Posted on 01/22/2006 6:22:25 AM PST by Pharmboy
Allan Penn
Daniel C. Dennett.
Q: How could you, as a longtime professor of philosophy at Tufts University, write a book that promotes the idea that religious devotion is a function of biology? Why would you hold a scientist's microscope to something as intangible as belief?
I don't know about you, but I find St. Paul's and St. Peter's pretty physical.
But your new book, "Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon," is not about cathedrals. It's about religious belief, which cannot be dissected in a lab as if it were a disease.
That itself is a scientific claim, and I think it is false. Belief can be explained in much the way that cancer can. I think the time has come to shed our taboo that says, "Oh, let's just tiptoe by this, we don't have to study this." People think they know a lot about religion. But they don't know.
So what can you tell us about God?
Certainly the idea of a God that can answer prayers and whom you can talk to, and who intervenes in the world - that's a hopeless idea. There is no such thing.
Yet faith, by definition, means believing in something whose existence cannot be proved scientifically. If we knew for sure that God existed, it would not require a leap of faith to believe in him.
Isn't it interesting that you want to take that leap? Why do you want to take that leap? Why does our craving for God persist? It may be that we need it for something. It may be that we don't need it, and it is left over from something that we used to be. There are lots of biological possibilities.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
"To be an atheist, you must be able to prove a "universal negative" - you would have to be in all places, at the same time, to prove that nowhere in the entire universe something exists. Biblically, this man is a fool - Psalm 14:1 "The fool has said in his heart, 'There is no god.'""
To digress into the sociology of science: Why are Dennett and Dawkins so popular? How did Carl Sagan get his spotlight? Dawkins was endowed by a Microsoft Billionaire, I know.
Eric Hoffer QuotesThe opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not.
Collected by John Petrie
Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.
They toe the party line (whatever it is at the moment), don't have original ideas of their own, and are intensely political.
Those are good, SC...we all need our demons, I s'pose.
..but Dennett is using science and arguing for a "scientific" (materialistic) conclusion. That should qualify it for the classroom.
DENNETT: "Certainly the idea of a God that can answer prayers and whom you can talk to, and who intervenes in the world - that's a hopeless idea. There is no such thing."
Could one expect an atheist to say or believe anything else ?
Because they are not having the relationship = God does not exist. Dennett is a loser who couldn't make it with God.
"Darwinism is a penalty from God for denying Him Creator credit" Dr. Gene Scott, Ph.D. Stanford University
Ray Martinez
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