[MD] Dawkins a Materialist

[David M]

Hi DMB


You said:
provisional beliefs held  on the basis of evidence

DM: Can you give any examples? Does not science require
hypotheses, and are these not the product of imagination,
aimed at explaining evidence rather than being based on
evidence, otherwise that would be descriptions rather
than hypotheses?


DMB:Faith as it exists today is a reaction against intellect. It is a
> kind of desperate clinging to social level values in the face of
> contradictory evidence.

DM: Some specific examples would be really great here.

> Again, anybody with a dictionary and access to the news should understand
> this. The fact that there are so many MOQers having trouble with it makes 
> me
> very, very blue. I mean, for Christ's sake, just look around at what's
> happening in this world right now. Its a bloody mess. And I don't just 
> mean
> that in terms of English slang. I mean its literally bloody. You know, 
> wet,
> red, and smelling of death and gunpowder.

DM: Do you think all violent conflict is religious?

> dmb says:
> What?! Two sensible sentences in a row? I'm thrilled to be wrong. I mean, 
> I
> would have bet against two in a row. This notion of freedom is the 
> flipside
> of control and can even be applied to the principle of oppostion. The 
> social
> level seeks freedom from the laws of the jungle and the intellectual level
> seeks freedom from the social level's laws. The history of evolution is 
> the
> history of increasing freedom, of overcoming the limits of the parent 
> level.

DM: How far can this freedom go? Does the social level need constraints
to work? Many in the west seem to be free but only reconising biological
and social & status values. If we were all much more free how would society
function? Who would do the drudgery?