@41:25 "about the rejection of evolutionary thinking by fundamentalist Christians ... a key issue in their rejection is that the values that they believe, rightly or wrongly, to be incipient in evolutionary thinking, arguably this question of values is far more important than whether evolution squares with the literal truth of genesis ..." so, perhaps we should ignore what is obvious because we believe otherwise.
I dunno, he lost me a bit in this one - although I liked the other lectures. I think there is a scientific method (of course it's not a static thing), and the method gave us answers to questions religion just cant. For me discussions like that are just too abstract sometimes - religions make quite specific claims, and they base those on talking to god or similar things. The difference is quite apparent... even if it has grown out of a complex history.
With a decade in hindsight, this just seems to be a struggling with the then-popularity if the new atheists. It's a simplistic answer or criticism of a cherry picked simplistic argument (against religion on the part of Hitchens and others). Obviously, Steven Weinberg sounds like a physicist when he speaks about there being meaning. Ask a philosopher, or a psychologist, or someone else in the humanities and soft sciences, you're going to get a different answer. Wouldn't it be better if we have a humanism attached to the cold and calculated hard edges of science? The answer is simply being multidisciplinary, but that's a difficult thing to ask of specialists. The core of Hitchens criticism, and many others over an eon, is that with all it's grand claims, "religion," especially Christianity, says it can make you a better person when clearly all the valid examples Hitchens lists and many many many more are examples of it not holding a candle to those claims. I'm glad scientifically illiterate people can get warm feelings about their afterlife and such, but those warm feelings are probably more part of being human than they are strictly religious, and you don't have to be tempted to go through the motions of a faith to justify the touching of children or reading the spectres of violent nationalism, which are themselves examples of human problems, something that religion doesn't appear capable of interpreting,vaddressing, or remedying except with more warm fuzzy feelings and helplessness. The nihilism that can be felt is in a way a byproduct of religions failures; not science's achievements.
@41:25 "about the rejection of evolutionary thinking by fundamentalist Christians ... a key issue in their rejection is that the values that they believe, rightly or wrongly, to be incipient in evolutionary thinking, arguably this question of values is far more important than whether evolution squares with the literal truth of genesis ..."
so, perhaps we should ignore what is obvious because we believe otherwise.
La ciencia y la biblia concuerdan en que el universo tuvo principio, entre otras muchas cosas.
I dunno, he lost me a bit in this one - although I liked the other lectures. I think there is a scientific method (of course it's not a static thing), and the method gave us answers to questions religion just cant. For me discussions like that are just too abstract sometimes - religions make quite specific claims, and they base those on talking to god or similar things. The difference is quite apparent... even if it has grown out of a complex history.
He just dismisses the Clash of Civilisations thesis without giving reasons. Poor.
With a decade in hindsight, this just seems to be a struggling with the then-popularity if the new atheists. It's a simplistic answer or criticism of a cherry picked simplistic argument (against religion on the part of Hitchens and others). Obviously, Steven Weinberg sounds like a physicist when he speaks about there being meaning. Ask a philosopher, or a psychologist, or someone else in the humanities and soft sciences, you're going to get a different answer. Wouldn't it be better if we have a humanism attached to the cold and calculated hard edges of science? The answer is simply being multidisciplinary, but that's a difficult thing to ask of specialists. The core of Hitchens criticism, and many others over an eon, is that with all it's grand claims, "religion," especially Christianity, says it can make you a better person when clearly all the valid examples Hitchens lists and many many many more are examples of it not holding a candle to those claims. I'm glad scientifically illiterate people can get warm feelings about their afterlife and such, but those warm feelings are probably more part of being human than they are strictly religious, and you don't have to be tempted to go through the motions of a faith to justify the touching of children or reading the spectres of violent nationalism, which are themselves examples of human problems, something that religion doesn't appear capable of interpreting,vaddressing, or remedying except with more warm fuzzy feelings and helplessness. The nihilism that can be felt is in a way a byproduct of religions failures; not science's achievements.