Here's an audio track of Richard Dawkins discussing his new book, The God Delusion, on the Alan Colmes show on FOX. I thought that Colmes did a good job allowing Dawkins to bring out his points. Some of the call-in comments are amusing, especially toward the end of this 24 minute…
A few months ago I stumbled on a preacher on television. The reason I stopped to listen was that on the screen he was scrolling through a litany of famous scientists, their fields and contributions, and noting that each was a Great Christian. Then the preacher–I don’t know who he was, sorry–ended his litany by making the claim that science and religion are inextricably linked, that they must have each other to work, that there is no dispute between them–
–and that evolution is wrong.
This was a week after I listened to an NPR interview with Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania in which he made the claim that it is vital to settle this question of where “we” (meaning humans) came from because if evolution is true, then we would have no basis for morality.
This is one of the most perverse false syllogisms I have ever heard, and it baffles me no end. Underlying it is the assumption that morality only ever comes from a supernatural source, that without a deity we are too dumb, puerile, self-serving, and just plain hopeless to ever do anything right–for ourselves on anyone else. (The Erik Von Danniken theory of moral provenance.) That atheists are a priori immoral and that evolutionists, who reject special creation, are necessarily atheists, and therefore, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, likewise immoral. They can’t help it. They have no god giving them direction.
A minute of clear thought shows how this is substantively untrue. …
Here's how it went. Worth a look and a laugh.
I just got an unsolicited, automated phone call from an organization fighting against stem cell research. NoHumanCloning.org is dedicated to raising fears and resisting biological research that furthers naturalistic understanding of who we are and how to artificially repair our ailments. The current battle is to prevent this type of…
To the majority of people, every issue has 2 sides. One is right, and the other is wrong. The impression is that, if something is wrong about an argument, a position, a theory, then the entire thing is wrong. This is Aristotelian or Boolean reasoning. Famous smart people use this binary right/wrong or true/false principle to do great things. But…
Once upon a time, the world was flat. We now know (as of at least 2000 years ago) that this is wrong.
Once upon a time, people thought the world was a sphere. In the 19th century, it was measured that this was wrong.
Are these ideas both equally wrong, or is one more wrong than the other? In science, one recognizes degrees of error, magnitudes of mismeasurement. The flat Earth is off by a dimension, whereas the spherical Earth is off by a few percent. (It is fatter around the equator from spin, stretched further by lunar tide, and oddly flattened near the South Pole (possibly related to the events that caused the moon to splash off, and/or the continents to rise)).
Some ideas can be wronger than others.
When Creationists gleefully point out that (popular evolutionist) was in error about (detail of the theory at the time), they use this to claim that the entire structure of the theory is wrong. Never mind that this detail was usually found to be wrong by discovering its replacement in supporting the original theory.