Pharyngula

Posted by: Mark Paris | February 7, 2006 4:59 PM

I assumed you were talking about using IDers as bait for some kind of fishing expedition. Is that not the case?

Posted by: AJ Milne | February 7, 2006 5:31 PM

I actually laughed out loud and loudly thumped the table during the bit in his 'Root of all evil?' thing when he told the glassy-eyed evangelical his 'service' reminded him of the Nuremberg rallies... Nothin' quite like telling 'em how it is. He da man.

Posted by: helmut | February 7, 2006 8:43 PM

Dare I say it? Dawkins may be a good science writer, but he is a philosophical hack. I said it, bejjeebus. Now, I fear, I will be pummeled for not worshipping Dawkins like a god. Anything Ned says, however, is right on. But go read your Kierkegaard, Emerson, Nietzsche, James, Dewey, do it carefully, and compare to Dawkins. It is a rich world without supernatural fantasies, and we don't need the crutch Dawkins decries. But isn't it, conversely, the crutch of scientific explanation by way of compensation?

And I agree with Pete's Hitler comment. That's sloppy, whoever does it.

Posted by: AJ Milne | February 8, 2006 3:33 AM

Helmut, Pete: the Nuremberg comparison isn't sloppy. It's apt. I'm assuming I don't need to tell you the Nuremberg rallies are infamous in the history of propaganda for their use of ritual and ceremony to enhance the image of a movement and its actors, quite divorced from the substance of what they represented. A mass evangelical service, utterly devoid of coherent content but packed full of music, all spectacle and flash, designed to put the believer in the middle of an enormous, mindless seething mass of one voice, pumped up into an utterly irrational emotional state, in which the leader can pump their arms and decry 'Do we buhLEEEVE' is quite the same phenomenon.

And what's beautiful isn't just that he made that very apt comparision. It's that he made it to the chief manipulator's face.

Oh, and Godwin's Law, incidentally, doesn't say 'you lose' when you make that comparison. It says, specifically, that the comparison becomes increasingly inevitable, as a discussion continues. And what it doesn't say is wise, as the phenomena the Nazis represent in politics and the techniques they advanced in propaganda are frequently present in the modern world, and the artificial rule that mentioning the presence of such techniques and phenemena must never again be done would be, apart from being a rather bizarre and arbitrary rule, quite crippling to insightful discussion.

And I'm afraid I find the notion that 'scientific explanation' is a 'crutch' rather... odd.

Science isn't a crutch. It's a pair of legs.

Posted by: John Farrell | February 8, 2006 8:14 AM

Dawkins frankly isn't even that good a science writer, as demonstrated by the number of basic facts he couldn't get right in one his latest books.

"Of more concern is the quality of his thinking, which is far from impressive. To call it low-grade intellectual poodling would perhaps be too harsh; but it is certainly not high-grade. The first thing to note is Dawkins� carelessness with facts. (This is especially strange in a man who so emphasizes the factuality of science, with its �testability, evidential support, precision, [and] quantifiability�). Here is a small sampler: speaking of neutrinos, he says that �on average one passes through you every second.� Actually many billions of neutrinos pass through you every second, a fact well known to science buffs. In explaining an evolutionary idea he states that a certain quantity �grows as a power function,� though any mathematically minded person would see that it grows exponentially. He attempts an elementary combinatoric calculation and gets it wrong. He discusses a well-known quantum phenomenon in terms that are incorrect. If one reads enough of Dawkins, one gets used to this sort of thing; in a previous book he showed that he did not know the difference between a cosmic ray and a gamma ray."

Posted by: mothworm | February 8, 2006 1:13 PM

I posted this on Neddie's site, but I still don't get it.

"I was once like you! Yes I was! But that all changed when I realized: I was living in a Gawwwwdless Univairrrrse!"

So his big rhetorical flourish is, "I used to be an atheist because I believed there was no God, but that all changed when I realized there is no God!"?

Posted by: Neddie Jingo | February 8, 2006 4:27 PM

I'm no art historian, but shouldn't that reference have been to a Bosch landscape?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Thetriumphofdeath.jpg

Summat like that.