[betty boop]

"Science feeds on mystery."

Forgive me, Chester, but IMO science is not about mystery. It is about explaining the physical world. "Mystery" is the bailiwick of religion.

This statement from Dawkins is the sort of rhetorical tactic I most object to. He is making an emotional appeal here for his own particular brand of religion, atheistic scienfic materialism. And there's nothing "mysterious" about that.

Wake up and smell the roses....

FWIW. Thanks for writing!

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you so much for the engaging post!

It seems to me that in the days before scientific materialism took over as the official mindset (at least here in the U.S.) – that science and philosophy/religion were connected in a common pursuit.

I suspect that Dawkins has yet another fatal attraction – he appeals to the sense of the mysterious for authentication (or equity) in one breath - and then utterly rejects the mysterious in practice of scientific materialism.

Things weren’t so hostile even back in Einstein’s day:

The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as all serious endeavour in art and science. He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious. To me it suffices to wonder at these secrets and to attempt humbly to grasp with my mind a mere image of the lofty structure of all that there is.

Einstein's speech 'My Credo' to the German League of Human Rights, Berlin, autumn 1932, Einstein: A Life in Science, Michael White and John Gribbin, page 262