Dawkins' Atheist Bus

[mixed_biscuits]

I like this one too:

So, what's he getting at, then - that there are contradictions in Christianity; et quoi donc? The contradictions in Christianity have been mulled over for centuries by theologians and could never be ironed out because of the heterogeneity of the source material and the variegated analyses it has been subjected to.

The related video I clicked on where Dawkins compares an evangelical service to the Nuremberg Rally: pfft.

 

[Mr. Tea]

et quoi donc?

You what? Put a donc on it!

 

[mixed_biscuits]

You what? Put a donc on it!

lol very good

The devil in nomad's first video is played with refreshing campness, somewhat ironically. The problem is that the actor is far too enthusiastic and makes the devil appear much more frightening than he actually is (when I've met him, at least).

 

[CHAOTROPIC]

Dawkins used to be a creepy child-man, all bouncing energy & Johnny Ball-esque wide-eyed enthusiasm. Like a primary school teacher trying to show the kids how 'cool' nature is, & isn't it all FANTASTIC!!!! Patronising fucker with his laughable job as a professional talking head. Idiotically absolute but quite good writer. But there's something really desolate in his face now. Saw him being interviewed about the God Delusion book & his voice had turned from BBC Childrens boisterousness to this empty monotone, hollow & about two eyeblinks from a quaver. Looked very flat, very unhappy. Just sad. He's the worst advert for atheists ever.

 

[waffle]

Dawkins used to be a creepy child-man, all bouncing energy & Johnny Ball-esque wide-eyed enthusiasm. Like a primary school teacher trying to show the kids how 'cool' nature is, & isn't it all FANTASTIC!!!! Patronising fucker with his laughable job as a professional talking head. Idiotically absolute but quite good writer. But there's something really desolate in his face now. Saw him being interviewed about the God Delusion book & his voice had turned from BBC Childrens boisterousness to this empty monotone, hollow & about two eyeblinks from a quaver. Looked very flat, very unhappy. Just sad.

He's the worst advert for atheists ever.

He's an advert for putative pseudo-atheists who fail to live up to the full implications of atheism, who bizarrely imagines that there are no [ontological, epistomological]implications, that 'choosing' atheism is no different than choosing a different career, or a different brand of computer, that life just blankly continues on as before. Not even Nietzsche (much less some insular, pompous, and pedantic Victorian-minded traditional scientific empiricist like Dawkins, much less the overwhelming majority of scientists throughout history, from Darwin to Einstein to Dennett) managed to come to terms with the death of God.

 

[Mr. Tea]

the death of God.

Pardon me if I'm massively missing the point here, but how can something that doesn't exist, die?

 

[swears]

The death of the idea of God, innit.

 

[waffle]

Pardon me if I'm massively missing the point here, but how can something that doesn't exist, die?

What you really mean to ask, perhaps, is why does Nietzsche exclaim "God is dead!" (first in "The Parable of the Madman" from The Gay Science, and later in Thus Spake Zarathustra ) rather than simply "God does not exist!"??

In a sense, Nietzsche takes it for granted that there is no such thing as the supernatural. Yet he does not say 'God does not exist', an atheist statement, but 'God is dead', an altogether more interesting claim. For Nietzsche, there is no Truth, still less an ultimate scientific Truth, there are only fictions which are more or less useful for life. God is dead means - the fiction can no longer be sustained. Not: we have unmasked all fictions, we have seen the glorious scientific truth. Christianity is to be condemned not because it is not true, but because it is hostile to life - and also, implicitly, on 'coherentist' grounds: Christian beliefs just do not fit together with other beliefs that modern people entertain. The story no longer convinces. Time, then, for another story, a 'better' one. (But not scientific humanism!).

I am not claiming that Nietzsche believed in any supernatural entity. In that sense, he was an atheist. But Nietzsche took such atheism for granted, as pretty trivial. It was the implications of the death of God that people were unaware of; it was these that he prophesied. Remember that, in the parable of the Madman in The Gay Science, it is those who did not believe in God who laugh at the Madman most vociferously. They laugh at the madman because it is obvious that God is dead. So what? Why is the madman bothering them with this old news?

