Dawkins (and my) atheism essentially stem from two basic tenets which are derived from the scientific method:
1. He who makes the claim needs to provide evidence to support the claim. The burden of evidence is upon the claim maker. Theists claim that God exists made the world etc. They need to provide evidence that supports this claim. Atheists simply state that the evidence for a personal God is lacking. Additionally, an inability of the listener to provide evidence against the claim DOES NOT constitute evidence for the claim. Dawkins outlines this idea well with his discusion of the spaghetti monster and the celestial teapot.
2. When a hypothesis is being tested (a personal god exists, created the world and intervenes in human activity), an alternative hypothesis needs to also be considered (evolution, carbon dating, fossil record, etc. etc. which are agreed upon by 99% of the people who understand these concepts - scientists)
Proof of a personal god falls short on both these criteria.

I think you are well aware of how philistine is used in common parlance and that it has nothing to do with race (or even circumcision)

“Race” itself is a modern social construct.

Philistines in the Old Testament were not a race. In Old Testament genealogy they were descendants of the Casluhites, who where descendants of Ham one of the sons of Noah (Gen 10). They were avowed enemies of the family and then group of clans who later became the nation of Israel. In later references Philistines simply were the people who had settled in a particular area in the South West of Canaan with five principal cities Gaza, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Ekron, and Gath. Like we who live in Australia are Australians. Want to call us a race?

The origins of the Philistines is still debated - probably Mycenean - they disappeared in the time of the Neo Babylonian empire.

The term ‘Philistine’ is now a term of abuse.

Abusing people by saying that they belong to one particular group of people is racism.

If you want to really insult somebody, always turn to terms of racist abuse derived from the Bible.

Eagelton has just betrayed how much hatred and racism religion has inspired , in one cute Freudian slip.

And you’re quite right, of course, it’s William. As you say, James would very likely put a determined agnostic — if that’s not a contradiction in terms — at the bottom of his scale.

Nicholas, glad to see you back. I’m not sure I’ve done anything like a decent job of defending your initial thesis — at least as I read it — in your absence but it’s been interesting. Look forward to whatever comments you may find time for.

Ingolf, nice quote, but I think it is William James, not Henry.

James, I totally agree, atheism certainly doesn’t rely on a “proof” of non-existence. I tried to explicitly disavow that in my comments.

But then I think an atheist is not waiting for the “bell to toll”. I read the W. James as an exhortation to decide, and not wait, if justified. So this gives no specific warrant for an agnosticism.

“Sodomites over there against the wall”. On to weightier matters, the Atkinson sketch is from his one man show. I’ve got it on an old cassette, “Live in Belfast”. Brilliant show. His straight man was Angus Deayton I think. Saw a version of the show in the late ’80’s or early ’90’s.

Also, fell asleep last night to the op.111 piano sonata. Found I had it on a cd. Only got to about 4 minutes of the first movement, and not a reflection of the music. Looking forward to listening to the rest.

The book fairly crackles with brio. Yet reading it can feel a little like watching a Michael Moore movie. There is lots of good, hard-hitting stuff about the imbecilities of religious fanatics and frauds of all stripes, but the tone is smug and the logic occasionally sloppy. Dawkins fans accustomed to his elegant prose might be surprised to come across such vulgarisms as “sucking up to God” and “Nur Nurny Nur Nur” (here the author, in a dubious polemical ploy, is imagining his theological adversary as a snotty playground brat). It’s all in good fun when Dawkins mocks a buffoon like Pat Robertson and fundamentalist pastors like the one who created “Hell Houses” to frighten sin-prone children at Halloween. But it is less edifying when he questions the sincerity of serious thinkers who disagree with him, like the late Stephen Jay Gould, or insinuates that recipients of the million-dollar-plus Templeton Prize, awarded for work reconciling science and spirituality, are intellectually dishonest (and presumably venal to boot). In a particularly low blow, he accuses Richard Swinburne, a philosopher of religion and science at Oxford, of attempting to “justify the Holocaust,” when Swinburne was struggling to square such monumental evils with the existence of a loving God. Perhaps all is fair in consciousness-raising. But Dawkins’s avowed hostility can make for scattershot reasoning as well as for rhetorical excess.

Much of this is a question of style, of course and so hardly deserves all the attention we’ve lavished on it since Nicholas raised the damn subject and then vanished. Still, style in this broader sense is hardly unimportant and so I don’t think we need to presume that objections to intellectual boorishness are necessarily based on sensitivity to ridicule.

