[chp]

Richard Dawkins - Darwin's Rottweiler

The press have been calling him Darwin's Rottweiler so it is with a little trepidation that I agreed to take part in a programme with Richard Dawkins, author of the "Selfish Gene" and more recently "The God Delusion". The programme will be shown in January on Channel 4 and features a demonstration of mediumship by me at Camberley Spiritualist Church.

It will be interesting to see how they edit the feature but I hope, and anticipate, that they will be fair.



More about Richard dawkins:
http://www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/dawkins/...ve/index.shtml

Whatever the case, stage two will be a 'discussion' with Richard Dawkins. His recent series about religion saw him rip into religious beliefs and I am sure that the same will apply when he considers Spirituality and New Age beliefs. I am sure that the rest of my encounter with Richard Dawkins will be challenging to say the least.

I expect that in January 2007 when the programme is aired that this thread will become quite busy.

My only regret is that so few of us mediums are prepared to enter the lion's ring. How many of the cable TV 'psychics' are prepared to speak to the sceptics? Stephen O'Brian has been prepared to stick his head above the battlements in the past, so was Keith Charles when he appeared with James Randi. I know these mediums to be sincere. But what about the pre-Madonna's? Maybe you have an opinion about how mediums should address the sceptics?

To get this thread going I have pasted below a recent article about Richard Dawkins. Did you see his programmes that attacked religion? Have you read his books? Do you think he's right with what he says or does he take things too far?

Please use this thread to debate atheistic science and the role of mediums in defending beliefs on TV.
Now here is the article to get you thinking. It's an extract from Prospect Magazine. Please see their website to read the full article or subscribe.[/b]

Dawkins the dogmatist

by Andrew Brown
FULL ARTICLE:
http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/a...ls.php?id=7803

Incurious and rambling, Richard Dawkins's diatribe against religion doesn't come close to explaining how faith has survived the assault of Darwinism
Andrew Brown?s books include The Darwin Wars (Simon & Schuster)
The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins
(Bantam, ?20)

It has been obvious for years that Richard Dawkins had a fat book on religion in him, but who would have thought him capable of writing one this bad? Incurious, dogmatic, rambling and self-contradictory, it has none of the style or verve of his earlier works.

In his broad thesis, Dawkins is right. Religions are potentially dangerous, and in their popular forms profoundly irrational. The agnostics must be right and the atheists very well may be. There is no purpose to the universe. Nothing inconsistent with the laws of physics has been reliably reported. To demand a designer to explain the complexity of the world begs the question, "Who designed the designer?" It has been clear since Darwin that we have no need to hypothesise a designer to explain the complexity of living things. The results of intercessory prayer are indistinguishable from those of chance.

Dawkins gets miffed when this is called "19th-century" atheism, since, as he says, the period of their first discovery does not affect the truth of these propositions. But to call it "19th-century" is to draw attention to the important truth added in the 20th century: that religious belief persists in the face of these facts and arguments.

This persistence is what any scientific attack on religion must explain?and this one doesn't. Dawkins mentions lots of modern atheist scientists who have tried to explain the puzzle: Robert Hinde, Scott Atran, Pascal Boyer, DS Wilson, Daniel Dennett, all of them worth reading. But he cannot accept the obvious conclusion to draw from their works, which is that thoroughgoing atheism is unnatural and will never be popular.

Dawkins is inexhaustibly outraged by the fact that religious opinions lead people to terrible crimes. But what, if there is no God, is so peculiarly shocking about these opinions being specifically religious? The answer he supplies is simple: that when religious people do evil things, they are acting on the promptings of their faith but when atheists do so, it's nothing to do with their atheism. He devotes pages to a discussion of whether Hitler was a Catholic, concluding that "Stalin was an atheist and Hitler probably wasn't, but even if he was? the bottom line is very simple. Individual atheists may do evil things but they don't do evil things in the name of atheism."

