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I've seen a lot of STEM people go on thinking they are kings of logic, reason, even correct thought. All the others in the world are lesser beings, humanities scum who don't understand what /reason/ is, or anything about SCIENCE. I hope your degree in the arts was good career-prep for the rest of your life preparing coffee for me and my fellow engineers, peasant! Then they write books like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_God_Delusion
and philosophers who have been thinking about these topics laugh at them, and they don't understand why. The subject was simple! Obviously so, for if it were difficult, it would be STEM! Philosophers should be grateful a STEM expert such has Dawkins spent his precious time on their puny insignificant domain, a great man who sees a room is dark and decides to, for the first time, light a torch illuminating features that have remained dark for centuries. A question open and unresolved, bickered about by lesser beings like Kant and Russell and Liebniz and Descartes (STEM people as well, but made impure by the fact that they considered themselves philosophers first) until finally, thankfully, someone in STEM thought about it for a moment and told us the answer. Yet we realize quickly this is not what happened. Instead of shining new light, Dawkins stumbles through a dark room, knocking over furniture, breaking vases and china. He stubs his toe and says "did you know you had a table here?" He steps on a housecat and hears a squeak, then quietly and calmly uses his superior STEM intellect to draw a deduction: a pet would have moved out of the way before being stepped on, and a single rat would have as well. He tells the owner his home is infested with thousands of rats. It was, after all, the most logical deduction at the time. Who could blame him for simply stating what's most likely to be the truth? He is promptly asked to leave. In most of real life (i.e. the sphere of life where events are determined by human relationships and decisions, including but not limited to the law) deductive logic and scientific theory is about as useful as this (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1701.07820.pdf) is to someone building a bridge. It is actually worse, because knowledge of deduction (and things like 'syllogism' or 'logical fallacies' even) impart often times little more of use than obnoxious hubris and a false sense of superiority, a severely off-putting and unhelpful sense about the world that endears its holders to no-one and makes collaboration difficult; camaraderie impossible. |