The Pierce that I quoted and the James that you quote are very clearly of a similar sensibility. Perhaps the air they were breathing was a bit full of spiritualists and cranks for my liking (though certainly Pierce was strident against the cranks of his age, religious and otherwise.)

It’s been an odd but good debate I think - between about five non-believers. I’ll stick to ‘vulgar atheism’ for Dawkins, but I’m afraid I don’t have the time to explicate further right now. I doubt it will make much difference but I have a slightly different take on it to Ingolf and will try to have one more go if I have a bit more time soon.

In terms of the kind of God presented by conventional religions I’d also have to classify myself as an atheist. It wasn’t for this that I felt the intellectual door should be left open. It’s more about nourishing a sentiment, an underlying openness that permeates Taoism, say, or some of Buddhism, or much of the thinking of Paul Tillich.

There’s a rather lovely — if slightly lengthy — quote from Henry James’ “The Will to Believe” which in a way encapsulates this whole business from my point of view:

“When I look at the religious question as it really puts itself to concrete men, and when I think of all the possibilities which both practically and theoretically it involves, then this command that we shall put a stopper on our heart, instincts, and courage, and wait, acting of course meanwhile more or less as if religion were not true — till doomsday, or till such time as our intellect and senses working together may have raked in evidence enough, — this command, I say, seems to me the queerest idol ever manufactured in the philosophic cave. Were we scholastic absolutists, there might be more excuse. If we had an infallible intellect with its objective certitudes, we might feel ourselves disloyal to such a perfect organ of knowledge in not trusting to it exclusively, in not waiting for its releasing word. But if we are empiricists, if we believe that no bell in us tolls to let us know for certain when truth is in our grasp, then it seems a piece of idle fantasticality to preach so solemnly our duty of waiting for the bell. Indeed we may wait if we will, — I hope you do not think that I am denying that, — but if we do so, we do so at our peril as much as if we believed. In either case we act, taking our life in our hands. No one of us ought to issue vetoes to the other, nor should we bandy words of abuse. We ought, on the contrary, delicately and profoundly to respect one another’s mental freedom: then only shall we bring about the intellectual republic; then only shall we have that spirit of inner tolerance without which all our outer tolerance is soulless, and which is empiricism’s glory; then only shall we live and let live, in speculative as well as in practical things.”

For my part, I’m no longer waiting for the bell of intellectual certainty to toll. As much as I’m able with all my powerfully embedded enlightenment prejudices, I’ve thrown open my windows and doors. Quite what, if anything, will come of it all remains to be seen but it feels good. So . . . . “nebulous agnostic”, as James said? Well, yes, but with a bias.

all the best

Ingolf

From time to time one encounters a bitter denunciation of something called militant atheism, on the basis that it involves some kind of double standard. The militant atheist is portrayed as no less dogmatic than the religious believers he scorns, and no less reliant on faith - His faith being different only by virtue of being negative.

I thought I detected this meme, to coin phrase, in your first post. If I was mistaken, then you might well agree with the following.

The trouble is that the militant atheist is a strawman. There may have been a time when an atheist was defined as someone who claimed that the non-existence of God could be formally demonstrated, while an agnostic believed that neither His existence nor his non-existence can be demonstrated. But by these deninitions hardly anyone, not even Dawkins, would be atheist, and indeed a good many believers would be agnostic. In contemporary usage, an atheist is simply someone who doesn’t believe in God, while an agnostic ‘isn’t sure’. All the self-proclaimed agnostics I have known were strongly tempted by the idea that there is some kind of conscious being ‘out there’. Atheists are not.

It’s obvious why religious people want to put atheists on the back foot, by exposing their alleged double standard. In the case of agnostics, however, I find it a bit puzzling. I guess it just boils down to a sensitivity to ridicule. But I don’t think Dawkins wants to rubbish anyone’s private spiritual experiences. On the other hand, when believers claim some degree of authority in matters of moral or natural philosophy, on the basis of those experiences, he takes that as a licence to cut and slice.

Gaby: I remember being in stiches over that sketch too, but had long forgotten it. Was it from ‘Not the 9 0′Clock News’ or later?

“For my own further education in the pitfalls of communication, would one or both of you let me know whether this is where your impression of my position – which I’ve unsuccessfully been trying to change ever since (!) – may have been initially formed?”

