Think of this as a prelude to the coming entry; a tip of the hat to Prof. Dawkins before I start shooting…
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I dunno, I get what he’s saying, but he’s kind of ducking the question, isn’t he? It was not about cultural context. It was not about how silly belief in things that cannot be reduced to inanimate matter is. It was about how one deals with the fact that you can’t have faith in everything. Dawkins deflecting the questions and throwing an absurd construction back in the questioner’s face is pretty cheap, IMHO.
To me it get’s into the deeper ontological point that we’re almost certainly “wrong” about a lot of how we conceive of our reality. This is why Dawkins gets on my nerves sometimes; deflecting challenges with a reductio ad absurdum is inherently dishonest. If you’re going to take the nihilist or obscurantist track, be honest about it. If the question is stupid, then just say it’s a stupid question or something you don’t care to answer. It may be equally deflecting but it’s at least up front about it.
What is the problem about the fact that you can’t have faith in everything? Why even have faith in anything at all?
Because at some level just about all experience requires faith, i.e. the assumption of a model of reality absent proof or testing.
Do you disagree? Do you question every single experience in your life endlessly and constantly collect evidentiary data to model the probabilities in a conscious manner?
You’ve set up a false dichotomy. Not having faith does not require you to question everything endlessly and constantly collect evidence. The laws of nature do not change that fast: they are, on the whole, uniform. If you don’t believe in the uniformity of nature, then yes I believe that you can’t know anything. But that’s your assumption, not mine.
I respect the fact that you assume this, but like you said, it is your assumption, not mine. One might even take it as an article of faith: faith in a particular materialistic, scientific view that sees mechansitic rules, laws, and prediction/control as the criteria by which approaches to the human condition shall be evaluated.
This is ok. When we recognize our biases and articles of faith, we can understand the context for the truths we adopt. I see your critique of Dawkins as orbiting around this argument, in fact. It’s up to us what we construct in order to accept and judge reality; to me, that’s the basis for freedom of conscience.
“I respect the fact that you assume this, but like you said, it is your assumption, not mine.”
It is not an an “assumption.” It is a prerequisite for any knowledge. By saying it is an assumption, you have just refuted yourself.
“One might even take it as an article of faith”
I don’t even know what faith means, so I can’t really agree or disagree. If by faith you mean belief in the unseen, then it is clearly false, as I can observe the uniformity of nature for myself.
“I see your critique of Dawkins as orbiting around this argument, in fact.”
False. Dawkins and I both agree with the scientific method and the uniformity of nature. You don’t. You are not even anywhere near this discussion.
You can only observe that nature has had certain uniformities in the past, and even this is not really an observation but a way of defining the uniformities such that they can be observed to have existed. Your assumption is that the uniformities you observed, as you defined them, will continue to exist in the future. Since you haven’t observed the future yet, you can’t justify this belief based merely on observation. Presumably you have a method (Occam’s Razor?) for choosing how to define the uniformities, but the method is not a direct conclusion from observations; rather, it is something unseen in which you believe.
Shouldn’t a true skeptic be skeptical even of the very possibility of knowledge? If something is a prerequisite for any knowledge, how is that a valid reason not to doubt it?
When did I say I was a skeptic?
She was using Pasca’s Wager and Dawkins was answering her FOR the audience’s sake, so he took the time to demonstrate Pascal’s Wager. She asked him if he was wrong about her Christian God and you know this and he knew this. His answer is that he does not believe in the Christian God and therefore, he’s NOT wrong. It couldn’t be clearer that he meant that by demonstrating that her question was rhetorical without any interest in learning about “Relative” religions that claim they are right, but rather, that she was convinced she was right. The bottom line is that she was not right.