| Dawkins's blind spot | | Date Created: Dec 07, 2006, 09:24 AM |
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As I've already noted, Richard Dawkins' book The God Delusion is not receiving much favourable press from anyone. His long-held position is that theology isn't a proper subject worth dialoging with, only ridiculing; no one who is bright and informed can be a believer and shouldn't even be an agnostic.
But even when Dawkins admits there are things he does not know (and he's happy to make such admissions) he assumes that the things he does not know must fall into categories and rules that he does know. He can't seem to conceive of the possibility that we don't know the rules, only that we don't -yet- know the data.
Like Einstein, but for different reasons, if he were 50 years younger, Dawkins's position would have led him to have similarly ridiculed Quantum Physics. "Not enough evidence, Mr Bohr." He needs to read his Kuhn and get to grips with the possibility that someone caught up in a paradigm, as he is, might not recognize evidence as evidence even if it were to rise from the dead and say "Howdy doody!" (Lk 16:27-31, paraphrase mine).
One of the phrases I can still hear JB Torrance repeating in class is "It is the nature of the object that determines the mode of knowing." What mincemeat he'd have made of Dawkins, who assumes that it is our comfortable methods of knowing that confidently determine what is and what is not an object. |
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