Yet under Stalin almost the entire Orthodox priesthood was exterminated simply for being priests, as were the clergy of other religions and hundreds of thousands of Baptists. The claim that Stalin's atheism had nothing to do with his actions may be the most disingenuous in the book, but it has competition from a later question, "Why would anyone go to war for the sake of an absence of belief [atheism]?"?as if the armies of the French revolution had marched under icons of the Virgin, or as if a common justification offered for China's invasion of Tibet had not been the awful priest-ridden backwardness of the Dalai Lama's regime.

One might argue that a professor of the public understanding of science has no need to concern himself with trivialities outside his field like the French revolution, the Spanish civil war or Stalin's purges when he knows that history is on his side. "With notable exceptions, such as the Afghan Taliban and the American Christian equivalent, most people play lip service to the same broad liberal consensus of ethical principles." Really? "The majority of us don't cause needless suffering; we believe in free speech and protect it even if we disagree with what is being said." Do the Chinese believe in free speech? Does Dawkins think that pious Catholics or Muslims are allowed to? Does he believe in it himself? He quotes later in the book approvingly and at length a speech by his friend Nicholas Humphrey which argued that, "We should no more allow parents to teach their children to believe, for example, in the literal truth of the Bible or that planets rule their lives, than we should allow parents to knock their children's teeth out." But of course, it's not interfering with free speech when atheists do it.

He repeats the theory that suicide bombs are caused by religious schools: "If children were taught to question and think through their beliefs, instead of being taught the superior value of faith without question, it is a good bet that there would be no suicide bombers. Suicide bombers do what they do because they really believe what they were taught in their religious schools." Evidence? As it happens, the definitive scientific study of suicide bombers, Dying to Win, has just been published by Robert Pape, a Chicago professor who has a database containing every known suicide attack since 1980. This shows, as clearly as evidence can, that religious zealotry is not on its own sufficient to produce suicide bombers; in fact, it's not even necessary: the practice was widely used by Marxist guerrillas in Sri Lanka.

Dawkins, as a young man, invented and deployed to great effect a logical fallacy he called "the argument from Episcopal incredulity," skewering a hapless clergyman who had argued that since nothing hunted polar bears, they had no need to camouflage themselves in white. It had not occurred to the bishop that polar bears must eat, and that the seals they prey on find it harder to spot a white bear stalking across the ice cap. Of course, you had to think a bit about life on the ice cap to spot this argument. But thinking a bit was once what Dawkins was famous for. It's a shame to see him reduced to one long argument from professorial incredulity.

Well i sincerely wish you lots of luck with that meeting / interview. I certainly will look out for it.

I did not think the write up by Andrew Brown was helpful in any way shape or form. What i saw was the same kind of diatribe he was accusing Dawkins of.

I found a quick ref about Dawkins from one of the links you provided:

From `The world of Richard Dawkins` site:

Richard Dawkins ? was educated at Oxford University and has taught zoology at the universities of California and Oxford. He is the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. His books about evolution and science include The Selfish Gene, The Extended Phenotype, The Blind Watchmaker, River Out of Eden, Climbing Mount Improbable, and most recently, Unweaving the Rainbow

From link - `Excerpt from Wired magazine:
`Gods utility function` - Extracts from Scientific American, p80-85, Nov 1995 article by Richard Dawkins adapted from a chapter of `River Out Of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life`:

"The world becomes full of organisms that have what it takes to become ancestors. That, in a sentence, is Darwinism." (p.2)

"The river of my title is a river of DNA, and it flows through time, not space. It is a river of information, not a river of bones and tissues; a river of abstract instructions for building bodies, not a river of solid bodies themselves." (p.4)

"...Yet the genetic code is in fact literally identical in all animals, plants and bacteria that have ever been looked at. All earthly living things are certainly descended from a single ancestor." (p.12)

"There is no spirit-driven life force, no throbbing, heaving, pullulating, protoplasmic, mystic jelly. Life is just bytes and bytes and bytes or digital information." (p.1

