--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "salyavin808" <fintlewoodlewix@...> wrote: (snip) > Fair play to [Dawkins] I say, nothing wrong with kicking the > hornets nest, it might do us some good but only if the new > ideas are better than the old ones. This is the athiests > trouble you can be as empirical as you like but not many > will give up their comforting allusions of eternal life > and replace it with the promise of a miserable death and > non-existence you get with the selfish gene.
It would be hard to accuse Aristotle and Aquinas and the like of doing no more than entertaining comforting illusions when they were formulating what became known as classical theism. The question is whether the atheists' empiricism is up to the task of rebutting what they *did* do. > And then there's the cultural side and traditions that > people like about religion, Dawkins doesn't really get that > I think. He held the chair for public understanding of science > at Oxford for many years never quite managed a scientific > understanding of the public. > > I think he's right about god though. And his books on nature > and evolution are among the very finest. I shall read the links > at my leisure. Add this by Feser: http://www.american.com/archive/2010/march/the-new-philistinism Excerpt: "Richard Dawkins is equally adept [as Dennett] at refuting straw men. In his bestselling The God Delusion, he takes Aquinas to task for resting his case for God's existence on the assumption that 'There must have been a time when no physical things existed'even though Aquinas rather famously avoids making that assumption in arguing for God. (Aquinas's view was instead that God must be keeping the world in existence *here and now* and at any moment at which the world exists, and that this would remain true even if it turned out that the world had no beginning.) "Dawkins assures us that Aquinas gives 'absolutely no reason' to think that a First Cause of the universe would have to be all-powerful, all-good, all-knowing, etc.; in reality, Aquinas devoted *hundreds of pages*, across many works, to showing just this. "Dawkins says that the fifth of Aquinas's famous Five Ways is essentially the same as the 'divine watchmaker' argument made famous by William Paley. In fact the arguments couldn't be more different, and followers of Aquinas typicallyand again, rather famously (at least for people who actually know something about these things)reject Paley's argument with as much scorn as evolutionists like Dawkins do. "And those are only (some of) the errors on pages 7779." He doesn't spare the American equivalent of the "soft- headed numpties" either. Poor vicarish chaps are getting it from both sides.
