How dare you force your dopey unsubstantiated superstitions on innocent children too young to resist? How DARE you? But depending on your point of view, he is also a hero, a heathen, or a liability. For some, his controversial positions have started to undermine both his reputation as a scientist and his own anti-religious crusade. Friends who vigorously defend both his cause and his character worry that Dawkins might be at risk of self-sabotage. The foundation is run by a team of three in Washington DC and supports multiple projects in the US, such as Openly Secular, a campaign to encourage atheists to proclaim their secularism, and the Teaching Institute for Evolutionary Science, which provides teachers with evolution-themed tools.
Dawkins regularly goes on fundraising lecture tours, where his fame comes in useful. In person, Dawkins subverts his reputation for stridency. He is reticent to the point of awkwardness, always scrupulously courteous. Dawkins and Ward have lived in a large house in north Oxford since The style is bohemian, eclectic, the taste of someone who prowls souks. Their two dogs, small fluffy creatures called Cuba a havanese , and Tycho a coton de Tulear named after a 16th-century Danish astronomer , have the air of pets who run the joint.
As a child, he preferred to read books while his nature-loving parents John and Jean were out spotting birds and plants. Jean, aged 98, lives on the family farm in Chipping Norton, outside Oxford, where Dawkins visits her weekly. Even then, surrounded by nature at its most vivid, Dawkins remained uninspired. He remembers, as a young child, being taken in a safari car to watch a pride of lions gnawing at a carcass.
While the rest of the group stared in fascination, he stayed on the floor playing with his toy cars. He does, however, know every class and order of the animal kingdom, a product of the classical zoological education he received as an undergraduate at Oxford.
If he has trouble sleeping, he mentally scrolls through the alphabet and assigns mammals to letters. As a postgraduate, Dawkins excelled at the early stages of the research process, mulling theoretical questions and coming up with hypotheses.
But he lacked patience with the laborious hours of data collection or methodical lab work. On a recent spring afternoon, sitting in his back garden, he explained the evolution of social insects by imitating an ant whose sole function was to guard the entrance hole to a giant bamboo stick in which the ant colony lived. The ant had an elongated head that it used like a door to block the hole and prevent the entrance of intruders.
Dawkins hunched in his chair and stuck his head forward, then jerked it back, blocking and unblocking the hole. The performance was strangely captivating, but the ant was simply a means to explain the social behaviour of insects.
He would regularly stay up all night writing code on the sole computer in the zoology department, an Elliot — at the time a relatively compact machine, now the kind of elaborate object kept for historical interest by the Science Museum.
The language of technology was ubiquitous in The Selfish Gene. To its critics, the book was an assault on human values: it seemed to suggest, in that stark title alone, that we existed simply to pass on our individual genes and cared nothing for each other, the common good, community.
To Dawkins, this was a basic misreading of his argument. In his next book, The Extended Phenotype , which he regards as his most significant contribution to science, Dawkins explained that he wrote The Selfish Gene while on sabbatical, after returning, high on ideas, from a conference on artificial intelligence. Dawkins has never lost his affection for technology. He is an Apple devotee, and an early adopter; he owns the 47th Tesla electric car to be sold in Britain.
In his spare time, he plays the EWI , an electronic musical instrument similar to a clarinet. It had originally been written in Pascal, an obsolete programming language. A few years ago, Dawkins put a plea on his website for help updating it.
Canon was brought up in a fundamentalist Christian household, shed his faith, and later became a dedicated Dawkins fan. You should receive instructions for resetting your password. When you have reset your password, you can Sign In. Please choose a screen name. This name will appear beside any comments you post. Your screen name should follow the standards set out in our community standards. Screen Name Selection. Only letters, numbers, periods and hyphens are allowed in screen names.
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Ross O'Carroll-Kelly. Ross O'Carroll-Kelly - "My fingers are actually shaking as I type my exam number into the laptop" Does my former faith in the Book of Mormon and the divine calling of Joseph Smith mean that Mormonism is objectively true? Of course not. I bet that he would not defend that explicit position for very long.
Yet that is what this analogy tries to imply. Hello again, everyone! Thank you very much for the insights, they are really helpful. However, I would like to apologize for the misplacement of some words that might have made some arguments escape a bit from my pretended track. Good logic needs good wording, sorry about that. Judging by the line of arguments we were having, what I think he was actually referring to was not that faith is like love in a sense of emotion, feeling or such.
Clearly faith and love are feelings triggered by chemical reactions in our brain. Since we were clearly talking about god in his case, the christian god , I think he was trying to say that his faith in the existence of god is like faith in love.
At first, I wanted to say that love can be proved by simply tracking down all the chemistry behind it. Judging by the line o…. The suicide bomber who blows himself to bits is a man of amazing faith, and this faith stems from his love for Allah. Jane Goodall told in a conference I attended-on animal welfare- Marc Bekoff and Jane Goodall on a plenary conference, which came not to be plenary but the audience listened to both separately :. Consider this continuity between subject and epistemological object, which Piaget- and Bachelard criticized:.
Do you think your friend makes some disscontinuity, or continuity between his reasoning and objective reality? How Pastor Ted explained Prof. Thanks for the attempted clarification. Fortunately, we can simplify the matter.
