Review: Enemies of Reason / Slaves to SuperstitionMore 4/Richard Dawkins
Channel 4 has a series in homage to, and presented by, Richard Dawkins. I think some or all of it is repeated, but I didn't see it first time around. Earlier episodes featured his now-familiar criticism of religion, and Christianity in particular.
Now, I'm watching a recording of a later episode on Slaves to Superstition. He's been chasing down and ridiculing horoscopes, spiritualism, dowsing, conspiracy theorists, and more, with his familiar blend of scepticism and scientism. He explains the benefit of believing verifiable evidence over private feeling.
And I'm inclined to agree with him. Every bit. Science offers us strong, valuable insight into our world's systems. It has advanced medicine beyond the wildest dreams of our ancestors. All this random spiritualism is largely flim-flam, with no substance and no real benefit - no impact beyond what you'd expect from random processes. Indeed, this line came from the middle of the programme:
Even in the 21st century, despite all that science has revealed about the indifferent vastness of the universe, the human mind remains a wanton story-teller, creating intention in the randomness of reality.
The whole thing is a bit of a hymn to rationalist enlightenment thinking,without a hint of any cracks in the edifice. His calm rational interviews of spiritualists, exposing their bizarre nonsense, is of course amusing. That their ways of thinking may give comfort and help is discarded: founded on nothing at all, their influence can only be malign. I think I agree.
And so two things bother me:
- for what good reason do I think that Christian faith is any different?
- is Richard going to be intellectually honest enough to ask whether the same purblindness afflicts the scientific community? It's much easier to build a theory based on the convenient data, and discard that which doesn't seem to fit. I don't suggest that a major scientific calumny is being committed - but I have to wonder whether it is more of a common human trait to discard the evidence that doesn't fit.
2 comments:
What could be more superstitious in 2010 than believing in the "resurrection of Jesus".
Such a statement is pure psycho-babble (babel) and is inherently unprovable (and absurd) via any kind of sophisticated Reality based philosophy, "theology", or metaphysics.
It is also interesting that both the advocates of conventional exoteric religiosity and of scientism make much of the use of "reason" to defend their rigidly held points of view. Blogs can be found ardently defending both propositions.
Hi Anonymous, sorry that your comment got caught by blogger's spam filter.
Certainly the resurrection of Jesus is inherently unprovable. I think that's rather the point. [As an aside, the 20th century is littered with several people who set out to disprove it, examining the 'evidence' in considerable detail, and instead became believers. But of itself, that proves nothing.]
A naive response would be to say that therefore it was ok to believe in either direction. That's rather silly - but I don't think that militant agnosticism is going to catch on, either.
Post a Comment