Margaret wrote:
>> If the first chapter is anything to go by Dawkins book is a waste of
>> paper, for it argues against something that few serious people
>> seriously believe (but pace to those that do).
>>
> Hear, hear Julian. I've read it and the God Dawkins is trying to
> disprove is nothing like the God I believe in.
> By the way, the God I believe in is my God, inside my head. It is part
> of my belief system and as such it exists in my reality.
> No-one can ever disprove that.
A question to ask about {a proposed entity|a god} is whether it produces
effects on the observable universe.
If effects are proposed, then a question to ask about them is whether an
adequate explanation exists for them, an observable cause, other than
the proposed entity.
If an adequate - mundane in the case of a proposed supernatural entity -
observable cause exists, then William of Occam suggested you would do
best not to assume there was something extra special causing the effect
- to avoid unecessarily multiplying entities.
If no effect is proposed upon the observable universe then it does seem
moot to consider whether there is an entity or not - one may multiply
unobservable entities to one's hearts content, but they are indeed in a
private universe. One hopes the owners don't spend all their time in
there with their gods.
If the proposed effect is initiation of everything else, then the to my
mind difficult question of why putting back the question of how it all
started one more step produces a better or more likely explanation is
again a reasonable one to ask.
Dawkins' thesis so far as why people believe what they believe is that
it is because, at a time when for good sound reasons children believe
what they are told (don't play with the big cat, it'll eat you - stay in
the tree; cars will knock you over and hurt you; dropping 5 times your
height is a bad idea etc) they have been told by their parents or
parental proxies things which the latter had themselves been told at a
similar age and it tends to stick.
Again, a reasonable question to ask is why that is a less good
explanation for the belief structures and their consequences than
another one involving supernatural beings with or without observable
pixie dust.
One piece of Science (the discipline) along with testable and
falsifiable hypotheses is to build models for the observable universe,
and to apply the rule that if two models explain events, the simpler one
or the one with its workings more completely observed, is the one
adopted. Empirically we have found that this goes with the simpler
model being true in many cases - epicycles versus ellipses for orbits,
along with a less special location for the earth we stand on, for
instance.
Arthur C Clarke invented the so far fictional discipline of statistical
theology for his novel "Songs of Distant Earth" which I think is worth
reading for a sufficient number of other reasons. If gods have
observeable interactions with the physical universe, including
informational ones which their {hypothesisers|worshippers} commonly
assert they do even if in only the lowest of bit-rates (Shannon would I
think say that Margaret's is sending a single bit with value "1" - which
we parse into "I AM" (whether the capitals are ex cathedra or a la
teletype)) then statistics should be applicable - things prayed for
versus things prayed against, not prayed for or randomly allocated - the
universe attempting to play dice with god.
--
Midgley