"Science shares with religion the claim that it answers deep questions about origins, the nature of life, and the cosmos. But there the resemblance ends. Scientific beliefs are supported by evidence, and they get results. Myths and faiths are not and do not." (p.33)

"This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. We cannot admit that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous - indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose." (p.96)

"In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference." (p.133)

**

This is not a stupid man by any means, and what i see is almost a `mad proffesor` type. Someone who has spent his life focussed on a view which in the main would be considered cynical yet based on scientific findings, thereby valid in it`s own right.

Enjoyably (for me at least) his view is apparently the complete opposite of Spiritual Awareness. In my opinion, two opposites can either war > or negotiate peace by integrating their opposite findings with an aim of balance.

Maybe it would help to be armed with some scientific facts from our beloved Scientific leaders in this field.

I hope the meeting is more productive than Andrew Browns rantings anyway.

Thanks for the info, interesting as always.

Love and light
Jas xxxxxxx

[Nat]

Never heard of Dawkins before but he sounds scary, lol, so my first reaction is to say RUN, your mad, ...lol, ...but very brave, and I guess someone has to do it so I hope it goes well.

Originally Posted by M+Jaspire

"There is no spirit-driven life force, no throbbing, heaving, pullulating, protoplasmic, mystic jelly. Life is just bytes and bytes and bytes or digital information." (p.1

Now who's being weird - does this guy live in the matrix ..lol? :shock:

Originally Posted by M+Jaspire

"Scientific beliefs are supported by evidence, and they get results. Myths and faiths are not and do not." (p.33)

I wonder if he has looked in to the evidence of spiritualism - particularly physical phenomena? :roll:


As far as mental mediumship goes, I guess asking someone to prove spirit is real is like asking someone to prove they love someone else. Love is a feeling that can't be proven to another because it is an experience only the person feeling it has,... but it does not make it non existent anymore than the spirits that mediums can link to also without being able to share the literal experience of it. People can only demonstrate actions which can be taken as evidence of love, ... and a medium can only demonstrate a spirit link as the evidence that spirits exist too.

As for nothing inconsistent with physics being reliably reported, "String theory" shows no inconsistency with there being a point where the laws of physics as currently known break down, particularly in relation to gravity I believe, ... but I won't elaborate too much on that coz I don't have a particularly good comprehension of it myself and the work in not yet complete in it's total complexity. It was first noted tho because of inconsistencies is simple things such a ferrous (? Maybe a longer word but starts with ferrous) magnets, etc, so has a basis in known and common anomalies to the laws of physics from which these theories sprang, .... and , don't hold me to any of this coz it's coming off the top of my head and might be off kilter a bit, ... but I am fairly sure that the vibratory rates of these strings which protons, electron, and gravitons are composed of determine what chemical element it will cause an atom to be, ... it therefore seems logical that vibrations beyond our known earthly one's would produce elements perhaps immeasurable to earthly standards (such as etheric matter maybe) and whilst just a hypothesis at the moment does point the finger at existence beyond what is presently known in science. More interesting from an info perspective is "M theory", which encapsulates the 5 string theories and intelligently hypothesizes parallel dimensions, etc. (like maybe the sprit world which our energy transmutes to when no longer bound in a body of elements of earthly vibration?) Maybe science will one day prove we are not all nutters once and for all. Brian Green has written a book (also a DVD doco) called "The Elegant Universe" which is like "M/ String theory for idiots" ..lol. Fascinating stuff! You can watch it, (and get the facts straight) on line here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/elegant/program.html

Another interesting thing to take a look at is that Japanese guy "Dr Emoto" who effected the magnified appearance of water molecules by thought energy. Check that out here: http://www.life-enthusiast.com/twili...arch_emoto.htm

Re: mediums not being willing to "enter the lion's ring", I guess some people prefer to get about their own business and leave the debate for those who care to have it, ... some are probably concerned about having their reputations or livelihood damaged by biased editing, ... some probably don't have the diversity of background knowledge from which to draw upon, ... some are probably not intellectual enough to hold their own in a debate/discussion, ... some probably just don't like that kind of forum. I also think that it takes a certain personality type to dance around the lions den and not get eaten for dinner.

