On 31 May 2014, at 12:04, LizR wrote:
On 31 May 2014 21:35, Bruno Marchal <[email protected]> wrote:
To oppose religion and science transforms science into a religion.
On the contrary, non confessional theology has to come back in the
academy, that's all. The problem is not religion, it is the
authoritative arguments. Some atheists club are worst than catholics
is the way they dismiss evidences. They confirmed my felling that
atheism is just, like Christianism, a variant of the Aristotelian
theology.
I think Dawkins is talking basically about authoritative arguments.
He clearly has in mind the insistence that "god did it", which stops
people being able to think of alternative explanations. I agree with
him on this, even if I am personally agnostic and not a militant
atheist - god is not an explanation, it merely pushes the question
back a step.
Q Why is there something rather than nothing?
A Because god made the world.
Q So why is there god rather than nothing?
A Don't blaspheme! (or whatever)
Which is exactly similar to my atheist opponents:
Q Why is there something rather than nothing?
A Because of the physical laws.
Q why are they physical laws?
A oh! that's philosophy (meaning: bullshit).
I have been discarded of teaching students at ULB because an influent
self-called atheists said that I pollute the mind of the students by
instilling doubt on the existence of a physical (primitive I guess)
universe. Then they have eliminated the course in logic as students
were asking more and more questions about what was wrong with my work
(then I got the price LE MONDE, and was told one month in advance
(still by the members of the local atheist club) that they were
powerful enough to make it disappear.
Hawking has all my sympathy for the warning against authoritative
argument, but he lost all his credits by implying that theology or
religion are the guilty one, when it is only human stupidity, that of
course any institutionalized religion can enhance, but this includes
atheism, as I have experimented, and I was not alone.
Some atheists are much more again agnosticism than against religious
institution. Some group of atheists want church and theurgy, in America.
I consider atheism, who fight against religious belief, as accomplice
with the christians and muslims to condemn, by sheer authoritative
argument, of hiding the real debate which is not between existence or
not of God, but between the Aristotle and Platonic conception of God.
I have heard more than one time bishops saying that atheism is their
best ally.
It is just plain wrong that science answer religious question. Science
addressed such question until the closure of Plato academy. Since
then, they put it under the rug, and allow only philosophers to
address it, but only because they consider that the whole of
philosophy is a waste of time, that god created for those stupid
people who can't do science (as one atheist told me).
I use of course the term atheists in the strong sense (B~g), and not
in the agnostic weaker sense (~Bg). Many atheists like to consider
agnostic as "coward or too much polite atheists", and atheists really
hate when I say that the gap between atheism and agnosticism is bigger
than the gap between atheism and christianity.
But Christians have evolved since, and usually, can be rigorous in
theology, if not in practice (in many place in Europa). Atheists have
still the foolish certainty of those who create a false religion. They
attack you violently when you dare to show your doubts, which is
enough to discredit them for me. They says look only at the evidence,
but then they talk like if there has been evidence for physicalism:
but when asked, they cannot give one, and are angry with you.
Assuming comp and the classical theory of knowledge, all Löbian
machine are religious. To fight against religion in general (as
opposed to authoritative religions) is like doing a war on 1+1=2.
For a platonist, atheism is a slight variant of christianism or
abrahamanism: same conception of the creator, and same blind faith in
the creation. I don't believe, in both of it, nor do I really
disbelieve it. I prefer to admit that I don't know, and do research on
that (but that is what they hate the most).
Atheists talk like if the choice was between "no god" or "a fairy tale
god", when the real choice is in doing research, experience and
experiments, and trying theories/ definitions and letting the sense of
the words evolves (as it does in science, and not in authoritative
religions).
Science is the best method, but it is only that: a method, not a
doctrine, and atheists makes me nervous when they pretend (or claim)
that science is on their side. That is what leads the most rigorous of
them to eliminate god, afterlife, person and souls all together,
without argument.
Bruno
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