They laugh at the madman because he thinks that it matters where God is. Obviously God does not exist, they think, so what? Ask yourself this: why is the madman preaching to atheists at all? If his message were simply a message of atheism, there would be no need to preach to them.

The madman realises that the death of God is the most terrble, most momentous event in human history because it is not a simple matter of divesting oneself of religious beliefs, but of giving up what underlies them - the belief in an organising centre of the universe, structure and order itself, and Truth.

The 'death of God' is an EVENT .....

It means facing up to paradox, chaos, lack of centre.... It means creating one's own values.... A terrible task, an unprecedented opportunity....

The point is, why THIS metaphor? Why the metaphor of death? Because Nietzsche is not ONLY saying 'a supernatural being does not exist' (he takes this for granted); he is ALSO saying 'something has happened in modern western culture'; something has occurred that people - especially people who do not believe in God - have not understood, or faced.

Nietzsche's perspectivism and its rejection of Truth and objectivity is one of the most famous and most important aspects of his thought.

Further, it's not just a question of dismissing God because he is 'imagined', as if it is not true. I obviously accept that, on one level, Nietzsche thinks that Man created God. But man himself - the concept of man - is fashioned in accordance with that image of God. When God dies, man becomes less than man, a 'dying animal.'

In The Gay Science [and later in Thus Spake Zarathustra], the death of God is something momentous, and something to be preached - in large part, TO ATHEISTS. That is my point: they think that giving up belief in God has no very serious implications.

Nietzsche is quite clear that it is not good for every single person to make the transition to atheism. On the contrary, such a transition would be bad for the 'vast majority,' for whom religion is a comforting illusion. (See Beyond Good and Evil Section 61, for instance). It is not at all clear that Nietzsche was 'anti-religious': he makes it clear in Beyond Good and Evil that religion has certain advantages, even for the master. For the vast majority, as I said before, religion is a useful consolation. Nietzsche thought religion - and belief in God - as enormously
important. Such beliefs couldn't just be sloughed away, and people carry on in the same old way.

The Gay Science was actually written just before Thus Spake Zarathustra. In the parable, the madman asks, 'What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down?' It is clear that Nietzsche/ the madman thinks that God is the organizing centre of the universe: without such a centre, we are 'falling without limits', and this is the terrible situation - and opportunity - that the Superman must face.

In many ways this is a world utterly without centre, without fixed values, without 'facts', that is the world that the Overman must operate in.

To call Nietzsche an atheist is profoundly misleading. The thesis that is attributed to Nietzsche - man creates God - sounds more like Feuerbach. What is this 'man'? What is this 'psychology' from which it projects God? Nietzsche says almost the opposite: Man, the Human, is made in the image of God, and when God dies, so does Man. Man and his psychology are not Ultimate Realities for Nietzsche, since the demise of God means the demise of all Ultimate Reality. If science - whether natural or human - posed as such a reality, it too would be God, and a more damaging, because more plausible, god than the departed Deity.

It is therefore wrong to treat Nietzsche as simply an 'atheist prophet' - an apologist for scientific empiricism. Nietzsche warns many times not to take the 'useful fictions of science to be more than they are..... And if the Overman mistakes them for Truth, if the Overman believes in Truth --- then he is no longer the Overman....

... Which is why Nietzshce can't be dragooned into being an advocate of scientific empiricism/ empiricist science.

 

[nomadthethird]

Agree entirely with this Nietzsche, Waffles.

As far as Dawkins is concerned, I suppose some of his "image" is lost on me, since I've only ever heard of him peripherally. I've heard of the God Delusion, but never saw him on film until I checked out youtube. I like a few of the questions he asked about Christianity, in particular:

Why couldn't God (being God) just forgive everyone? Why would he need to send Jesus to die in order to accomplish this?

I would be interested in what a Christian might respond to this.

 

[swears]

Why couldn't God (being God) just forgive everyone? Why would he need to send Jesus to die in order to accomplish this?

I would be interested in what a Christian might respond to this.

From what I remember from catholic school, god sacrificed his only son as a sign of his love for us, there's also the idea that Jesus himself made a the choice through his own free will to suffer for our benefit. Has to be dramatic, doesn't it? God can't just sign a form pardoning mankind, that wouldn't make a very good story.

