News items
Something is broken so I can’t post news items in News for the moment, so I’ll post them here.
Massimo holds out an olive branch.
Jerry returns the olive branch.
Frans De Waal on god-science shouting match
He would love to see a debate among moderates.
It is good to see peace “breaking out” on at least a small front in the gnu atheist wars, and the generosity on both sides is encouraging. But one really wonders about Frans de Waal and his idea of an argument amongst moderates. What is there to argue about if we’re all going make nice? Nothing, in a sense. People who are unbelievers will still not believe, and believers will still be stuck with their chaos of voices. Religion is an unsettleable disagreement, even, or perhaps especially, within religions.
In the last thread the question about holy books arose. Well, holy books are books with the implicit claim that a god speaks through them. But what words does this god speak? All text is interpretable, so hermeneutics is going to be vital to the meaning of the text, and disagreement over interpretation is a given. So the voice of the god is divided, and must always be. This is the nature of the hermeneutic auction. If we have a debate of moderates we haven’t even begun to have the debate that’s needed, and that’s the debate that calls into question the very intelligibility of a revelation from a god. And if we have that debate, it’s not going to be moderate any more. So, what’s the point of talking about moderates?
We can admit, with de Waal, that religions seem to be a very large part of most cultures, and perhaps that needs to be looked at scientifically, but we’re not going to come up with any very good way of bringing peace in religions, because the very terms of the debate are skewed, right from the start. Only if religious people are prepared to look at religion scientifically, and accept some conclusions, is it worth have this discussion. Are they willing to do this? I very much doubt it. Religion depends upon the spell. Dissipate that, and what have you got? Guys dressed up in funny costumes doing completely unaccountable things.
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Ya, I don’t agree with De Waal (he spells the de with a big D – I guess that’s the custom in the Netherlands, unlike France), and I commented on his post with a bit of my disagreement.
I like his work though. I’ve known some great apes quite well, so it interests me.
Yes, we are all friends amongst atheists and naturalists, no need to treat us as the enemy, we have real enemies and we’re the ones loudly pointing that out.
Of course argumentum ad hominem is something that no true philosopher would resort to. Just kidding!
Egbert, what are you quoting?