science, magic, madness

[Keith Davis]

Anyone tried, "Breaking the Spell", by Daniel Dinnett? Got about fifty
pages in, and he kept saying he wasn't attacking religion, but trying to
approach it scientifically. Interesting premise, but he didn't get very far
very fast, and I started to become convinced that he wasn't as impartial as
he claimed. (Of course, I knew that going in, but still gave him a shot).
Guess he's in the same camp as Dawkins? Tried Dawkins, but I wasn't looking
for a new religion....


On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 6:40 PM, <malignd at aol.com> wrote:

> For the most part, Dawkins doesn't write about theology.  And comparing
> theology or theologians to Hume or Derrida, is inept.  Theology is an
> explanation or apology for a preordained conclusion:  one needn't read the
> theologian to know where the argument will end.
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
> To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Sent: Mon, Apr 22, 2013 5:48 am
> Subject: Re: science, magic, madness
>
>   Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the
> subject is the *Book of British Birds*, and you have a rough idea of what
> it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. Card-carrying
> rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional
> atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least
> well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don’t believe
> there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth
> understanding. This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures
> of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince. The
> more they detest religion, the more ill-informed their criticisms of it
> tend to be. If they were asked to pass judgment on phenomenology or the
> geopolitics of South Asia, they would no doubt bone up on the question as
> assiduously as they could. When it comes to theology, however, any shoddy
> old travesty will pass muster. These days, theology is the queen of the
> sciences in a rather less august sense of the word than in its medieval
> heyday.
>  Dawkins on God is rather like those right-wing Cambridge dons who filed
> eagerly into the Senate House some years ago to non-placet Jacques Derrida
> for an honorary degree. Very few of them, one suspects, had read more than
> a few pages of his work, and even that judgment might be excessively
> charitable. Yet they would doubtless have been horrified to receive an
> essay on Hume from a student who had not read his *Treatise of Human
> Nature*.
>
> http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n20/terry-eagleton/lunging-flailing-mispunching
>
>
>
> On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 5:43 AM, alice wellintown <
> alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>  "...* applied science, purposeful and determined, and pure science,
>> playful and freely curious, continuously support and stimulate each other.
>> The great nation of the future will be the one which protects the freedom
>> of pure science as much as it encourages applied science.*"
>>
>> http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi2876.htm
>>
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 5:40 AM, alice wellintown <
>> alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22105898
>>>
>>
>>
>


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