We are comparing god itself to love. Once you see this, it becomes clear that the chemical reactions triggered in a brain by faith are irrelevant. The way a believer feels when experiencing faith is irrelevant. Nothing about the nature of faith itself has any bearing, because faith is not being compared to anything other than itself.
This is simply a false equivalency. The criteria for rational belief in one of them is not the same for belief in the other. Love is a subjective, emotional state. Because love IS an experience, the fact that we do in fact experience it is more than sufficient to establish it as a real phenomenon.
God is not subjective. Objective realities require objective evidence. Therefor the analogy fails. There are only two ways to rescue it and they both involve redefining terms in such a way as to make them agree.
But if god is defined in that way, then yes I will admit that god does demonstratively exist — as a mental construct inside the mind of believers. Both beliefs would be equally irrational given the available evidence. I would encourage you to send the link to your catholic friend. When you finally get down to it, love, and any other useful evolutionary emotion is actually the product of electrons being exchanged between atoms in the brain. Or Depression. Particular shaped proteins that fit into particular shaped receptors in the brain generate particular emotions.
This is how narcotics like heroin operate. A naturally occurring molecule created by a plant as an insecticide happens to fit in a receptor in the brain of a human triggering a relaxed feeling of well being and peace. A dose of heroin induces an emotion in the recipient. And Naloxone, the artificial drug created to deal with overdoses of heroin. It is more chemically reactive that heroin and out competes for key hole receptors in the brain, saving the person from overdose.
I know this is very sad for the romantics and mystics, but when we look in the mirror, we just a bag of chemical reactions. The best counter-arguments I have yet seen to this old chestnut! There is an expectation of getting something in return- whether it is a better afterlife, the idea that others will revere you…. I have faith a deep sense of hope that situations in my life will work out in the long run. I have faith an assurance that my career will be OK despite some ups and downs.
I have faith assurance that good people exist everywhere and will help me out if I am ever in need. I have faith because these situation have proven themselves in my life in an actual tangible way. It is a type of confidence resulting from past experiences. Faith is a good an necessary part of the human experience.
It is tossed out into thin air and fails to acknowledge humanity. I have faith that competent individuals will assist him. I have faith that his natural healing process will kick in; he has a positive outlook and his prognosis is excellent. We should ask Your dog is he loves You :. No offense, but people often project their own feelings toward animals. I know that love is not a topic here. I think domestic animals as dogs react upon our act, as you say He will cry, He will demand padding, cuddles,closeness, and so on, because he likes that not because he loves you.
He does all this things because He likes it. He demand attention not because of You, but because of himself. Why he did not pick the flowers from a meadow and brought to You if he loves you? People animals as You say do that for a person they love. If your dog loves you he would do something nice for you, and not himself.
Key word is Sapiens. As I often heard love is feeling, and not an emotion. There is a difference. We can have emotions physical reactions even when we are in sleep unconscious but we can not have feelings because they are conscious manifestations.
Pedros friend probably has mistaken love with feeling of safety. We often fell in love with persons that give us feeling of safety. Sorry for the long comment, and no hard feelings ;. Most of us believe that death is scary terrifying now when you believe that you will end up in a state that is not eternally nothing I suppose that fear is removed.
Now eternal happiness being loved feeling that you are apart of something much bigger all of this was created for you I. I think domestic animals as dogs react upon our act, as you say He will cry , He will demand padding, cuddles,closeness, and so on, because he likes that not because he loves you. Separation anxiety and depressed behavior are very pronounced in many dogs. According to your logic dogs must whine, cry, reject food, become lethargic, throw fits, and act out, because they enjoy these behaviors not because they are experiencing emotional trauma at being separated from someone to whom they feel a bond.
Given what we know about evolution, it seems unparsimonious to assume that related species DO NOT experience inner states analogous to our own when we can clearly observe analogous behaviors. How does the fact that I get selfish gratification from these behaviors rule out the idea that I might also experience emotions like love while engaging in them?
I have never picked meadow flowers and brought them to anyone. Imagine my surprise to suddenly learn that this means I have never loved! Dogs appear to get real satisfaction from pleasing their masters, and real sorrow from indications that they have disappointed us.
So do humans. One could easily argue that all human actions and inner states are ultimately selfish. I fail to see a distinction on this level between humans and many other species.
Do you know of any actual research that says there is a qualitative difference between the emotional states we can experience during sleep and waking? Does dreaming count as conscious or unconscious?
Faith was exemplified by the men who drove the planes into the Twin Towers. Love was exemplified by the brave men of the New York Fire Department. Otherwise, the theory goes, there is very little point to our lives. Even our consciousness, the feeling of having experience inside our own heads, may not really exist, or may exist only as a kind of shadow of our brain activity. But I take the rather unfashionable view that there is meaning to life.
As I suggest in my book Spiritual Science , it is absurd to reduce human life and behaviour to purely genetic factors. We are not just ghostly entities living inside machine-like bodies in an indifferent world.
Human life is not a meaningless space between birth and death, spent trying to enjoy ourselves and forget about our predicament. I believe that human life and the world mean much more than that. And this is not because I am religious — I am not.
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