Repeat after me: “this has nothing to do with my views on religion”
| April 13, 2008 | Posted by William Dembski under Darwinism, Evolution, Philosophy, Religion, Science |
[[This blast from the past was originally published here at UD 25oct06. With EXPELLED coming out so soon and given Dawkins's prominent role in it, I thought it worth moving to the top of the stack (blogs have the data structure of a push-down stack). --WmAD]]
Last night Richard Dawkins did a reading from his new book, The God Delusion, at a bookstore in DC. After the reading he fielded questions. A friend of mine was in the front and got to be the first to go. He asked Dawkins if he thought he was being inconsistent by being a determinist while taking credit for writing his book. The answer so shocked my questioner friend that he typed out a transcript of what was said, which is pasted below. He recorded the audio on his laptop and has as an MP3, just in case someone wishes to dispute his recollection of this event. I post it here with my friend’s permission.
Richard Dawkins at Politics and Prose speaking on The God Delusion
Question and AnswerQuestioner: Dr. Dawkins thank you for your comments. The thing I have appreciated most about your comments is your consistency in the things I’ve seen you written. One of the areas that I wanted to ask you about and the places where I think there is an inconsistency and I hoped you would clarify it is that in what I’ve read you seem to take a position of a strong determinist who says that what we see around us is the product of physical laws playing themselves out but on the other hand it would seem that you would do things like taking credit for writing this book and things like that. But it would seem, and this isn’t to be funny, that the consistent position would be that necessarily the authoring of this book from the initial condition of the big bang it was set that this would be the product of what we see today. I would take it that that would be the consistent position but I wanted to know what you thought about that.
Dawkins: The philosophical question of determinism is a very difficult question. It’s not one I discuss in this book, indeed in any other book that I’ve ever talked about. Now an extreme determinist, as the questioner says, might say that everything we do, everything we think, everything that we write, has been determined from the beginning of time in which case the very idea of taking credit for anything doesn’t seem to make any sense. Now I don’t actually know what I actually think about that, I haven’t taken up a position about that, it’s not part of my remit to talk about the philosophical issue of determinism. What I do know is that what it feels like to me, and I think to all of us, we don’t feel determined. We feel like blaming people for what they do or giving people the credit for what they do. We feel like admiring people for what they do. None of us ever actually as a matter of fact says, “Oh well he couldn’t help doing it, he was determined by his molecules.” Maybe we should … I sometimes … Um … You probably remember many of you would have seen Fawlty Towers. The episode where Basil where his car won’t start and he gives it fair warning, counts up to three, and then gets out of the car and picks up a tree branch and thrashes it within an edge of his life. Maybe that’s what we all ought to… Maybe the way we laugh at Basil Fawlty, we ought to laugh in the same way at people who blame humans. I mean when we punish people for doing the most horrible murders, maybe the attitude we should take is “Oh they were just determined by their molecules.” It’s stupid to punish them. What we should do is say “This unit has a faulty motherboard which needs to be replaced.” I can’t bring myself to do that. I actually do respond in an emotional way and I blame people, I give people credit, or I might be more charitable and say this individual who has committed murders or child abuse of whatever it is was really abused in his own childhood. And so again I might take a …
Questioner: But do you personally see that as an inconsistency in your views?
Dawkins: I sort of do. Yes. But it is an inconsistency that we sort of have to live with otherwise life would be intolerable. But it has nothing to do with my views on religion it is an entirely separate issue.
Questioner: Thank you.
95 Responses to Repeat after me: “this has nothing to do with my views on religion”
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Note also that there is no experimental result that would be inconsistent with an omnipotent unknown designer. Any experimental finding can be explained by saying “it was designed that way”. However, there is no way to test that explanation.
Jerry, I dont think that most people here are that way at all. I think most of them would not want their religion forced upon other people. Their own bible does not say that you should force other people to believe. I think you are totally wrong. I have never met anyone who wanted christainty taught in public funded schools as fact- especially as the monopoly of education.
ID does not calim to be for any religion and its theory is not connected by necessity or logic to any religion. The founders dont want to build some Reich and neither do I. I dont think that Kairosfocus would want any of this and he is a regular poster here and certinaly the declared athesits and deists and agnostics that post here who I have had discussions with most lilly wouldn’t either.
I think you are propagandising here a little. Once again there is no “ID day” but there is a “Darwin day.” Show me where the ID advocates are marching and demonstating like the Gay Pride- or the green peace or the anti war or all the other real and true poltical extreamist and belief based movements.
Your view has no merrit at all in my eyes because all of my knowledge and expierence completely conradicts it.
I have little more to say on this issue.
“You miss the point. If God is an eternal being, then he encompasses our linear time.”
That’s a lovely assumption would you care to back it with something other than your word?
I got your point, my problem and the paradox I presented however, were that this finite existence is all there is.
That there is absolutely nothing beyond the ever expanding membrane that makes up the spatio-temporal realm, and that space-time only exists within that membrane. There is no future universe for a God(and an irrational God at that) to look toward.
A God that has always been is simply a God who has always existed, existance had a starting point and quite likely will have an ending. Plancks constant dictates there was no time before the big bang. Space-time occurs afterward, so for all intensive purposes, God could very well be a material thing. Isn’t that an unromantic concept though? lol
A footnote:
Gentlefolks, first note that if God is eternal not time-bound, then his knowledge of what happens in time is not the same as forcing what happens to be so through deterministic cause-effect chains.
By sharpest contrast, evo mat derives “mind” from chance + necessity acting on matter + energy, so it ends up with chance boundary conditions and deterministic forces driving our thought world — including the real decision making we need to be rational — straight into absurdity.
THAT is the key point, one ducked by Dawkins as shown in the OP, and diverted from by others, who ar5e far more eager to discuss the perceived or real challenges of traditional theism, than they are to address the gaping hole in the foundation of today’s dominant worldview among the College educated classes of the West. A view that has taken time to redefine science to establish itself by definition, and is now resorting to classic censorship and expulsions to keep it so!
Next, observe: we live in a contingent cosmos that credibly had a beginning at a specific point in the past. Such a cosmos of contingent beings entails, logically, a necessary being that is its own cause. A quasi-infinite cosmos as a whole in which sub cosmi pop up by chance is a [poor!] candidate for that, and so is God [a much better candidate].
But, also, we see trotted out the inference that Judaeo Christian theists are enemies of liberty.
That is historically ignorant, and is utterly illogical, once one can tell the difference between liberty [which is profoundly moral in character, being rooted in issues of justice] and libertinism or amorality [this last being a logical outcome of evolutionary materialism: there are no grounds that giver weight to our moral intuitions in this view]. And, Frosty is right, I am a principled liberty-minded small-d democrat; and BTW, a cynical monarchist. (The house of Windsor gets our Caribbean tourism destinations better publicity than we can pay for, so it is worth the trifling amount it costs to keep the historical tradition going. For instance, recall a few months back where it was BBC world news that Jamaican soldiers were taking their turn at guarding Buckingham Palace, complete with Jamaican music a the change of guards! (FYI, the Monarch of Britain is per constitution also the monarch of Jamaica.))
GEM of TKI
[...] Dembski reported on his friend’s exchange with Richard Dawkins at a D.C. bookstore, where Dawkins was promoting [...]