Sometimes you secretly want Richard Dawkins to be wrong, just because he's so smug. And arrogant. And insultory. Much like a lot of fundamentalists. Religious fundamentalists, that is. One might argue that Mr. Dawkins is a fundamentalist.
The problem with challenging Dawkins is that he is right. About science and reason.
It is possible--knowing human behavior, likely--that some people who follow Dawkins do so because Dawkins is right. Humans have an inexplicable need to be right... which also means for someone else to be wrong.
(see footnote on page 101 of In the Lake of the Woods)
The problem with Dawkins is that it is always risky to state any current discoveries as truth. We have no idea how the world will look in five years. We cannot even guess at what we will discover in 60 years.
Me: "I want to be the man that re-marries the physical and spiritual worlds."
Richard: "But there is no spiritual world."
M: "Belief in anything takes faith. And it doesn't take much faith to believe in the spiritual."
If you cannot believe in something produced by reconstruction, you may have nothing left to believe in.
If you start with the Biblical viewpoint, it makes as much sense as any other viewpoint. There are as many answers, and as many questions.
For example: if the world is as "young" as the Bible suggests, how do we explain stars that are so far away that they must have burned out millions of years ago? Unless such stars are purely hypothetical.
Re-marrying the spiritual and the physical is (arguably) a more human endeavor than "killing" God or spiritual things.
The Spiritual is more than the release of emotion in a church service.
My idea that we cannot prove God or it would greatly limit free will. It would make free will not as free. Yes, you would still be able to chose to disbelieve (or believe if disproved), but not really.
Dawkins has a palpable dislike, or disgust, for people who have not joined his beliefs. And for those who partially join. There is room for only one belief in Dawkins' beliefs. He would argue that what he believes is not based on belief, and for much of it, he'd be correct. But until everything is known, belief is necessary.
His animosity toward the religious is not unique to him, nor is it new, nor is it a position held only by the learned. There are several explanations for such animosity: it can be an understandable frustration with unreasonable, bull-headed
zealots. Plato said that those still in the cave would resist learning. But it is often a defiance toward God or the idea of God.--a deep (spiritual) rebellion. Which also aligns with Plato's claims, and which the Bible, conveniently, predicted.
However, Dawkins does not sound like a Philosopher-King. This perspective could be the bias of my beliefs, but Dawkins comes across as someone supremely knowledgable about science and someone whose thinking is most logical, but not as someone enlightened. He is missing a human-ness. A compassion. Which, of course, does nothing to his arguments; thankfully. If personality deficiencies affected the validity of our arguments, we all would be in trouble. All that it means, perhaps, is that Dawkins is unfit (or not yet fit), by Plato's definition to be a Philosopher-King.
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I'm not sure why science insists that their can be no other / that nothing else dare exist. Science allows nothing else. But why? Kant's Critique of Pure Reason applies here.
Here's a simple example: sin. Some human behaviors can be explained no other way. Throughout history and throughout the world, there are dark places and terrifying deeds