Richard Dawkins' Faith In Free Will Is As Blind As A Christians To God

[Cecco]

pretty much, scented nector. he says he doesn't believe in free will but this contradicts with his belief that humans can make the decision to educate religion out of themselves, as the idea that we could decide to do that requires a belief/faith in free-will (i.e. humans taking control of their destiny, a power which would seperate us from all other animals -very undarwin - and is my definition of free-will here).

when times are good, for example, if you are a comfortable living middle-class guy from the UK, then god really isn't needed, but times of comfort are periodical, and when it goes so will athiesm, because when it comes down to it humans are highly illogical, irrational creatures. religion is written into our dna, maybe not yours or mine so much, but it's pretty prevalent. the only way to deny this is to suggest that religion has come about seperate from evolution, which is dawkins 'memetics' theory.

could you educate homosexuality out of someone? no, it's prefectly natural. so why religion? what makes it different?

[Scented Nectar]

pretty much, scented nector. he says he doesn't believe in free will but this contradicts with his belief that humans can make the decision to educate religion out of themselves, as the idea that we could decide to do that requires a belief/faith in free-will (i.e. humans taking control of their destiny, a power which would seperate us from all other animals -very undarwin - and is my definition of free-will here).

Without his exact words, I can only go by your paraphrase 'decision to educate religion out of themselves'. Based on other things I've heard him say, my best guess is that he probably meant something like a decision to be open minded and not closed minded so that they will look at information outside of what they've been presented in their holy books. Then of course since they are not closed to what they find, the result will be that their belief goes away, since the belief no longer adds up logically with what we know is true and factual about our world and ourselves. The 'decision' part was probably something about deciding to look into things objectively from all sides.

Holy fuck. In defense of not putting words in Richard Dawkins's mouth, I just pretty much put a bunch of words in his mouth. There has got to be something wrong with that.

Where did you hear this thing RD said? Can you go back and get the exact words? It would make it easier to help you (and us) figure out what exactly he meant.

Faith is not an element of my guess about what he meant. By faith, I mean the definition of believing a thing without any evidence, believing because you've decided to believe, or want to, or think you should. Non-faith belief only happens with evidence. For instance, a crumpled car and streetlight is visual evidence that has the result of me instantly believing that a crash has happened. If I saw no crashed car, and a stranger told me the crash was right there but that it was invisible and can't be felt when touched, I would only believe them if I took their word on faith and told myself it was true.

As for taking control of our destiny in a different sense than other animals, I doubt that too, since taking in information and using it for decisions and conclusions, is common to all animals. Are you saying that RD thinks there is some predetermined fate and that only we humans can change it? If so, where are you getting something like that from a statement about people educating themselves about religion?

Also, if he actually said the phrase free will, he probably meant the dictionary definition. He could not possibly know that you would someday be reading his words, so how could he have been using your personal unofficial (made up) definition?

when times are good, for example, if you are a comfortable living middle-class guy from the UK, then god really isn't needed, but times of comfort are periodical, and when it goes so will athiesm, because when it comes down to it humans are highly illogical, irrational creatures. religion is written into our dna, maybe not yours or mine so much, but it's pretty prevalent. the only way to deny this is to suggest that religion has come about seperate from evolution, which is dawkins 'memetics' theory.

If god had a good track record of helping people in times of need, you'd have a point maybe about 'when times are good'. But no god actually does anything. Your chances of getting out of the bad situation are just as good or bad when you don't believe as when you do. I wonder if maybe people might even do BETTER when they don't pray, since they are not wasting time trying to have telepathy with their imaginary friend. Instead they can start thinking of a way out of their troubles, which gives them better odds, I suspect.

could you educate homosexuality out of someone? no, it's prefectly natural. so why religion? what makes it different?

The body's response to different types of sexual stimulation has nothing to do with the mind's ability to conclude whether something is true or false. Gays can't stop feeling that way deep down even when they believe they are bad people to be gay and try to change themselves. They CAN stop actually doing it by not letting themselves have gay sex, but there is no stopping the fact that their body enjoys the same gender for sex. Beliefs won't change the body's sexual orientation. They have nothing to do with each other. However, the information we think about does affect what we believe, and us atheists keep seeing time and time again many former believers who stopped believing once they researched the bigger picture and saw much more information. They educated themselves by looking into their religion's claim to see whether they might indeed be true. Sometimes they start out looking for info that strengthens and proves their beliefs, and they find the opposite, to their shock.

