Richard Dawkins lives in a separate universe, one of “us vs. them” where the good guys all agree with him, and the rest are evil, by his moral determination. His latest thrust is for a more aggressive ridicule attack:
“I suspect that most of our regular readers here would agree that ridicule, of a humorous nature, is likely to be more effective than the sort of snuggling-up and head-patting that Jerry [Coyne] is attacking. I lately started to think that we need to go further: go beyond humorous ridicule, sharpen our barbs to a point where they really hurt… You might say that two can play at that game. Suppose the religious start treating us with naked contempt, how would we like it? I think the answer is that there is a real asymmetry here. We have so much more to be contemptuous about! And we are so much better at it. We have scathingly witty spokesmen of the calibre of Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. Who have the faith-heads got, by comparison? Ann Coulter is about as good as it gets. We can’t lose!””Massimo demurs. Along the way he acknowledges that the evidence that Dawkins claims is the basis for Atheism is not a valid argument, citing his own exposure to Eugenie Scott’s superior knowledge of philosophy and her influence on his views. In short, science adopts a voluntary (“functional”) materialism because it cannot empirically address or measure non-material issues. So any output from science has no bearing – by definition – on the non-material realm. This is entirely missed and not comprehended by Dawkins, and Piglucci calls him out on it:
“…the lowly creationist has just given the mighty evolutionist a humbling (if unconscious) lesson in philosophy by showing that evidence simply does not enter the debate. If evidence is out, then we are left with sheer rhetorical force. But there too, atheists are easily outmatched…”This in no way means that Pigliucci is dissuaded of his own Philosophical Materialism:
“That said, both Genie and I do recognize that science is one of the strongest arguments for philosophical naturalism, and I suspect that in her case, as in mine, a pretty big reason for why we are atheists is because of our understanding of science. Still, the philosophical/methodological distinction is both philosophically valid and pragmatically useful, since it doesn’t serve the purposes of either science or education to fuel an antagonism between a small minority of atheistic scientists and 90% of the world's population (those taxpayers, on whose good will the existence of science and the stipends of most of said scientists depend).Amazingly, Pigliucci seems to admit that his Atheism has no basis in material reality. Yet he repeats his attack on “creationists” with the following definition of faith, the one he always uses as an attempt to paint faith as a leap into the unknowable:
“it makes the creationist completely and utterly impervious to evidence: the more evidence you bring up, the more he feels validated in his faith, because faith is belief regardless or despite the evidence.This is exactly what Massimo is admitting about himself…He believes what he believes without the backing of scientific (material) evidence.!
[At this point I am without words! The astonishing lack of self-understanding is self-apparent. I shall let it stand as it is].
