Are you all listening?

"What About Me?" by Al Franken = Funny book, that might come true...well, except for the end we hope.

You should all vote for Al Franken. He is the best.

Franken and going to wipe the floor with Coleman in'08!

will it be archieved and put up for download?

I was in the queue for Science Friday - Dawkins is on my list of people I would have at a dinner party, if I could pick anybody in the world.

And the segment ended before they got to me.

It just proves that there's no God.

Franken and going to wipe the floor with Coleman in'08!

You mean Colbert. Stephen Colbert will be the Republican Presidential Cannidate in 2008.

As an agnostic, I find the believers and atheists a bit arrogant about the unprovable. Some times it is funny, though. Scriptural bigotry versus the evidence-free many worlds theory. Heh heh.

> As an agnostic, I find the believers and atheists

Learn what "atheist" and "agnostic" actually mean. They are not mutually exclusive.

SteveC at 4:18PM I use the most common definition of agnosticism: an equipoise between the certain belief there is a god and the certain belief there isn't one. I don't pretend to know for certain either way. Perhaps there is a god who operates so slowly that humans can't perceive it. Then again, perhaps not. I am not amenable to conversion.

Dawkins as usual is good.

Can't say the same for someone as ignorant as clueless JimPP, "As an agnostic, I find the believers and atheists a bit arrogant about the unprovable."

One thing I have noticed about both poles of certain faithful and the certain unfaithful is they each contain a large population of haters: ignorant and clueless, indeed. Have a peaceful evening and life, bernarda. No Torquemada or Lenin for me, please.

I guess I just don't see any good reason for putting the probability of God (something said to exist that is completely udetectable, and is less and less useful in explaining, well just about anything, as time goes on) at 50%.

Really, there are many, many things that you can't prove DON'T exist, but there is no reason to believe that they are at all likely to exist. Since there is no credible positive evidence for God, why assume that it is at all likely that he exists any more than Thor, or Odin, or Posieden or any of the various gods worshipped at various times by various cultures?

JimPP seems to be the arrogant one in his smug superiority to both believers and nonbelievers.

JimPP should have listened to Dawkins on the radio report listed above.

Poor JimPP, "One thing I have noticed about both poles of certain faithful and the certain unfaithful is they each contain a large population of haters: ignorant and clueless, indeed." What haters does he find among the atheists? What does Lenin have to do with atheism, as he implies?

I doubt that he is even an agnostic. He seems to be a theist poseur. "Have a peaceful evening and life, bernarda"--what a piece of jesus freak crap.

One other thing, Dawkins is very good at talking to the callers.

Dave Please don't accuse me of lying unless you have proof.I don't think a placatory remark is a religious monopoly. I believe agnosticism is the only truly empirical attitude. Sectarianists and Atheists both pretend to know what they can't prove or disprove. How can you claim to know for certain what is and isn't in the Universe or Multiverse when no one even knew that the main part, dark energy, existed until less than a generation ago? Why does the anthropic principle prove over time to be a good predictor of cosmological discoveries? It doesn't prove there is a god, but equally invisible 'bubble universes' don't prove anything either.
The Sectarianists and Atheists have a lot emotionally invested in their faiths. I don't trust those with a strong need to believe or disbelieve to tell the truth, Dave.
I don't give a damn about your 'soul' either. You don't even believe real agnostics exist! How bloody convenient for you. Agnostics don't need hierarchies and clubs like you Atheists do. We lack your evangelical zeal, but we're nicer.

Sectarianists and Atheists both pretend to know what they can't prove or disprove.

Do you know many [A]theists?

Let's presume you're an agnostic, as defined by Thomas Huxley. If you believe nothing for which there is no evidence, how much room does that leave you for extending your provisional assent to theological claims about god[s]?

Are you agnostic WRT Zeus? Indra? Baal?

