| Question for you -- is it a breach of etiquette to respond to something several days old? If so, I apologize, but I was away for a bit and I found your response interesting. The reason I responded to your initial post is that it seemed to suggest you support Dawkins' ideas but not his methods. I was pointing out that his methods actually follow logically from his ideas. In your follow-up post, I realize that you weren't making an idea/method distinction -- you actually just disagree with him. So it turns out that this is really just a bog-standard debate about theism. I was all fired up to post a response, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that a refutation would really just resemble a series of excerpts from Dawkins' book. In other words, I think he's already addressed your position quite convincingly. If you read it and didn't feel the same, I'm unlikely to do better. But one last point. You've misattributed the "boil down" of the book. Dawkins is doing something like this: 1. Here's why it's illogical to be a fence-sitting agnostic
2. Here's why it's illogical to posit God as an explanatory philosophy of the universe
3. Here are some specific problems with common theist arguments
4. Okay, now that we've got all that out of the way, here are some interesting theories on how things got to be the way they are
In other words, the part of his book that you single out is the part that he attaches heavy disclaimers to. The fact that you chose to focus on it suggests to me that your belief that "it's impossible to know for sure one way or the other," is even more of a gut-feeling assertion that you're accusing him of.My personal context: I'm also an agnostic, but I am what Dawkins would describe as a Temporary Agnostic in Practice, whereas you seem to be what he would describe as a Permanent Agnostic in Principle. I disagree with Dawkins on many things, but I found his arguments against fence-sitting agnosticism to be persuasive. |