter odor of almonds prevents me from swallowing the Dawkobot Kool-Aid.

I’ve watched Richard Dawkins lecture (http://www.glumbert.com/media/calltoarms). I’ve watched him debate with a liberal theologian from the Anglican Church (http://www.glumbert.com/media/dawkinsbishop). I’ve read some of his latest screed as presented at a speech in Wisconsin. (http://www.madison.com/tct/news/27676

Without question, the man is a brilliant biologist like his fellow Kool-Aid imbibers PZ Myers and Larry Moran. He is also a witty, incisive speaker. There is much to be admired about the man in terms of scientific intellect. Much the same may be said about his fellow thinkers Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris. They are all bright men in their correct fashion.

But as philosophers, they are all frightfully and dangerously amateur and misled, and as proponents of public policy, they are as ominous in their idealism as the worst Torquemada or Hitler.

As for the realm of philosophy, I cite Dawkins from his most recent article listed above:

Dawkins joked that he’s not absolutely positive there is no God. “Only in the sense that I’m not absolutely positive there is no large china teapot in orbit in the solar system.”

No one can actually disprove the existence of a celestial teapot, he said, “which means we all technically have to be agnostic about the teapot. But in practice we are all ‘ateapotists,’ ” he said to laughter.

He is, in his snarky upper-class British twit fashion, poking fun at religion by reciting a variant on the Flying Spaghetti Monster. The short version of this long-useless argumend against the existence of God is that we an imagine any sort of nonsense -unicorns in our backyard, flying spaghetti monsters, teapots in orbit- and to simply imagine them, while perhaps difficult to disprove, is insufficient to prove that they DO exist. Since the likelihood is so minimal as to be non-existent, we are safe in assuming that they in fact do NOT exist.

The debunking of this argument however, is really quite simple. In each case of the unicorn, or the spaghetti monster, or the orbiting teapot, the creator of the myth in question is dealing with constructs already very familiar to the human psyche. Each is made up of ideas that we as humans have already experienced.

But in the case of the Creator, of an all-powerful, all-good, perfect being in God, we are talking about a construct that is alien to our experience. There is nothing in our experience that is all-powerful; certainly nothing that is all-good, and perfection doesn’t even exist in nature (ask the high-speed photographers if they can capture the perfect “King’s Coronet” that is possible at the instant after a drop of milk falls into a perfectly still bowl of milk. It is possible, but it has never been captured on film.). Despite this lack of experience, our collective souls yearn for it, and on some level therefore must have experienced it. When else but before the fall?

Dawkins himself in his talk with the Bishop of Oxford (which is, by the way, an almost absurdly polite and deferential conversation. Both antagonists hold to their native positions, but are unfailingly polite and understanding of the other) admits that there must be some form of “other”, similar to what Einstein hinted at, but he refuses to admit this is God, or that religion in any way leads to this “other.” I have suggested elsewhere that Dawkins was having second thoughts about his atheism. I wish I’d had access to his talk with Oxford at the time. I still believe I am correct, but as CS Lewis was too stubborn to admit to Catholicism due to his traumatic upbringing in Ulster, so too Dawkins out of stubborn habit will never admit to the existence of what even his ossified conscience is hinting at.

Regardless, Cambridge, Morris and Toronto biologists need to stick to what they know, and keep the hell out of philosophy. They have shown themselves to be abundantly unqualified.

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As for acting as framers of public policy, the Dawkobots take their orders from Richard Dawkins, and those orders are disturbingly Orwellian.

There is no such thing as a Catholic child, there are only children of Catholic parents, Dawkins said. “I think it is a form of child abuse to speak of a 4-year-old child as a Catholic child or a Protestant child or a Muslim child. There is no such thing as a Protestant child. There is no such thing as a Muslim child.

Meaning, of course, that such horrible practices as forming the faith of one’s child ought to be outlawed. He has signed a petition at one point that advocated exactly this, but later repudiated it for fear of a backlash amongst the more rational of his sycophants (an oxymoron, I know. . .but let it lie for now).

Mark Shea has characterized Dawkins as evil, not just stupid. I have to disagree. Dawkins is stupid- dangerously so- in terms of philosophy and public policy.

But no man is inherently evil. He may believe in evil practices, but that does not make him the devil.

Though come to think of it, this sort of logic gives Hitler a pass as well.

I had considered at one point sounding off on this. Michael O’Brien -a writer whose fiction, most notably Father Elijah I’ve greatly admired- has written at length, for many years, about the evils purportedly found within the Harry Potter novels. Frankly, I always felt that he was straining at a gnat, or better yet, a ghost. Contemplated writing a rebuttal in my usual half-assed fashion. There is a problem, however.

I’ve never actually read the series.

It has captivated my children, and I have heard my oldest son read portions aloud to his younger siblings; and I confess that the storyline as presented in his readings and the movies is intriguing.

But when I tried to read Sorcerer’s Stone at the height of the initial frenzy all these years ago, I simply couldn’t find my way past JK Rowling’s prose. It bored the hell out of me. Her plotting was fine, her characterizations adequate. But her sentence structure, paragraphing and overall pacing bored. Me. Stupid.

Which may say more about my shortcomings as a bibliophile than it does about her’s as an author.

All that said, I have been long a supporter of the phenomenon, and I applaud her work.

Fortunately, the proper apologia for Potter -and response to the naysayers like O’Brien- has been given by the inimitable Mark Shea, once again. (He claims -I think rightly- that O’Brien painted himself into a corner years ago and simply refuses to step back over the line and rejoin the party. Too bad for him).

Go read Mark’s work, and the link, right away.

via Mark Shea, once again.

Money quote:

The hubris of the scientific skeptic is that he imagines his particular field of interest is the source and summit of wisdom when, in comparison to the matters discussed by Scripture, it is a small hobby–legitimate in its way and certainly important in its proper sphere–but ultimately not the Final Question. God is pleased with science well done as he is pleased with all human things well done. God enlightens the scientific intellect as he enlightens many other forms of intellectual pursuit. But the notion that if God does not answer our trivia questions about the composition of the earth’s mantle or the age of the universe to our satisfaction, then he is failing some test–that’s just silly.

I’m telling you, the man is gold.  Over and over I have said to these materialist reductionists that their’s is a decidedly arid cosmology, where truth is found only in what we can directly sense and then test scientifically.

Link to article.

(Mark Shea, of course)