Ingolf, first, I always understood you to be supporting an agnostic position. I think the following summarizes my major points of difference with your comments.

1. I don’t think the questions are at all as mysterious, ill defined or ineffable as you want to argue.

2. I don’t think our disagreement is a “semantic” one, that is, about the meaning of “god” or meaning of the proposition “god exists”. Rather it is a substantive one about belief and what does and doesn’t count as evidence.

3. I believe that the absence, or if you will paucity of evidence, for god justifies a belief in atheism. I don’t think one is compelled to agnosticism, or in other words, to “suspend one’s non-belief”.

To be an atheist and believe that no god exists is the negative part of our account of the world. The positive part is to give a persuasive account of the world without it.

And of course, in respect of this positive account, we can be wrong.

I’m reminded of Rowan Atkinson’s wonderful sketch when he is playing the Devil on the Day of Judgement and confronting a group of atheists. He says to them, “Well you must feel a right bunch of Charlies then”.

My only contention throughout has been that the ultimate questions – however one is to try to frame them – seem best left open because they are probably unanswerable.

This was an attempt to clarify that I don’t pretend to know. And don’t expect to ever know. None of which fills me with angst, by the way. It simply is. At any rate, looking back through what I wrote, I have the suspicion the whole misunderstanding may have arisen out of this sentence in my first post:

It’s all very well to flay the more literal religious or spiritual reponses that merely paste a poster called “God” over the void, but in doing so one is no nearer to answering the questions for which these various belief systems have through the ages sought to be an answer.

I can see how this might have looked like a defense of religion rather than, as I’d intended, an acceptance that they were in general fairly easy to deride in terms of their content and claims. For my own further education in the pitfalls of communication, would one or both of you let me know whether this is where your impression of my position — which I’ve unsuccessfully been trying to change ever since (!) — may have been initially formed?

Turning to more fruitful matters, entirely agree on the late Beethoven quartets. A few other pieces that tend to evoke a deep response in me are Shostakovitch’s 8th and 15th String Quartets and Vasks’ Musica Dolorosa. In some ways, it seems to me that Beethoven in the late quartets was about a hundred years ahead of his time.

Great to run across such an eclectic forum.

I’m not good on opus numbers, but I think there is an Op.135 that is a personal fave.

And “Point Counterpoint” is a good read too.

And if someone comes to me insisting that this, and only this, possible answer is the true answer to this unanswerable question (”I am the Way, the Truth and the Life”) then aren’t I entitled to cry “bulldust”? Especially when, as is usually the case, the insistent dogmatist then slides from positions on unanswerable questions to positions on questions which are capable of an answer but where they don’t like the best answer.

On entheogenic music, there’s a scene in Aldous Huxley’s “Point Counterpoint” where someone tries to convince an atheist of the existence of god simply by playing the 2nd movement - the Heilige Dankgesang - from Op 132. If you want profound and moving music you can do a lot worse than any of those late quartets - 35 years after I first heard them they’re still capable of evoking tears when I’m in the right mood.

I’ve enjoyed the chat too, Ingolf. So thanks to Nicholas for his original post too.

Ingolf, you asked me about what our disputes of substance may be. Well our differences are not about meaning, e.g., the meaning of “God” or the meaning of the proposition “god exists”.

But rather about the truth of, or justified belief in, the proposition “God exists”. This to me is a difference of substance in the sense that it depends on how the world is.

Also, I interpreted your use of “proof” to be a reference to the standard philosphical arguments or proofs of god’s existence.

Finally, I suppose I don’t find this issue as mysterious or ineffable as you. If god is so ill- or un- defined that it is difficult to ask even these simple questions of his nature or existence, then so much the worse for believers.

Richard Dawkins is of course no less free to fulminate than anyone else. My negative reaction, by the way, is not based on having read his latest book but on a radio programme I listened to a while back celebrating his career (a sort of intellectual roast if you like). Religion and God received the expected bashing — which was obviously fine — but I remember being surprised at the shallow, almost sophomoric quality of many of the comments. Could have been a bad night for he and his mates and may also have been a poor representation of his more fully articulated views but it added to the distaste I’d occasionally felt reading a few of his books many years ago.

Anyway, enough — from me at least — on Mr Dawkins. My initial few words yesterday, which I thought would pass without comment, have grown and multiplied far too much.

Thanks for a good exchange. Time to listen to that piano sonata, me’thinks.