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The mission of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science is to support scientific education, critical thinking and evidence-based understanding of the natural world in the quest to overcome religious fundamentalism, superstition, intolerance and suffering.
The Magic of Reality
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Sean Faircloth:
Attack of the Theocrats!
In order to define the supernatural out of existence one would first have to define it INTO existence. "Supernatural" is a meaningless term unless we have some notion that nature actually has ends, we know roughly where those ends are, and we have some means to tell which side of this putative divide a phenomenon resides on.
Otherwise we're just stuck with another natural phenomenon. It is fundamentally perverse to posit the existence of two somehow distinct types of phenomenon (natural and supernatural) in the absence of any valid way to distinguish between them, or any understanding of what the one might consist in apart from not being the other one. That isn't a valid approach to ontology, that's a somewhat garbled restatement of the concept of difference.
Permalink Wed, 21 Mar 2012 01:21:51 UTC | #929145