[abbondanzieri]

How many of the cable TV 'psychics' are prepared to speak to the sceptics?

i'd pay good money to see Acorah v Dawkins :lol: or perhaps even Browne v Randi :lol:

[Nat]

:lol: Now they would definately be dinner ...lol. If I am not mistaken Randi already had a chew on Browne.

Hiya
Interesting debate here.

I would just like to make it very clear, that in Nat`s response, my`quotes` are not my opinion, but quotes taken from the link chp provided.

love and light
Jas xxxxx

[Nat]

Hi Jas,
Sorry bout that. thought about making a note myself when I realized after I posted it that it looked like I was quoting you when it was actually Dawkins.

[chp]

I did the interview with Richard Dawkins today. We had a pretty good debate. I think I held my corner quite well. Snag is there are no scientists who believe in Spiritualism being interviewed on the programme. So once again, I fight the corner alone and I expect I'll be for the high jump!!! Who knows how they'll edit all of this? It is a very sceptical look at Spiritualism (as usual)

Nonetheless despite our opposite views about Spiritualism and so on, Richard Dawkins is an amicable and interesting man. I hope that one day one of us mediums will give him enough conclusive proof for telepathy or mediumship ..... after all Einstein won his Nobel prize trying to debunk Quantum theory. Perhaps Dawkins will make a great breakthrough trying to dubunk mediums!



I often wonder what would have happened if Alfred Russell Wallace hadn't posted his theory of evolution to Darwin and Wallace had published before him. We'd have had Wallicism rather than Darwinism. And Wallace of course became a convinced Spiritualist.

http://www.survivalafterdeath.org/re...rs/wallace.htm

[Nat]

Originally Posted by chp

I hope that one day one of us mediums will give him enough conclusive proof for telepathy or mediumship .....

Maybe scientists will have to prove it in their own way for themselves, ... they have been getting genuine and highly evidential stuff thrown at them for 150 years and still continue to dismiss it, ignore, it, call it fraudulent, ... or attack their own when ever one of them backs it up. Looks like heads are on the chopping block on both sides.

In my opinion Darwin and Wallace whilst brilliant pioneers are both outdated and only wrote half the story. The other half is the theory of evolution (from a scientific standpoint), beyond physical form, and beyond this planet, dimension, vibration, whatever. Some one should write it.

I'd like to know tho - when it is generally accepted that Einstein proved that energy is never destroyed and just transmutes to a different form - what scientist think becomes of our own energy when we die? I think the laws of physics have barely scratched the surface of natural law where I think just about anything is possible, ... but someone please explain the one where our energy ceases to be. I'd love to hear the theories on that!

Hiya
Craig, i think of you as an experiential scientist, and a brilliant spokesperson for Mediumship, Psychic, and the paranormal. Who better to meet with `the opposition` than someone of your knowledge and ecperience?

I have no doubt your interview will likely be edited to present whatever the programmers agenda desires. (Do you know the title of the program?) However, i would say that you are a very courageous `lion`, and you can hold the knowledge in your heart that you have done the best you can do > which is a great deal more than less courageous lions lol.

Perhaps, if we focus on the positives, the negatives will not receive so much energy.

I would love to hear the whole interview. Are you allowed to tape it yourself, and play it on site once the program has shown on tv i wonder.

Bless your heart for `standing up` and giving it your best shot > whether it is shown or not.
Well done for coming out of it alive and kicking lol.

Nat - some really interesting points there > thanks for sharing. No worries about the quote thing, i am sure your intentions were pure.

Love and light
Jas xxxxxxx