Richard Dawkins on Irish TV on The God Delusion

Hi there folksRichard appeared on The Late Late show (on Irish tv) recently to discuss some of the issues arising out of his recent book.Reasonably thoughtful responses and questions of the like discussed here. EvCtv more or less The clip (about 20 mins) is the 4th one down on the link. You'll need RealPlayer.Be in The Late Late Show Studio Audience!Happy Christmas to yis all by the way

While your at it, have a look at Tommy Tiernan (2nd down on the above link). He's a comedian and is just back from a go at the States. Some interesting observations of you guys n'gals - from our perspective

Oh, my goodness....I just really have a hard time thinking that Richard can compare "an accident of geography" with "imaginary beings."Evolutionary theory is undoubtedly trying to outgrow the archetypical past where one dissected an individual organism without necessarily at first distinguishing teleology and final cause but to think that physical experience translated into the mind's imaginary "friends" is but a misplaced revelation is simply to be even MORE deluded than thinking that artifical selection by future humans may be less isotropic than is thought on a norm today!!My physicist brother DID believe as a child in 13 imaginary friends which he showed me were populating his "hair" and indeed I thought if I was in India I might not be presbyterian but for Dawkins to have implied that both Greg and I and our whole family is deluded fails to seperate the approach to the unconditioned between the two boys and the post-Sputnick illusion that the difference of creation and evolution detailed to a younger generation than those like older ones where both creation and evolution are assumed to not differ.So to say the majority of the people in the audience were deluded is simply "not right" because there are different infinte regresses between my brother and I. I have a biologic and he has now after a pHd in physics an IT perspective. Dawkins is thus wrong because any infinte regress can digress in infintely many ways since Cantor if thought about hard enough.Wow, I am really not living in my proper time.Well, RD seems to have confounded or confused "Calvanism" and where I curved the phrase "same dynamism."
Click for full size imageEdited by Brad McFall, : update

Here's a link to the youtube clip of Dawkins making a guest appearance on Stephen Colbert's "The Colbert Report".https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuXpysYEhgA

& here Dr.D opens up saying, "god is very improbable." Well, that is all that I have ever had to believe anyway.Oh well, he must be talking to my parents.

Hi all,The best is here.Reading of The God Delusion in Lynchburg, VA, two streaming videos, absolute peaches. Dawkins is presenting at a "real" university, & in the second video is hit by questioner after questioner from the nearby creationist ministry of misinformation & canes the lot.Enjoy.MarkEdited by mark24, : No reason given.

---

There are 10 kinds of people in this world; those that understand binary, & those that don't

I think this was posted in another thread recently but in case you missed it here is a Time article on a discussion between Dawkins and Francis Collins.Page not found | TIME

---

Everybody is entitled to my opinion.

If I may enter this discussion from another POV. I tend to invoke Julian Jaynes' "bicameral mind" principle to explain why Dawkins' new book is necessary. Consciousness, according to Jaynes, is an escape from the understandably more-primitive bicameral mind, where the voice (word) of God is hallucinated and obeyed without any intellectual challenges. Jaynes's differentiation seems almost gravitational in principle, causing me to suppose that an inverse square law could be applied to the attraction of those bicameral commands on the escaping consciousness as it rises up from its roots. Many people simply cannot get beyond "God's gravitation field," because they still hear those powerful voices that command them otherwise. They need a little boost. So I welcome Dawkins' challenge like I welcome NASA's space-exploration program.Please pardon me if I've strayed too far off topic.”Hoot Mon

So then you are supposing "action at a distance" then?

Maybe, if my gravitational analogy holds. However, I'm not yet sure how to measure distance in this context.”Hoot Mon

quote:

---

---

Rather whatever the measure through distance is I think it will look more like this: I still see no reason to challenge God by throwing thoughts (Freud's notion of projection). The next step from thinking this many people ARE deluded is to have a legal system that medicates them for so thinking. Oh, wait, I was involuntarily confined and medicated not because I kept my ideas about God private but because I presented my ideas on evolution as if they applied to everyone in the species. This would lead me to discount science more than religion but I do not. In truth the "Bicameral Mind" started me off with an idea on how to "cut" through anatomy in the brain but MacLean's notion of a triune brain immediately nullified my first reading of Jaynes. Since then there is this idea of hox genes and rombomeres so it is all quite an intricate and elaborate mess as any message tracing paths across synapses may fullfill.If you accept that Newton was permitted to model the Earth as a point then I don't see how I am not permitted to imagine some measure of the distance the action a-crosses in a triplicate way my brain provided me. God however is over and across from this altogether, and given Newton's use of absolute space God could simply change the ABSOLUTE relation to point anyway. Perhaps you still have the idea WITHOUT distance being involved but this seemed somewhat problematical to me.Edited by Brad McFall, : letter "I"(not "t" by the way)

Brad, re: Here’s my “distance from God” (D) equation:D = f(x),where x is a measure of linear belief (B). Thus:B = E/G,where E is everything and G is God. Note here that since you can’t divide anything by zero then God must have either a positive or negative value.Hope this helps, Hoot Mon.

If either of you (or both) continue to post so far from the topic of this thread you will be suspended for a day.

In a review of Dawkins’ new book (Am. Sci., 95, 1, January -February 2007), Nobel laureate David Baltimore writes: I share his apprehension.”Hoot Mon

i bought the book the other day. have you seen sam harris' "letter to a christian nation"? it looked snazzy, so i bought it too. any maybe his other book. i don't remember. i bought a lot of books yesterday.