[Cecco]

thanks for your reply sn.

if we instead use your description of people making a 'decision to be open minded' then we still come to the same problem as far as i see it, for open-mindedness and narrow-mindedness are personality traits that people don't get to decide over. there may be one or two who make the jump from one to the other, but it is rare and the change over from open to narrow may well be bigger than vice versa, from my personal experience of people at least.

i've had a look for my copy of the god delusion but for the life of me can't find it so have instead taken the lazy option of pilfering a dawkins quote from the net: 'God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the environment provided by human culture'.

from this we can take that RD believes the idea of god survives as a 'meme' (there is currently not the slightest evidence for memes, as far as i'm aware, so this atleast is an act of faith) which is somewhat independent of human evolution. he is suggesting that memes have their own seperate 'survival of the fittest' thing going on; religion was once invented by someone in a particular environment whereby it helped that person, and this meme spread to many other people, but now we live in a more enlightened environment, RD see's this old human invention (which it certainly is) of god as redundant.

i cannot find a decent quote in regard to his 'educating religion out' philosophy, but i think we can take is as read when we look at his current 'crusade'
against religion, why else would he be touring the world, writing his books, demanding religion not be taught in schools, if not to educate the world better? does he not dream of a day when most of the world is enlightened to his way of thinking? would you say not? if not, then his crusade can be seen as little more than a celebrity/money making scheme.

these two attitudes together is why i paraphrase it into 'educating religion out of people' which is the same as your 'opening up people's minds'. it seems to me he has dreamt up memes as a way of saying 'look, religion isn't natural, it's a poison that can be withdrawn from us' because without the invention of memes, he has no case, as darwinism tells us that people are religious because it is inherent in their biology, and anything inherent in their biology cannot be 'educated' out.

my definition of 'taking control of your destiny' does not differ from the dictionary version. dictionary version: The power of making free choices that are unconstrained by external circumstances or by an agency such as fate or divine will. if you were to 'take control of your destiny', you would be 'unconstrained by fate', because you would be controlling it. so my definition is fine, just a different way of saying it.

and i never mentioned anything about the body's response to sexual stimulation being anything to do with the mind's ability to conclude whether something is true or false. i just said some people are born inclined to be gay and some people are born inclined to be non-scientific. some people are born inclined to be athletic, some to be comedians, some to be artists, some to be scientists. nobody would doubt this. so why doubt that people are born with an inclination to believe that there's a flying spaghetti monster? dawkins does. he believes religion is learnt, youngsters picking up old memes off their deluded elders. can you teach someone to be funny? nope. and neither religion.

sure, you can teach them all about jesus and allah and the all the idiosyncrasies of the different religions, but jesus and allah are not the essence of religion, they are the bullshit details that somewhat satisfy the enquiring mind. religion is much deeper than that, it is in the bones and blood of many human beings. we can teach them that jesus and allah are nonsense, but they will only fill the void with something else.

if you believe that religion is only an idea borrowed by one generation from the previous, then you have to believe there is something like 'memes' going on, for which there is no evidence.

[Scented Nectar]

Cecco, that stuff is too confusing for me to respond to. There are too many spots where it looks like you are assuming things that I don't see as likely. And contradictions, and even some anger towards the guy maybe. I don't know. Plus I really can't properly tackle what a person might be meaning without the whole paragraph, maybe even the chapter, maybe even the book, who knows?

I'm using my free will to choose the easy way out tonight. Trying to read Dawkins' mind through your second or third hand interpretation is not what I want to be doing.

[Purple Rabbit]

If you cannot edcucate religious notions, whoever did educate it into that poor kids heads????

And the universe silently weeps...

If it could speak to itself it would probably proceed this way:

"What have I done?? WTF am I?? I wanted to understand myself through human facililitated self-reflection but all I get is circular reasoning for breakfast, Dicky stalkers for lunch and dickhead gods for dinner. I might as well torch the place."