[chilehed]

Qfwfq, on 12 January 2012 - 10:23 AM, said:

I quite agree with this, why did you not say so in the first place?

Maybe I was feeling a bit cranky. Usually I’ve got enough judgment to not post at all if I’m going to be overly terse, but I guess I fell off the wagon.

I have the same reaction when I hear Kent Hovind bloviating about how entropy is synonymous with disorder, so evolution must be false because it requires more information to be generated which is a violation of the Second Law. The guy doesn’t know a damn thing about either thermodynamics or information theory, and he’s so sure that he does that he’s unteachable.

Qfwfq, on 12 January 2012 - 10:23 AM, said:

I'm not with you on this one, the word faith is from the latin for trust and hence belief without proof.

You've substituted the word "proof" for the word "evidence" (which is what Dawkins actually said). They're not the same.

In real personal relationships we come to trust someone because we have some evidence that they're worthy of trust. And while that doesn’t prove that they’ll be trustworthy in the future, it is certainly evidence that they will be, and proof that they were in the past. And so we make an act of the will to adhere to the other. That’s what faith is: an act of the will by which we adhere to another who is known.

Faith is historically used as the translation of the Hebrew emunah. And notice how the word’s actually used: the characters in the bible are said to have faith in God, a god with whom they’ve been speaking! They most certainly do have evidence that he exists, because they’ve seen it with their own eyes and heard it with their own ears. You might not believe that the story is true, but that doesn’t change the fact that within the context of the story it is true and that it shows the proper use of the word faith. That's how it's always been used in Hebrew, Latin and English.

In English, when speaking of an absurd belief that is completely without foundation, it is never said that such a belief strains faith. We say that it strains credulity. That’s because “believing something without having evidence or in the face of evidence to the contrary” is the definition of credulity; it is NOT the definition of faith and it never has been.

[dduckwessel]

While I agree with Richard Dawkins that religion is "lethally dangerous nonsense", he appears to be making the same mistakes as religious people do.

Due to past associations with a topic a person assumes that future associations will be the same. Anything and everything associated with the topic becomes "tainted with the same brush" and a person becomes closed-minded to it.

I think we always need to be at least open to examine something before we judge it:
http://scholar.googl...dt=0,5&as_vis=1

[coldcreation]

dduckwessel, on 15 January 2012 - 03:39 PM, said:

While I agree with Richard Dawkins that religion is "lethally dangerous nonsense", he appears to be making the same mistakes as religious people do.

Due to past associations with a topic a person assumes that future associations will be the same. Anything and everything associated with the topic becomes "tainted with the same brush" and a person becomes closed-minded to it.

I think we always need to be at least open to examine something before we judge it:
http://scholar.googl...dt=0,5&as_vis=1

Your deduction dduck is baseless since you provide no specific example of where Dawkins "appears" to make the same "mistakes" as religious people. To make your case you will need to provide a quote by Dawkins with a link directly to the source so that the context (of what Dawkins writes or states) may be examined in full.

As for the link you provide above Dawkins is not mentioned at all, i.e., it supports not at all your baseless claim.


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