"I think reasonability, although innocently employed, is a weasel word. Yes it might be said to be reasonable that people do things, but that's distinct from those actions being based on reason alone. You sympthise with his actions, I get that."
Well, yeah, I tend to but substitute "unsurprising" for "reasonable" if you like in the previous paragraph to get what I meant there.
"Honestly? Please clarify where....."
It's virtually the whole point of the debate isn't it? Does he or does he not have grounds to make this assertion? But to just slip in at that point that he doesn't as a way towards another argument seems a bit cheeky.
"Again maybe I am dumb, please explain?"
I mean you pressed the keys on the keyboard in the belief that writing would appear on the screen where I could read it and so on... but uh-oh belief, we're on our way to an infinite regress again.
"Not objectively. From my own subjective pov, I might be more inclined to think that, in this thread, 'there is a God' is closer to the truth. If having a debate about God with some fervent Roman Catholics, I'd probably suggest the phrase 'there is no God" to be more closely resembling the truth, as long as there was little likelihood of violence."
So to get it clear where you stand - presumably you think that "London is the capital of England" is objectively (otherwise bringing in this word means that you're not answering the question I'm asking) closer to being a fact than "My little finger is the capital of England" but you do not accept that even in principle "There is no God" could be objectively closer to the truth than "There is a God"?
It sounds to me as though you have a kind of two-level system of facts where there are close-to-facts, say factoids (basically the things that most people would call facts), and then other further away unknowable meta-physicals, would that be fair to say?
Although I'm not sure that your contrarianism in religious debates is an argument for the subjectivity of that factoid relative to the other one. Maybe in a given argument you might claim the little finger thing is closer to being a fact than London even though you've accepted that that is not the case...
But we digress further and further.
Edit: Just read back through the whole thread and it is one big digression. Possibly my fault. But I would really like to have an encapsulation of the left-wing critique of Dawkins' position, I still don't think I properly get it. Is it just that it doesn't attempt to answer the questions that religion attempts? Is it because in a capitalist world the void that a lack of religion will leave will be filled with more capitalism, or is it simply because continental philosophers think that empiricists should stay out of what they see as their domain? I'm beginning to think the latter.