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Author Topic: The Intellectual Deficiencies of Richard Dawkins  (Read 516 times)

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Offline stevusmagnus

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The Intellectual Deficiencies of Richard Dawkins
« on: November 05, 2009, 11:59:43 PM »
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  • Offline CM

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    The Intellectual Deficiencies of Richard Dawkins
    « Reply #1 on: November 06, 2009, 04:14:48 AM »
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  • Quote from: The article
    After all, we Catholics take seriously the injunction to "know thy enemy," and that requires us to treat their arguments with respect. Unlike Dawkins and Myers, we cannot simply retreat to the safety of our prejudices and call it "reason."


    A most excellent observation.


    Offline Jehanne

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    The Intellectual Deficiencies of Richard Dawkins
    « Reply #2 on: November 06, 2009, 07:46:14 AM »
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  • I read Dawkins' book The God Delusion several times.  His whole argument is in a section called "The Poverty of Agnosticism" (pages 43 to 51) where he gives his 7-point scale of belief, 1 being you are 100% convinced that God exists (strong theism) and 7 being that you are 100% that God does not exist (strong atheism).  Keep in mind that earlier in the book Dawkins says that "Deism is scarcely more probable than theism."  In The God Delusion, Dawkins says that he is "in Category 6 (de facto atheism) but leaning towards Category 7."  In a few interviews, he has said that he is a 6.8; in another interview he says that he is a 6.9.

    So, let's analyze Dawkins position, shall we?  Converting his equal-interval "1 to 7" scale to a ratio scale, we subtract 1; hence, Dawkins is a 5.85 (taking the average of his statements) on a 0 to 6 scale.  Given this, Dawkins thinks that there is a 5.85 out of 6 chance that God does not exist, which means he thinks that there is a 0.15 out of 6 chance that God does exist.  Computing an "odds-ratio," this means that Dawkins believes that there is a 40:1 chance, given our present evidence, that God does not exist.

    Now, here's a nice little article on the calculating horse racing odds:

    http://horseracing.about.com/cs/handicapping/a/aaoddschart.htm

    So, a 40:1 odds means that if you bet $2, you get $82 back (the $40 you bet, plus the $2 you spent on the bet.)  So, what does Dawkins offer us, assuming that his "odds" are correct:

    Bet on Dawkins  :  get nothing, once you're dead, your dead.
    Bet on some God:  the hope to get everything.

    Okay, of course, this is Pascal's Wager, which Dawkins & Friends love to bash.  Their flaw is, of course, in not understanding Pascal's theology (who was, of course, Catholic.)  If God exists, then He (pardon the pronoun, for those secular readers among us) is either indifferent to belief (deism) or is not, and if it is the latter, it is more reasonable than not that those who seek Him will find him, even if they are born into the "wrong" religion.  Even in Father Feeney's theology, this is the idea of "salutary repentance," whereby God will grant mercy to those who sincerely seek him.

    This means that theism, whatever its stripe, will always be a better "bet" than atheism.