If you are agnostic WRT religious claims about god[s], what do you do with that attitude? Do you incorporate theism, or are you living day to day without it?

the most common definition of agnosticism: an equipoise between the certain belief there is a god and the certain belief there isn't one

That is a rather common, but far from exhaustive definition. If you're going to make assertions about what atheists do or don't believe, you may perhaps want to investigate what many agnostics who post or lurk here mean when they describe themselves as agnostic:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnostic

"Certainty" is such a loaded term. I doubt many atheists profess 100% certainty that there is no God. Many (probably most) are fallibilists and believe 100% certainty impossible. I'm not a fallibilist*. I think science shows God to be impossible and I think much of science is essentially complete and not open to revision. If a part of "complete science" were revised it would be due to human error and not because all inductive reasoning is necessarily fallible. I'm close to 100% certain that the revisions necessary to make God possible will never take place. But that lack of certainty is merely a practical matter; in principle 100% certainty could be attained. So you might as well just go ahead and say I'm certain God doesn't exist. I bet I'm pretty much alone in this belief though.

[* I can't see on what grounds one can be a fallibilist. The usual argument is from the problems of inductively reasoning from "observables" to "unobservables" but, unless you think psychology is outside the realm of empirical science, you already have to accept the ontology you're trying to bring into question to have a hope of making such distinctions.]

It seems to me that this debate between agnosticism and atheism is something of a storm in a teacup.

I take agnosticism to mean, following Huxley, that the strength of one's belief in something should be in proportion to the weight of evidence by which it is supported.

For most, if not all, values of the term 'god', there is no evidence for the existence of such entities so I have no belief in them. In my daily life, wherever a decision about such matters is required, I act on the assumption that there is no God. This makes me effectively atheist as well as agnostic and I would argue that this is the position of most of those who call themselves either agnostic or atheist.

storm in a teacup - indeed. To get back to Dawkins (NPR direct link here), in today's interview he gave as full and clear an exposition of the hypothetical teacup in interplanetary orbit as I've heard (thank you Bertrand Russell for thus clarifying agnosticism - and the evidence for that teacup is still out, despite modern instrumentation).

Dawkins also noted the FSM as the contemporary equivalent. And something new: apparently there's now a schism among those touched by His Noodly Appendage. What's up with that?

I think some is of the garlic pork sauce phalanx, while others are of the pepper sauce faction. Arguing like that, have they no taste?

thwaite wrote:

storm in a teacup - indeed. To get back to Dawkins (NPR direct link here), in today's interview he gave as full and clear an exposition of the hypothetical teacup in interplanetary orbit as I've heard (thank you Bertrand Russell for thus clarifying agnosticism - and the evidence for that teacup is still out, despite modern instrumentation).

I thought it was a teapot not a teacup.

Actually, I like to think that, after that unfortunate incident in Boston, the Empire launched an interplanetary export drive for tea. Soon, astronauts on the Moon will find a buried teapot which, when exposed to sunlight, will beam a recording of Tea For Two Cha-cha towards Jupiter. A subsequent manned mission to Jupiter will find a giant teapot in orbit around the planet. The last words heard from the astronaut approaching it in his space-pod will be: "My God! It's full of tea-leaves!"

Dawkins also noted the FSM as the contemporary equivalent. And something new: apparently there's now a schism among those touched by His Noodly Appendage. What's up with that?

The rift is between all those fancy-schmancy, liberal Democratic, Euro-sauce types and the good ol' red-state, meat sauce fundamentalists.

"You don't even believe real agnostics exist! How bloody convenient for you. Agnostics don't need hierarchies and clubs like you Atheists do. We lack your evangelical zeal, but we're nicer."

So you say, but my experience is exactly the opposite - it's the atheists who have a live-and-let-live attitude towards everybody else - insofar as everybody else agrees not to target them for conversion - but it's the so-called "agnostics" who are adamant and demonstrative in their self-absorbed superiority to everybody else.

But, hey. We can sit and tar each other all day long. I'm sure you've seen an atheist tie tin cans to puppy's tails, and I know a few agnostics with unpaid parking tickets. The simple truth that we can apparently agree on is that there's no evidence for God. Not believing in that for which there is no evidence is what I define as "atheism". You choose to use a different word that means exactly the same thing.

Seems a little ridiculous to me, but whatever. You really want to argue about what words mean?

Hey Dr. Mirez,

I'll trade you Hillary Clinton for Al Franken if he gets into the Senate, OK?

Chris