Hi Glenn
I used to have a great deal of respect for Dawkins but have more or less given up on
him as a serious contender to affect the way we think after realising that he was more
interested in running down religion than talking up Science. Much of his reasoning
appeared to fall apart after 'The Blind Watchmaker' and descended into a long anti-
religious rant. I have watched him on TV several times in the fairly recent past hoping
that the brilliance of his earlier thinking would surface somehow. But unfortunately not.
Is he not able to understand that Religious faith will not be negated by rational
discourse?
He has made a number of stupid statements in the past - perhaps his most stupid being
to ask who would notice if all the actions and achievements of the church in the last
1000 years or had never happened!!!! Weird or what? This was in a letter to the
Independent and I don't currently have a URL for it.
However there is still a ray of hope that exists due to his agreement with Pirsig that
Science is unable to deal with moral values (or any other type of values for that matter).
And why the hell does he make such a big issue about kids wearing baseball hats
backwards - it really is a sad waste of an intellect. Ah well....
Horse
PS
The reference for Glenn's extract from Dawkins article is:
http://www.forbes.com/asap/1999/1004/235.html
for anyone that's interested
On 14 Mar 2002 at 23:07, Glenn Bradford wrote:
> Richard Dawkins, in a Forbes article written three years ago, speaks his
> mind on the notion, popularized by Fritjof Capra and others, that the
> science of quantum mechanics is converging with religious mysticism.
>
> DAWKINS:
> [A] kind of marriage has been alleged between modern physics and
> Eastern mysticism. The argument goes as follows: Quantum mechanics, that
> brilliantly successful flagship theory of modern science, is deeply mysterious
> and hard to understand. Eastern mystics have always been deeply
> mysterious and hard to understand. Therefore, Eastern mystics must have
> been talking about quantum theory all along.
>
> Similar mileage is made of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle ("Aren't we all,
> in a very real sense, uncertain?"), fuzzy logic ("Yes, it's okay for you to be fuzzy,
> too"), chaos and complexity theory (the butterfly effect, the Platonic, hidden
> beauty of the Mandelbrot Set--you name it, somebody has mysticized it and
> turned it into dollars). You can buy any number of books on "quantum
> healing," not to mention quantum psychology, quantum responsibility,
> quantum morality, quantum immortality, and quantum theology. I haven't
> found a book on quantum feminism, quantum financial management, or
> Afro-quantum theory, but give it time.
>
> The whole dippy business is ably exposed by the physicist Victor Stenger in
> his book, The Unconscious Quantum, from which the following gem is taken.
> In a lecture on "Afrocentric healing," the psychiatrist Patricia Newton said that
> traditional healers "are able to tap that other realm of negative entropy--that
> superquantum velocity and frequency of electromagnetic energy--and bring
> them as conduits down to our level. It's not magic. It's not mumbo jumbo. You
> will see the dawn of the 21st century, the new medical quantum physics really
> distributing these energies and what they are doing."
>
> Sorry, but mumbo jumbo is precisely what it is. Not African mumbo jumbo but
> pseudoscientific mumbo jumbo, down to the trademark misuse of the word
> energy. It is also religion, masquerading as science in a cloying love
> feast of bogus convergence.
> --
>
>
>
>
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