No, writing those posts about James Randi wasn't exactly a pleasure, I had to go down into the seamy, bottom of the barrel, dishonesty and hypocrisy that the entire pseudo-skepticism consists of to reach the Randi level of it. About the only thing that might have given me less pleasure would be to write a similar series about Penn Jillette or, perhaps worse, that "genius" of Brit-atheism, Stephen Fry. Just the conventional requirement to pretend that Fry is a genius because someone on the BBC or somewhere like that said so and so many famous show-biz celebs have repeated the lie would do it for me.
Actually, the most pleasure I've ever had from writing about atheists was when I took apart Richard Dawkins' most famous bit of "science" his "first bird to call out" fable from "The Selfish Gene" I have made the argument that his proposed gene-based "altruism" is not only not evidenced in observation but contains a mathematical impossibility as well as being a violation of the classical Darwinism that is all that Dawkins' fable and his phony substitute for alturism is constructed of, and is likely made even more unlikely by such pedestrian science as the speed that sound waves travel, all of which was a pure pleasure. I have yet to have one of Dawkins' fans be able to refute any part of that, including the atheist crank of a mathematician who I pushed to explain just the mathematics of it. Being able to point out that his fable undermined his fundamentalist version of Darwinism which it was based in was rather fun, too. Dawkins seems to have a habit of sawing away at branches he tries to perch on.
The only thing that gave me more pleasure, perhaps, was forcing Sean Carroll to kick the legs out of his Cervantean quest for a "theory of everything". When, after more than two weeks of posing the question to him, I finally got him to admit that physics didn't know everything about even one object in the universe, that not even a single atom or electron was known comprehensively and exhaustively by physics, which he didn't want to answer because he knows if that's the case, as it so obviously is, then there will never be a valid "theory of everything" about the entire universe, not even mentioning the infinity of imaginary universes which atheists have created in contemporary cosmology and theoretical physics*. If I can't stop bringing that up it's because he and his fellow cosmologists are still pretending they can do what they so obviously can't do, tie up the universe for their atheist materialism by answering "The Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything". Even that bigger atheist celebrity and hero, that one-trick pony, Douglas Adams mocked that absurd idea. By the way, Carroll hasn't seemed to suffer much for having made that admission.
There are very, very few of the big names of atheism who match their PR. I think if any of them did they would probably not be well known because atheism is, at bottom, a profoundly anti-intellectual fad. Something that it's nice to know after way too many years of lazily buying that pig's dinner on reputation and not on inspection.
Actually, there are a lot of things I wrote that gave me a lot more pleasure than scrapping in the gutter with Randi and his buddies. One was thinking about just what a tiny, minuscule fraction of evolution that science can possibly study even as such folk as Richard Dawkins pretend that they've got the problem licked, that having been done in 1859 in the basis of the scantiest of information and evidence. If that were the case then the position of evidence in producing an allegedly objective view of reality, itself, has to suffer from that dogmatic assertion. I do hold that atheism is a symptom of intellectual decadence, not its apotheosis as is claimed.
* Which effective infinity of universes is invented by such folk because they can't stand the idea that the universe had an absolute beginning and that it would seem to be so finely tuned for the creation of intelligent life. Though I'd never argue either of those as a proof of the existence of God, the idea that those could be taken to imply the existence of God and provide rational reasons that support some peoples' belief in God makes those atheists so angry that they violate all kinds of rules of science and that atheist's favorite slogan of logic, Occam's razor, with the wildest abandon that anyone has ever gone to. The Jewish mystical measurement of the vastness of God and the Hindu exposition of the dimensions of existence are nothing in comparison to what the atheists do to support their non-god.
The very question of the existence of God (beloved of on-line atheists) is a question from philosophy of religion. The questions about the nature of reality (the cosmos, human life, etc.) are, secularly at least, questions of philosophy.
ReplyDeleteI might as well try to answer a question about atomic structure using the language and ideas of haute cuisine, as to answer a question about philosophy using the language and ideas of physics.
But ignorance is bliss, and ignorance of philosophy is rampant, especially in America and American education. So while no philosopher of religion gives a wet snap about the "existence of God" (even agnosticism is a rather silly posture in philosophy), an issue even Aquinas pointed out was bootless (7 centuries ago!) , it is still a raging argument among the ignorati, some of whom have advanced academic degrees.
Even as they, as you say, strain at gnats and swallow camels. Perhaps one of the worst consequences of scriptural ignorance is the loss of such rich metaphors from the common discourse.