FINALLY found someone who's not afraid to go on the offensive against Dawkins, and effectively. Quick summary:

  • Dawkins constructs a lot of straw-men
  • Dawkins evades questions on free will, saying it's not important - when it's tantamount to philosophy and morality
  • Dawkins mentions attrocities commited by religious, while saying that atrocities commited by athiests FOR atheism is irrelevant

Yeah, I had a great laugh.

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Old comments

Hermi

Quinn didn’t make a single good point unfortunately, merely repeated his dogma with his ears shut.

Dawkins is quite correct that free will is not an important discussion in this case. The universe is just a giant physics simulator; your sense of self is an illusion and there is no absolute morality. Plainly there is no room for free will in the absolute sense, but clearly humans perceive that they have free will in the same way that we perceive that we are conscious beings. These truths don’t lend themselves to the argument because Quinn would reject them out of hand.

Tue 15 September 2009, 13:26 AEST
Steve

Honestly unsure if you even gave it a good listen. Just a short list of the points Quinn gave:

  1. Tooth Fairy” vs “Divine Being”, and growing up. Once people gain the ability to reason properly, they realise the Tooth Fairy isn’t possible. They may continue to believe in God though, as reality and belief in God are consistent. Your challenge: come up with one inconsistency. Just one.

  2. Existence of Free Will - which Dawkins completely dodged, saying its unimportant and complicated, but never refuting its existence. Free will is impossible without consciousness - impossible in this “physics simulator” view you mention…which brings us to…

  3. Existence of Matter - This “Physics Simulator” has to come from somewhere. Yes, “Science is working on it”, and hopes to find an answer - but the leading hypothesis (that, by the way, cannot currently be refuted, it also cannot be proven) is that something or someone created it. What Quinn called “The Uncaused Cause”

  4. The whole point about Dawkins going for pages about atrocities commited in the name of God, but playing down the atrocities commited by atheists against relious people. The fact that Dawkins disagrees with this is kinda weird, has he not read his own book? It’s a double standard if ever I saw one.

  5. Evolutionary Scientists thinking they’re qualified to be talking theology - indeed, in Dawkins’ case, thinking he’s more qualified. Eg. “Everyone who doesn’t have the same view of the “Old Testament God” as me must not have read the Old Testament.” Bollocks, he’s come to his opinion of God before he’s read it, read it, and it agreed. Grats, he accused people of getting their morals using the same methodology. What was the point?

Finally, regarding the whole free will/physics simulator thing. You make a claim: “The universe is just a giant physics simulator”. Prove it. That’s a remarkable claim and, if you can prove that, then I’m sure you will win a prize of some sort, and people will be abandoning their religion in droves. Your faith in that statement is as bold as my faith in “The universe was created by a divine, personal being who loves us, despite our desire to go against him - to the point of sending His Son down to die on our behalf, so we might have a relationship with Him.” My statement has indicators too (much like G = g*M_1*M_2/(d^2) is an indicator of the universe being a physics simulator, for example).

If you want to find out about any of these indicators, any of this evidence (which I honestly doubt you will, but I hope you will), I’d be happy to go through them with you, or you could read some of the plethora of books available on the subject. One of the better ones is “Case for Creator” by Lee Strobel. By no means perfect, yes it contains some funky science which causes one to raise ones eyebrows, but most of it is good stuff, and shows you how much of faith is rooted in solid evidence.

Wed 16 September 2009, 10:48 AEST