 

[CHAOTROPIC]

The madman realises that the death of God is the most terrble, most momentous event in human history because it is not a simple matter of divesting oneself of religious beliefs, but of giving up what underlies them - the belief in an organising centre of the universe, structure and order itself, and Truth. [/i]

Yeah ... maybe that's what I was seeing in Dawkins' face. I think this was the interview:
Dunno why it struck me so much, but there's something about the glibness of his monotone & the emptiness of his engagement that makes me want to run screaming & wringing my hands into the nearest church. Nearly. He looks like his anima has been sucked out of his nose.

Beautiful summary of Neitzsche by the way.

 

[CHAOTROPIC]

I'd forgotten that his last words in that interview with Paxman were, "I don't believe we were put here to be comfortable". God bless him!!

 

[Shonx]

I did like the quote on the www.alpha.org site (If you could speak to God on the telephone, what would you ask?")

"If you created the universe and all its contents, are omnipotent and all-loving, why do you need people to worship you? Are you insecure?"

 

[mixed_biscuits]

The problem with Dawkins is that, as he says in the interview, he doesn't even have a remote understanding of what faith can mean to other people.

 

[3 Body No Problem]

The problem with Dawkins is that, as he says in the interview, he doesn't even have a remote understanding of what faith can mean to other people.

The problem with Galileo is that he doesn't even have a remote understanding of what heliocentrism can mean to other people.

 

[3 Body No Problem]

The problem for Dawkins of course is that he has himself seemingly unknowingly sucumbed to the 'evolution as teleology' fallacy, of believing evolution as having some positive <i>purpose</i>, which couldn't be further from Darwin's fundamental findings, so presenting it as a more 'intelligent' and 'rational' alternative to religion.

What's wrong with teleological explanations in science? The Second Law of Thermodynamics for example is usually phrased in teleologial terms in that certain systems tend towards a final state of maximal entropy.

This is a macroscopic description of certain forms of microscopic randomness.

It is simply a fact of nature that many random systems can be best described macroscopically in teleological terms.

 

[IdleRich]

"The problem for Dawkins of course is that he has himself seemingly unknowingly sucumbed to the 'evolution as teleology' fallacy, of believing evolution as having some positive purpose"

That's obviously not the case, it's the exact opposite of what he professes.

The thing with Nietzsche's madman is that what he says is only relevant in a society that has already invented God right? I mean, imagine if humanity had evolved and never seen fit to have a God then the situation of suddenly confronting your responsibilities would not arise. All people would be born implicitly facing this challenge, it's only when you have (or society has) abdicated this responsibility that it becomes something to reassume on God's death. I think that in the increasingly secular West this has become closer and closer to being the case and the parable become less and less relevant.

 

[Mr. Tea]

What's wrong with teleological explanations in science? The Second Law of Thermodynamics for example is usually phrased in teleologial terms in that certain systems tend towards a final state of maximal entropy.

Strictly speaking, this is only true for systems with an initial state that is well below its maximum entropy level, which is the case in our universe as a whole because it started out in a state of extremely low entropy: it's not obvious why this should have been the case*, as it happens, and it's a very active area of ongoing research. In fact, you can imagine a universe which is already in a state of maximum entropy, and if you could watch it effectively for ever (like, a gajillion times the current age of our universe) you would occasionally see it fluctuate into a slightly-lower-entropy state, during which period time would seem to run backwards. Then entropy would start to increase, and time would run forwards again. Most of the time, though, entropy would be pretty constant (i.e. at or just under its theoretical maximum), and the 'arrow of time' wouldn't exist at all, with concepts of past and future rendered as meaningless as a universal 'up' and 'down'.


*since high-entropy states are, by definition, much more likely than low-entropy ones

 

[3 Body No Problem]

Strictly speaking, this is only true for systems with an initial state that is well below its maximum entropy level

What is only true for such systems? The 2LOT or its teleological phrasing?

 

[Mr. Tea]

(just seen the discussion on the previous page)

How long does a god take to die, though? In European society as a whole, god was dead long before I was born - the creeping process of secularisation and the burgeoning of the atheistic scientific worldview was going on in Nietzsche's day, well over a hundred years ago, wasn't it? Dawkins must be in his 50s, but even so, mainstream Christianity in Britain was on its last legs when he was a little kid.