Just got The God Delusion

[theVOID]

Oh, and you have a concise summary of all the great works on naturalism tucked away somewhere do you?

All is asking a bit much, I think the gist of evolution and natural selection can be conveyed quite briefly, a paragraph should be enough.

So one set of standards for them and another for you right? The 'gist' of the concept of string theory can be conveyed quite briefly too, that does not mean that to give it any real justice you have to delve into extremely unintuitive and confusing and seemingly incoherent reasoning. Is string theory a much better and more concise explanation? Sure, but it's also analogous how we should consider other unusual concepts.

I don’t really care about the philosophical work on “Atheism,” I don’t even recognise it as an ism.

Oh come one, that's a pretty petty complaint. You know precisely what I mean without getting into semantic noise.

Theist philosophy may give Atheist philosophy a reason to be,

I never said that. Our natural curiosity would lead to this question with or without religious philosophers making arguments for God.

but it hobbles scientific progress, I have no time for it.

Oh really, go find me one professor of natural theology who advocates not doing science! It's as if you have it in your mind that all Christians, even the professors, are wilfully ignorant idiots like the Ken Ham types.

A thoughtful twelve year old should be able find sufficient reasons to reject the idea of god by just living in the world, the same reasons that are in The God Delusion.

And now you're imposing your subjective experience onto the cosmos as if your perception is just some obvious matter of fact! Whatever comes to mind just by living your life constitutes sufficient reason to reject the concept of a deity? You know how easily someone can flip that on it's head and just as baselessly assert the opposite right?

So the leaders delegate the thinking that seeks to justify their delusions to the Jesuits or some university department.

No, most of them couldn't give a flying fuck because they're not curious about their beliefs, there are many theistic philosophers or scientists who are in contrast to that

You seem to respect these guys as worthy competitors, I don’t it’s as relevant to me as an argument over the power of a Borg Cube as compared to a Star Wars death star.

And you keep asserting that they're all the same and all the arguments are of the same quality. That's bullshit.

All I ever said is that arguments against your own position, especially the creative, complex and interesting ones, makes you think about your own position, about how much you really know on the matter and about what the potential problems in defending our beliefs are - This is beneficial for not only being aware of your own assumptions and biases, but gaining and understanding about how people think.

Well that doesn’t sound so bad, it sounds like something I’d recommend to the 15 year old OP.

Sure.

Can’t philosophy find something more productive to do, a discussion of heavy petting perhaps?

Are you really this ignorant, or was that a bad joke?

I think the book’s argument is it is very unlikely that a god creator exists, and religion is doing us harm.

No, that's the book's conclusion.

I think the fear of hell is a good example of the harm of religion, it is covered pretty well I think.

Sure, it's also got nothing to do with whether or not a deity is possible.

If the who designed the designer argument is bad, well the alternative of there’s an Earth and a Sun and a Moon so some father figure must of created it, is just absurd.

You do get how this works, right? Dawkins was attempting to convince people that believe in God that he probably doesn't exist, he attempted to do so using a number of points in his book, this specific philosophical argument happens to be bad - Nobody should be rationally convinced to accept that there is no god based on this argument. Whether or not we can consider the concept of God is unlikely is a matter of whether or not there are better arguments suggesting that he does not exist or that phenomenon we encounter are better explained via other mechanisms, that is what all of the knowledge we have gained has done, given us progressively less and less reason to assume that a deity is a reasonable thing to believe exists - As it stands I find it extremely unlikely that a god exists.

There is no evidence of god, there are the reasons to create god, fear, the need for explanation, power for priests. The stories of god look like the creation of men. There are many differing explanations of god, unlikely they are all right, it seems likely they are all wrong.

Again I agree, but this has fuck all to do with whether or not Dawkins is a good philosopher...